Steve Walker

This is the third year in a row that we’ve put together the Making Information Pay conference for the Book Industry Study Group, in conjunction with Ted Hill of THA Consulting. We’ve repeated the formula we’ve applied for the past two years, doing an industry survey on the conference theme to provide some additional insight.

This year’s conference is called “Points of No Return.” It looks at things from the perspective of publishing’s employees and seeks to discover when the markets, technologies, and process changes make things so different that old skills don’t map, old organizational structures have to be completely revamped, and people really have to develop new capabilities, accept new roles, or be forced to move on.

Our survey this year tried to gauge the feelings of publishing’s labor force about the changes they’re seeing in their company and throughout the industry. We also asked for a reaction to a number of industry “buzzwords” (like “Twitter” and “vertical”.) A report on the survey results will be distributed at the conference, but here are three little nuggets:

1. The preponderant majority of workers in all parts of publishing — editorial, marketing, sales, IT, distribution — believe that significant changes caused by technology either have occurred or are occurring now. No surprise there, but the surprise will be that there is one function people think is changing much less than everything else. And wouldn’t you know it is one that I think will likely change more than any other over the next few years?

2. Half of our respondents think publishing will become a more profitable business in the future, but they split down the middle as to whether the business will be smaller and more profitable or larger and more profitable. There’s a similar split on expectations about whether there will be more jobs or fewer. (Half of those expressing an opinion think there will be more jobs! Stop the presses!!)

3. What I found to be a startling percentage of our respondents think Twitter is a fad, soon to fade away.

Making Information Pay delivers a concise program: two 90-minute sessions surrounding a 30-minute networking break that starts at 9 and concludes at 12:30. We designed the program so that the first 90 minutes delivers facts and insights about the industry and the second half features reports from the front lines of change.

After BISG Executive Director Scott Lubeck opens the program and I deliver a very short keynote, Kelly Gallagher of Bowker will begin the morning segment talking about what Bowker PubTrack Consumer has discovered consumers are saying that is relevant to publishers thinking about points of no return. PubTrack has delivered some great insights over the past year, from demonstrating how important in-store display is to book sales to quantifying consumer attitudes about ebooks in a special study done jointly with BISG. He will highlight the Bowker findings most relevant to our program’s theme.

The Gilbane Group is also working with BISG, doing research on the seven “essential processes” (which I still call “systems”) that publishers need to keep up to date in order to stay viable as their businesses change. Do your production processes support tagging chunks of content that you might want to sell separately from the whole book? If not, you will lose revenue as the market for fragments develops. Does your royalty accounting process enable you to report to authors on sales of this kind and divide revenues appropriately? If not, then you’ll have a different set of problems exploiting those new opportunities. David Guenette of Gilbane will tell the MIP audience what the seven essential processes are, why they’re critical, and what pitfalls await if they are not ready for what’s coming.

George Lossius of Publishing Technology will tackle one of the paralyzing challenges of our current environment: how can publishers make substantial investments in technology when the business climate is changing so quickly around them? Lossius maintains that there are things we do know that can guide us; he’ll be helping publishers see what truths are stable and reliable to guide their investment decisions, even when a lot is not.

Jabin White of Wolters Kluwer has worked through some major process changes within his own company. We’ve asked him to focus on the people-centered challenges of those changes. How do you bring people along when change might be making them uncomfortable or unhappy? And how does an organization deal with the changes in job skills required, which could mean changes in the particular people required, in the least disruptive way?

The second half of the program will start with Bruce Shaw and Adam Salamone of Harvard Common Press who will present an eye-opening view of how the strategy for new title acquisition changes when a publisher becomes sensitive to its role as a vertical player. They demonstrate convincingly that decisions change when an editor sees they are acquiring content for a database rather than simply publishing a book.

Phil Madans is deeply involved in Hachette’s move to a digital workflow for book development. This requires a shift from an “assembly line” way of working to a “collaborative” one. Editors no longer finish their work before they engage with design and production; there’s a lot more being done simultaneously rather than consecutively. Hachette is well along in building this new process; Madans will offer insights that will be very useful to other publishers still contemplating this switch

Matt Baldacci of Macmillan, who oversees all the marketing spending at his company, is covering the challenge of changes in where marketing dollars are allocated, and the processes and skill sets necessary to do successful marketing in today’s marketplace.

Maureen McMahon of Kaplan draws on her prior experience directing sales at Random House to analyze the changes in sales, which she sees as having moved from requring “closing” to requiring “connecting”, all of which leads to different hiring criteria than she would have applied only a few years ago.

And on top of that, BISG has two sponsors with useful messages. Steve Walker of SBS Worldwide offers his Electronic Distribution Center, which gives publishers completely new supply chain capabilities and a web-based tracking mechanism that cuts administration and communication costs at the same time. And John Konczal of Sterling Commerce has tools to enable new business models, such as those that the Gilbane analysis points out as requirements earlier in the conference.

We’re very excited about this program; we think people at every publishing house will have something to take home and apply that very afternoon, which is always our objective. As readers of this blog well know, I’ve been speaking at, running, and going to digital change conferences for almost two full decades. To my knowledge, there has never been one before that focused on people in their jobs. How will mine change? Will I still be able to do it? Will it still be here for me? And what do I have to do to make sure I can stay employed in publishing?

We think these are questions a lot of people are thinking about. If you’re one of them, join us at Making Information Pay on May 6!

I am interrupting the “What I Would Have Said in London” series to bring you this time-sensitive post. We’ll resume WIWHSIL with Part 2 tomorrow.

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I spent a chunk of yesterday working on this post while, with one eye, I was watching the news about the volcanic eruption in Iceland that shut UK air traffic. As I post this on Friday morning with a flight scheduled to leave tomorrow night near midnight, I’d guess the chances of actually getting there might be as low as 50-50. In fact, the post has already been edited because two people from one client I was going to work with there — Copyright Clearance Center — already had to cancel because of the air travel disruption. I hope the post will be of interest no matter how this turns out.

It’s been a running joke between me and my oldest friends (none of whom are in the book business or digital space or anywhere near it, having chosen careers long ago as teachers, lawyers, engineers, TV directors, and other “normal” comprehensible things) that all of them wonder “what the hell does Mike do?”

It has occurred to me that readers of The Shatzkin Files might wonder very much the same thing. So while I’m thinking through my planning for what promises to be a very busy time next week at the London Book Fair, it seemed to me that writing about it would both help me think and spell out a bit about how a book business consultant adds some value and earns a living. And hey, maybe we’ll promote some clients and some of these activities of mine at the same time!

My principal mission next week is to talk to UK publishers, mostly to the digital strategists but also to some senior management, about the following initiatives:

1. I am just starting to organize the program for the second annual Digital Book World conference, which will take place in New York in January, 2011. I’ll be doing a post here sometime after London to enlist the help of all my readers in brainstorming and planning this, but what I’m going to do next week is tell publishers what I have in mind and get feedback and suggestions. It is an article of faith among the US publishing community that we’re “way ahead of them” and, indeed, I am not aware of conferences dedicated to publishers in the UK that are comparable to Digital Book World, O’Reilly’s Tools of Change, or the Book Business Conference and Expo. (There is London Online, but that is not a conference focused on book publishing.) Since it would seem that the world of digital would bring publishers of different nationalities closer together, not further apart, I’ll be looking for possible speakers as well as ideas, and probing whether it makes sense for our partners at F+W to really market our conference in the UK to look for paid attendees as well.

2. We’re also on the verge of formally announcing a new program in partnership with F+W Media: E2BU, Enhanced Ebook University. The White Paper, being written by Pete Meyers, is expected to go out for “peer review” next week. Kirk Biglione of Oxford Media Works, our CTO, has been leading our effort to craft a multi-track webinar program that will also be part of the initial E2BU offering. Since this effort is all virtual, we’ll definitely want to market it in the UK. I’m expecting UK participants in our webinar sessions (as “faculty”) and we’re recruiting peer reviewers from the UK for the White Paper as well.

3. As readers of this blog know, we’ve been working with Copia, a new ebook platform with social networking integrated in (and six ebook reader hardware offerings as well). Copia offers some unique marketing opportunities to publishers that are simply not a part of any competitive platform. So we’ll be using the London Book Fair to meet with the digital heads of UK houses to jump-start the awareness of this new platform and sales channel among non-US publishers. The response to the Copia presentation among publishers and agents in New York has been unanimously enthusiastic. Meanwhile, from the Copia side, we’ve been seeing that we need to engage with publishers well beyond their ebook departments; really taking advantage of Copia will require the involvement and creativity of editors and marketers. I’m looking forward to seeing how the UK publishers react to the opportunity.

4. London Book Fair ends this coming Wednesday, April 21. Exactly one week later, I’ll be addressing the AGM of the PA (which everybody in the UK knows is the “annual general meeting of the Publishers Association.”) My remarks are already thoroughly planned, of course. I’ll be talking about where the world of content and publishing will be in 20 years, predicting a world where owning IP won’t be of nearly as much commercial value as owning eyeballs. And I’ll be talking about a couple of publishers who are already getting ahead of that change. Then I’ll discuss where the US book marketplace is going in the next three years, which I think has very significant implications for UK publishers thinking about territoriality and global markets. But I’ll be using the book fair to get somewhat more acquainted with how UK publishers see their market today, hoping to find additional bits of relevant information to sprinkle into the talk.

The London Book Fair is not just about meeting publishers and publishing operatives from “across the pond” or around the world. Sometimes it is presenting an opportunity for us to work in person with US clients who are not based in New York, or to introduce clients to US publishers who are not based in New York, as with these:

5. I have also written on the blog about our “freight forwarder” client, SBS Worldwide and their eDC supply chain solution. Steve Walker, the Chairman of SBS, is speaking at the BIC (that’s Britain’s Book Industry Communication, their rough equivalent to our BISG) Supply Chain Meeting, an annual London Book Fair event. So, of course I’ll go see that. In addition, we’re using the London Book Fair to introduce Steve and eDC to a couple of US publishers from outside NYC.

6. In the same vein, we’ll use London Book Fair to meet with our clients at Bookmasters. They have a very broad suite of author- and publisher-support services, which have grown organically from their roots as a short-run printer. The range of their services really extends across the entire publishing value chain: literally from getting the book written (if necessary), getting it set up for printing or digital distribution with an XML workflow, content conversion, printing (POD, short run digital, or offset), and all sales and distribution services up to and including a toll-free number to take orders. And, unlike others that approach that range of services, they’re a willing on-ramp to publishing for individual authors and tiny publishers. Bookmasters is based in Ashland, OH and they’ve just created a new position called Business Development Manager for Integrated Solutions and put a new executive named Bob Kasher in place who is making their very complex set of solutions accessible to potential customers. LBF gives us a chance to meet and refine the way the propositions are being presented in light of real customer reactions and responses.

Oh, that’s not all, of course. I’ve been invited to speak in Ljubljana at a digital publishing event next year and the person who invited me will be available for a chat in London. I’m having dinner with the head of one of the big DADs (digital asset distributors) that I hadn’t yet had the opportunity to know personally. I’m seeing a Boston-based publisher with which I’ve had some conversations about digital change to see if there’s a potential engagement. I’m meeting with an Irish publisher to be interviewed for a thesis he’s writing. And I’m seeing lots of old friends before my wife comes in and we head off with two of those old friends (and their dog) to spend a weekend seeing Scotland from our base at The Pineapple in Dunmore.

I certainly won’t be bored at the London Book Fair and now you know why new posts from me might be sparse until I get back to the States on April 29.

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