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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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Because I am giving a keynote talk at the Writer’s Digest Conference in New York on September 18, I am thinking about “what do you tell a writer about digital change in publishing?”

The view of the media world that I proselytize, which is that it is “going vertical”, is hard to accept if you are “general” (i.e. horizontal) and it is hard to accept if you are small. Both general publishers and small publishers have always depended on aggregators to create a large enough offering to be commercially viable. General publishers need bookstores, primarily, and general book review media (pre-pub and to the consumer) as well. Small publishers have required wholesalers and distributors to organize a large enough product offering to be effective with bookstores and libraries. The intermediaries have always found it difficult to deal with offerings of a small number of titles.

The vertical vision says that aggregation is not just necessary at the “book” level, but also at the “subject” level. If the vision is accurate, publishers of just a handful of titles — even if they are in a niche — will find it prohibitively difficult and expensive to reach their audience.

One reason why life is getting so much more difficult for general trade publishers and small publishers is that the capital barriers to entry for publishing, particularly ebook-first publishing, have dropped to near zero. The aspiring book author 10 or 20 years ago needed somebody to print a run of books, hold them, and distribute them — mostly one-by-one — to points of distribution (called bookstores, libraries, and wholesalers) all over the country. That took capital and it took scale.

This isn’t true anymore. Anybody with a computer and an internet connection can be a publisher. You can publish a blog on a free platform. You can publish ebooks through Smashwords by sending them your Word file. You can publish a document for download through Scribd by sending them a PDF. You can make your property available as a printed book through a number of services — Author House being the largest — without any investment in inventory and only a modest set-up cost.

This ease of entry is part of what bedevils the established publishers. They’re still gatekeepers, but the gate isn’t attached to a fence or wall anymore so aspirants just walk around it. That doesn’t mean that getting published by a real publisher is of no value; it is still the only way to sell significant numbers of copies, and it will remain that for some time to come.

But most books, even those published by legitimate publishers, don’t sell large numbers of copies. And it is increasingly the case that the self-publishing of various kinds is the best way to get on the publishers’ radar screens and it has the additional benefit of beginning to build an audience and a response loop that are essential components of any successful writer’s platform.

In fact, when we discussed with a leading agent a panel we’re planning for our January Digital Book World conference called “Stalking the Wild Blogger: Scouting Blogs and Self-Published Content for Fresh Voices”, which is about agents and editors finding authors through blogs and self-published books, he said that is now something that “every agent does.” He explained: “it is now the standard way to find new clients.”

That means that blogs and self-published books using ebook and print-on-demand models are now part of the overall commercial structure of publishing. They are not something separate and inferior, as “vanity publishing” was in the past.

The best thing that can happen to a writer is still that an established agent takes on and sells their project to an established publisher for an advance large enough to constitute adequate financial compensation to the writer for her work. Most books published by mainstream publishers still do not earn out their advance and yield additional royalties, so getting paid upfront is still the best financial situation for the author, in the short run. (In the long run, failing to earn out advances and sell books will catch up with an author; it’s a trick getting harder and harder to repeat in a world where BookScan numbers tell each publisher how prior books have performed.)

So here’s a starter list of tips I’ll be offering writers on September 18, a list that would grow between now and then even withoutthe help I may get from readers of this blog.

1. Understand your vertical world on the web, and participate in it.

2. Blog. And build a following for your blog.

3. If you have finished book material, and it is not already in the hands of a capable agent managing the process of selling it to publishers, self-publish it in ebook form at least and promote it the best you can.

4. Join PublishersMarketplace for at least one month and use the deal database to find the agents that handle material like yours. Reach out to those agents and listen carefully to their feedback.

5. If you have a book with an ISBN, self-published or not, take advantage of your free web site at Filedby.com to promote yourself. (I am a proud co-Founder and shareholder of Filedby.)

6. Google yourself and find and fix your presence anywhere on the web where you can influence it, particularly bookish sites like GoodReads, Red Room, Shelfari, LibraryThing, and, of course, BN.com and Amazon.

7. When you talk to agents, try to discern how aware and conversant they are of ways an author can promote his or her own career. Can they coach you on using social networking and blog touring and your own posts to promote yourself? If they can’t, they might be a great 20th century agent and not right for you in 2009.

8. Link, link, link. When you write each blog post, link out to other sites. Have a blogroll of your favorite sites an encourage them to link back to you. Build your connections on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And remember that the people you are linking with have their own agendas, which is not about helping you. Respect that.

I know a lot of readers of this blog specialize in helping writers; I don’t. I want the additional thoughts for writers that I’ve missed. You can post them here or send them to us at info@idealog.com.

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Here’s how we’ve been putting together the program for Digital Book World.

First, I dreamed up a list of panel “topics” that I thought touched the key issues and concerns facing general trade publishers today as a result of digital change. Then we ran that list past our illustrious and helpful Board of Advisors, who pointed out some places where consolidation would be appropriate and dismissed a couple of ideas as klunkers.

That left us with a list of topics longer than we can use: we have between 18 and 24 panel slots and well over 40 ideas in hand. We figured that some would be harder to fill than others and things would sort themselves out as we recruited panelists.

In the process of discussing things with our Advisors, new ideas also surfaced. One of them is now looking prescient.

At a meeting at Macmillan with Advisory Board member Ami Greko and a couple of her colleagues, an interesting topic arose. What happens when the entry level employee knows more than the manager about how to use digital tools or play in a digital space?

After all, the top marketers in trade publishing houses honed their skills in a different era. They don’t necessarily know how to use Twitter or Facebook or Ning. But the people they’re hiring to fill entry level jobs have been on Facebook for years and they have probably already used it to organize something. Who would tell whom what to do here? Who would be in charge? And how do we apply the content-and-market knowledge that is developed through years of book experience to promotional venues that are best managed by green marketers (and we don’t mean “green” in the environmental sense!)

Although that panel figured to go on the list of those likely to be “harder to fill”, it seemed to us like an important topic.

And we got evidence this weekend that we’re not the only ones with that thought in mind, although perhaps publishers are seeing it a bit differently. The Bookseller reports that a survey by an organization called “Skillset” has revealed knowledge gaps in UK publishing houses.

Suzanne Ashley, Skillset publishing sector manager, said the report had revealed specific problem areas within training and recruitment.

She said: “There are those who know the business really well—often those who are more experienced, middle-management types—who are very uncomfortable with the wholly changing digital landscape.”

The question not being answered is whether those who “know the business really well” might actually be uncomfortable with the young people new to their team who live in, and are quite comfortable with, the changing digital landscape. That’s the question I hope we’ll explore constructively at Digital Book World. If any managers or recent recruits have thoughts to offer on this question, we want to hear from you.

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Michael Cairns has a really good post today that distills a lot of thoughts I have had over the last several years into a clear formulation: that the publisher needs to serve as a “digital concierge” for its author.

Three years ago, Brian O’Leary, Ted Hill, and I did a study of marketing spend for a mid-sized trade house. At that time we articulated the notion of a “new marketing partnership” between publishers and authors. We urged then that publishers do what is necessary to make it easy for authors to promote themselves on the web because, in the modern world, that marketing energy would be indispensible.

What was a fairly forward-thinking suggestion in 2006 has become a common understanding by 2009. Harper has launched several author-centric initiatives. Sourcebooks just unveiled a suite of tools and advice for authors to promote themselves effectively. And, of course, I’m a co-founder of Filedby, Inc., and the filedby web site is all about delivering web promotion capabilities to book authors, photographers, and illustrators at scale.

I guess it won’t surprise any frequent readers to hear that I believe that the success of this concept depends on…verticalization!

The swingeing volume of detail that Michael points out is impossible for authors to navigate (Twitter, Facebook, and Friendfeed are just the start, really) is also really impossible for publishers to navigate as well. I believe that is becoming increasingly obvious in many houses. The web worlds of knitting and beading are quite distinct, even if books on either subject would go into the crafts section at Barnes & Noble. The web world of parenting is one thing; the web world of parenting an autistic child would be quite another. Publishers who don’t specialize, focus their specialization, and learn the web world for the fields they are in are trapped in marketing that is massively labor-intensive and yielding no advantages of scale.

Publishers (anybody, really…) gains expertise by repeated use, involvement, familiarity. Publishers have had credibility telling authors what will work with a B&N buyer, a NY Times book critic, or the booker for Oprah or Today. They’ve worked with these outlets many times before and the author hasn’t. The digital concierge, in order to really help me, has to be able to tell me which of the sites for my book on summer night stargazing will take my posts, link to my blog, generate followers on Twitter. Otherwise they’re just giving me general advice a bit more easily, but no more personalized, than I could get from a web site dispensing advice. Or a book.

This is very much a transitional need. Ten years from now, most authors will have arisen from the ranks of the digital community for their subject. We’re very much in a transitional time (one very important point that will be made in my “Stay Ahead of the Shift” talk next Thursday), and the concierge will be characteristic of the transition.

I’m working hard at BEA. Please join me. “Stay Ahead of the Shift”: Thursday 5/28 at Javits Center at 11. “StartWithXML for Editors”: Thursday at 3. And “Digital Debut Tool Time” Friday morning 5/29 at 9:30.

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The question of how to plug the independent bookseller into the digital revolution is a knotty one. Nobody has really “solved” it. 

Two of the smartest guys in the UK, Francis Bennett and Michael Holdsworth, tried to tackle this question in a report for the Booksellers Association in a report published in 2007. While they touched on a whole host of issues, including that publishers are likely to sell digital downloads direct, they really didn’t manage to come up with an action plan for the individual bookseller. Rather, they focused on the need for booksellers and publishers to join collaboratively to solve the problem: start with a public conference, create standards, form a joint trade working party. This is, at best, a path to an answer.

From this I conclude there is no ebook-centric answer. If there were one, these guys would have found it.

Then, three weeks ago, PW did a story headlined “Indie Booksellers Debate the E-book Conundrum”. This article introduced a product/technology called Symtio, which stores (among them Tattered Cover) use to back into ebook revenues. Symtio is a plastic card, sold at a retailer, which entitles the bearer (gift recipient) to download an ebook, an audiobook, or both from Symtio’s web site. If this strikes you as something less than the perfect ebook solution for retailers, you’re seeing it the way I do.

The ABA plans to work ebooks into Indiebound. Len Vlahos calls it a “focus for the immediate future” in a white paper presented to the ABA Board. Ingram Digital offers access to 150,000 ebook titles to independent stores. And stores such as Vroman’s are quoted as enthused about the potential for them with ebooks.

Dick Harte, however, who runs BookSite, which provides Web hosting for booksellers and librarians, doesn’t agree. Not only were ebook sales low on the BookSite platform, often they were erroneous purchases (people thought they were buying a printed book!) which then required a customer service intervention. One particularly far-sighted bookseller quoted in the article is David Didriksen who sees ebooks as very low-margin transactions not worth the effort.

I agree. What distinguishes what independent booksellers offer: local taste and judgment, personalized service, intimate customer knowledge — these things just don’t provide much competitive advantage in the ebook space. And the competition isn’t just Amazon and B&N either.

So independent booksellers need to look elsewhere to participate in the digital revolution. I tried to sketch out a strategy in a previous piece:

1. Set yourself up (probably with Ingram) in the simplest way you can to be able to sell as many titles in as many formats as you can. That is, get the maximum choice you can for your customers with the minimum hassle and investment for you.

2. Don’t expect to make money selling ebooks: consider it an accommodation to your customers to keep them buying physical books from you. Restrain yourself from investing large amounts of labor improving your ebook presentation past the point of acceptable. If the margin from your sales starts to amount to something, you can do it then.

3. Spend all of energy that you might have wasted perfecting the sale of ebooks on social networking, trying to be in direct contact with your customers through Facebook, Twitter, and through postings on popular and well-read blogs in subject matters your store specializes in. Particularly focus on the opportunities to promote to specific groups, such as through hashtags (#s) on Twitter, which identify groups of people interested in a particular thing.

I neglected to add a fourth, very important element of an indie bookseller’s digital strategy, although it is hinted at in the marketing suggestion above. This one is the same as it is for general trade publishers: get vertical!

The bad news about digital change is that it brings the biggest companies in the world — Amazon, B&N, Apple, and every phone company — into the indie bookseller’s back yard. But the good news is that it also brings every customer in the world into that back yard. So a bookseller with a vertical specialty can build a global market. This was the pre-Internet strategy of CEO-Read (originally 800-CEO-Read; if Bezos had invented Amazon ten years earlier he would have chosen a 7-letter name…) They’re business book specialists and their customer base is truly international.

Independent booksellers need to build a reputation within vertical niches. That’s a matter of having the stock, having the knowledge of the vertical subject, and then getting involved in the vertical communities — blogging, commenting, tweeting, reaching out. The bookseller’s web site, if it has good content properly tagged, can rapidly be discovered for relevant searches. Tattered Cover may not be able to beat Amazon at everything, but they should beat them on searches for Pike’s Peak. A northeastern store that specialized properly could come up ahead of Amazon in a search for “autumn leaves colors” or “historical sites Boston”. (By the way, I just checked, an no bookstores come up in the first ten pages of “historical sites Boston”!) 

In just the same way that general trade publishers need to use the time they have left when “general trade” still works to build vertical presences that will last beyond that time, so do general trade bookstores. It will work for Barnes & Noble to be “general” for far longer than it will work for any local store. The trick is to be World Class at something, most likely something that has a local root will make the most sense.

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Len Vlahos of the ABA is the latest to take on  the noble but very difficult  task of encouraging independent booksellers in the digital age. Independent booksellers face a challenge similar to that of publishers  adjusting to the change we’re facing: the skill sets and predelictions that are useful for what they’ve been doing don’t necessarily map to what needs to be done in a digital world. But none of us wants to hear that.

Vlahos’s piece reviews the history of books and music and devices. Most of it is good history. He comes to the conclusion that ebooks could well be about to take off and be a meaningful part of the business. That takes him to the hard part: figuring out what a bookseller can do to benefit from it. I’ll let you read what he’s thinking.

I’d say the right digital strategy for a bookseller is pretty simple:

1. Set yourself up (probably with Ingram) in the simplest way you can to be able to sell as many titles in as many formats as you can. That is, get the maximum choice you can for your customers with the minimum hassle and investment for you.

2. Don’t expect to make money selling ebooks: consider it an accommodation to your customers to keep them buying physical books from you. Restrain yourself from investing large amounts of labor improving your ebook presentation past the point of acceptable. If the sales start to amount to something, you can do it then.

3. Spend all of energy that you might have wasted perfecting the sale of ebooks on social networking, trying to be in direct contact with your customers through Facebook, Twitter, and through postings on popular and well-read blogs in subject matters your store specializes in. Particularly focus on the opportunities to promote to specific groups, such as through hashtags (#s) on Twitter, which identify groups of people interested in a particular thing.

But that’s not what I wanted to write about. What I wanted to write about is “the book business ain’t the music book.” And the subtitle is “anything you think you learned about media consumption through the iPod doesn’t necessarily apply to the Kindle.”

As Vlahos acknowledges, the “unit of appreciation” in music is “the song.” But the record companies were selling “the album.” This is not often the case  in our business, and the books to which it applies  (soft reference) have declined in commercial appeal as a result. Most book-length narrative reading: not so much. (My first use of a brand new cliche! How long have we had “not so much”?)

But that’s not nearly the most important difference.

There is almost no benefit to carrying every book you’ve ever read around with you in your pocket. There is, obviously, enormous benefit to having all the music you own in a single device. On top of  that, the iPod came out after the music business had stocked you with what are known as “gold masters”, infinitely copyable digital copies, of all your music. If CDs hadn’t come before the iPod, the barrier to adoption would have been much higher. You ever try to “rip” a cassette? or a record? 

So from the day the iPod came out, anybody could — with the investment of a little bit of time — listen to all the music one owned on it. That was much more important to the spread of the device than their ability to buy more music at the iTunes store, even though their sales have always been impressive. I had three thousand songs on my iPod before I bought anything I didn’t already own. 

So here are the two ways the book business is different than the music business.

1. We can’t just put all our already-owned content on a book-reading device.

2. We wouldn’t want to if we could.

Anytime you hear the iPod invoked in a Kindle conversation, the first thing to check is whether any comparison is relevant. Usually it isn’t.

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When Joe Esposito first told me about blogs in about 2001 or so, there were very few. Michael Cader had PublishersLunch, but if Michael knew that it was an emailed blog, he didn’t tell me. And then blogs “happened”, as things do: gradually, then suddenly. And now I’m late to have one of my own. Really late.

I’ll admit that I fiddled with this a couple of times before. I started up at least twice, maybe it was three times. I decided I’d try it for a while, see if I could get into the pattern of writing regularly, and then reveal it to the world when I’d piled up a month or two of posts. But I never GOT to a month or two of posts. And because I was keeping what I was doing a secret, I had no traffic, no comments, and none of the rewards of interaction which provide the motivation to keep going. So I didn’t keep going.

I admired my friends Gwyn Headley and Michael Cairns for starting their blogs and sticking with them. Gwyn started by making a list of 365 things he could blog about, so he could refer to his list every morning if he needed to. It would take me five years to make a list of 365 things I could blog about.

But I’ve been getting some signs that “now’s the time.”

One follows from having been on Peter Brantley‘s mailing list for a couple of years. Twenty, thirty times a week, Peter sends us a link to something he’s found about publishing and digital change and invites comment. The posts and comments have increasingly sparked a response from me that amounts to a blog post. Once in a while Peter would ask me to extend a comment as a post to one of his blogs, PubFrontier. Then last week David Rothman flattered me by turning another Brantley list comment into a post on his Teleread.

Then, thanks to my friend Laura Dawson, I hired a really smart woman named Tess Strand Alipour and her partner Hamid Alipour to help me optimize traffic to idealog.com. They rebuilt the site so the speeches can accept comments, which was never the case before. They did other things that have boosted our traffic by a gazillion percent in the past two months. And they’ve told me that traffic will get even better if I post whatever I have to say to my OWN site rather than always to other people’s.

And then two weeks ago I started using Twitter. I was a bit slow to get it, but Tools of Change accelerated the process for me. The complementarity of Twitter and a blog seem pretty apparent.

On top of that, I’m involved with a large number of exciting new initiatives even in these troubling times. Filedbyauthor, a new venture I’m co-founder of being headed by my longtime friend and colleague, Peter Clifton, will be live with a web page for every author with an active ISBN in another month or so. FotoLibra, an open-source photo stock agency based in the UK that I’ve been involved with since its founding a few years ago, has achieved orbital velocity. We’re working out details, to be announced shortly, to take our StartWithXML project to London soon. We’re doing a research project on “Shifting Sales Channels” with BISG that has an online survey component and will culminate with the Making Information Pay conference on May 9.

So there should be plenty to write about.

Please write back.

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