Martha Moran

BookExpo America, trade publishing’s industry-wide gathering, just completed what must be considered another successful year at Javits Center last week. Attendance was pretty much what it had been last year and the lines for autographs on the convention floor certainly gave off the feeling of enthusiasm and excitement that publishers want to see.

Convention roundups are best delivered by people like Laura Hazard Owen and my Publishers Launch partner, Michael Cader, who make a real effort to take in the breadth of what is going on. I, on the other hand, have my meetings and chats with friends that seem to fill up the days so my impression of the overall is just that: an impression. An ad hoc impression.

One thing that seems pretty clear is that my forecast for the future of BEA from 2009 was unduly pesssimistic. I like to get to what I think is the heart of the matter, but in this case I was overly simplistic. I got it right that bookstores would continue to decline but I got it wrong to think that would doom BEA within three or four years. Although other retailers stock books more than they used to, there are nowhere near the number of opportunities for publishers to talk to customers that there were even in 2009. But publishers are that much more interested in talking to any source of shelf space that they can and, in fact, non-book retailers often aren’t hit by the field sales forces.

So there continues to be sufficient reason for publishers to exhibit to keep them coming (albeit with smaller stands and less staff than the big guys used to bring). And that brings a whole slew of other players, including the ever evolving set of companies with digital propositions looking to get the attention of publishers large and small.

Aside from our Publishers Launch conference, which made lots of news and was an altogether satisfying event from an organizer’s perspective with a number of really fabulous presentations, I had a handful of takeaways from BEA 2012.

1. Metadata is still a mess. For a BEA panel outside Publishers Launch, we reunited the incredibly engaging team of Newlin and Toolan to discuss metadata. Bill Newlin of Avalon, a division of Perseus, and Fran Toolan, the “Chief Igniter” (CEO) of Firebrand Technologies, know it all about metadata and are both passionate and extremely entertaining in discussing it. I heard from somebody who saw the session or talked to them afterwards that they might be getting bored with presenting on the subject. I checked in with Bill afterwards and he said he just had to freshen up the presentation; it remained important and he wouldn’t stop.

Then I talked to Karina Luke, who had spoken about metadata for us in London last year when she was at Penguin and who now is in charge of Book Industry Communication (BIC), the BISG equivalent in the UK which has, among its responsibilities, the monitoring of industry complicance with metadata standards and certifying publishers for competence. “Is this really still a problem?” I asked her. “Yes.” “Even among the big publishers? Don’t they have it all straight?” “No.”

Since metadata has, as Karina makes clear, literally replaced catalogs and sales reps as the most important and mission-critical source of information about a publisher’s books, this is a bit shocking. We had Jonathan Nowell of Bookscan do a presentation at Pub Launch Frankfurt last year which demonstrated pretty emphatically the relationship between metadata and sales. He’s repeated the presentation, first for us at Digital Book World, and then under other auspices. Apparently not enough publishers have seen it.

2. Still, nobody reports selling illustrated books effectively as ebooks. I have asked the question over and over of every illustrated book publisher I know. One Big Six house that is doing ebooks for all the titles in one of their divisions with a lot of illustrated titles, told me that most of the time sales of the digital edition are in the single digit percentages of the total sale. Very successful illustrated ebooks might do 15% of the print sale. For immersive reading, that percentage is a big multiple of that.

Illustrated books as ebooks have not yet demonstrated that they will work in the marketplace.

3. Still, nobody reports a formula that can deliver repeated commercial success with enhanced ebooks. We all know about a few instances that have worked, but, so far, no publisher has come up with a formula to make enhanced ebooks commercially sound propositions.

We introduced Ron Martinez’s “Aerbook Maker”, a cloud-based technology that makes it easy to build complex ebooks and apps and cuts the cost of doing so dramatically. Martinez’s technology will definitely reduce the cost of experimentation and allow a lot more titles to hit the marketplace. Maybe that can jump-start a business both by making the costs go down and by making it easier for the creative people, including the author, to engage with the technology.

There certainly isn’t a business yet.

4. Publishers still haven’t focused on creating rights databases (which I identified as the biggest problem of the decade over a year ago.) This is a knotty problem for publishers. Sales of books are, in general, flat or down. Sales of rights, particularly in small bits and pieces (chunks), are going up. But without rights databases, the cost of those transactions can often eat the all revenue.

Exactly what to do is an extremely complex problem for any house to tackle and requires some high-level consideration, planning, and resource allocation. But I think it is obvious that the correction must begin with properly databasing the rights in current contracts as they are signed. Even this is apparently not happening yet in most places, according to the “support” industry that would help publishers change this.

Meanwhile, the “in” baskets in the permissions departments will continue to be piled higher and the number of unattended=to opportunities that might have been really remunerative or helped with the marketing of the book will be a subject to be considered at some future time.

(I recall now that my wife, Martha Moran, increased sales by some huge multiple in the 15 months she was doing special sales for Crown in the late 1970s. Her singular innovation was to create a set of form letters that allowed her to answer every request within a couple of days. The impact was immediate. It might well be the same when some publisher creates such a policy for its Rights and Permissions requests.)

5. The problems that distributors are facing with ebooks in the public library market are being duplicated in the K-12 library market. People in that space tell us that they suffer from the same concerns on the part of publishers that keep some players out of the public library market. Is there any way to offer ebooks in school libraries that won’t cannibalize sales of multiple copies in school settings? That’s as much a conundrum as the public library one, but it gets a lot less attention from the public or the publishers.

6. The slowdown in ebook share growth got a bit of conversation. Did I believe it was real? Sure, it is. And it is probably a very natural state of things. Before ebook reader prices plummeted, which they have really done in the past year or two, the readers only made real economic sense to people who read a lot of books. The first mover advantage Amazon gained with Kindle (which was the first device that was easy to load and also hooked up to a lot of titles) was huge because they self-selected the heaviest readers with their pricing. I’ve never seen figures that would prove it, but I’ll bet Nook also has found that ebooks sold per new device is declining from what they saw at first.

Another reason for this, besides the bias of heavy readers to be early adopters, is that so many devices being sold now are replacements. There is a tendency to “load up” on a new device. That’s not necessary on a replacement, particularly a replacement within the same retail ecosystem. So device sales have lost their power as a leading indicator of ebook share growth.

7. The most stimulating and exciting conversation I had at BEA was with Marcello Vena, the director of digital business at RCS Libri, a large book publishing group that owns Rizzoli and Fabbri Editori. RCS Libri is part of RCS Mediagroup, one of the largest EU media holding companies. They own a lot of media businesses including newspapers, magazines, radio, and online advertising.

RCS Libri is doing a large number of innovative things with ebooks, both illustrated and straight text. They’ve done an illustrated ebook on museums that has been a huge success in Italy and will be delivered in English by Rizzoli. They’re starting two new vertical imprints dedicated to genre series in Italian: Rizzoli Max for thrillers from Rizzoli and Fabbri Editori Life for romance novels from Fabbri Editori. All titles will be issued simulaneously as inexpensive hardcovers and ebooks starting this week. The initial list of the thriller series includes a book by my favorite self-published author, John Locke.

RCS is thinking globally and also innovating locally, including in the way they manage promotional pricing of their digital products online. Of course, what’s stimulating for me will probably be stimulating for an audience as well, so I’ve booked Marcello Vena to speak at the Publishers Launch Conference in Frankfurt on October 8.

I turned 65 during BEA. People older than I am are getting harder to find at industry events. But I really enjoyed seeing two of them at BEA.

Martin Levin is in his 90s. He went to law school after he retired from his publishing career, which concluded after he was chairman of Times Mirror Publishing, which then owned Abrams and New American Library. For the past two decades he has done M&A with the law firm Cowan, Liebowitz, and Latman. Martin greeted me with a big smile saying how happy he was that my career has gone so well. But he pointed out, accurately, “you’re not nearly as smart as your father.” Then he recalled some of Dad’s accomplishments, including putting in a vendor-managed inventory program at Doubleday in the 1950s.

Joe Friedman was a new sales rep at Doubleday when that program was instituted. He went on to a career leading sales at Penguin and then working for the ABA. He’s 76 now and hasn’t been in the business for a decade or more. He came in to Manhattan from Long Island on two separate days just “to see if anybody remembers” who he is. I was glad to see him. I wish I’d gotten his email address. I hope he found a few others with whom to discuss old times.

Although the decline of newspaper book review sections is just a sub-set of the larger sadness of the overall demise of newspapers, I was struck by the recent report of the mighty Los Angeles Times Book Review being stripped down to practically nothing.

I haven’t read it for years, but this news made me think about a time when book reviews in that paper were important to me.

Something over 40 years ago (wow!), I was an undergraduate at UCLA fortunate enough to take a bunch of courses from Robert Kirsch, who was then both the Book Review Editor of the LA Times and the daily book critic. Kirsch wrote six daily book reviews a week and edited the Sunday section. He also taught a course or two each quarter at UCLA, assigned more writing than any professor I ever had, and put more editing and commentary marks on the stuff we turned in than any other professor did too. He also clearly had plenty of time to have fun.

Obviously, there had to be a trick to it.

Kirsch explained to one of our classes that he had invented a speed-reading technique for himself in the early 1950s before he had ever encountered Evelyn Wood. The key, Bob said, was that you had to stop “silently reading aloud”, effectively articulating each word to yourself (as we all did, he said) as you processed it. He said if you put your hands to your throat you could feel yourself doing it. Avoiding that, he claimed, allowed you to pull in whole sentences and paragraphs at a time.

I just didn’t get it. It didn’t make any sense to me. I always read “word by word” and still do. But Kirsch read at a speed that I would call “scanning” (his eyes moved over the page) and he turned pages like a person who was looking for something that would stand out. (Let’s say you were looking for a series of capitalized words on a written page: “United States of America” or “American Civil Liberties Union” and think about how fast you could scan text and be sure you weren’t missing that.) But he remembered everything he’d read.

(Years after I left school, I met my wife who reads in these chunks the way Kirsch did. I always finished every reading test I ever took before time was up; Martha reads narative books about 2 or 3 times as fast as I do. She’s not as fast as Kirsch and she didn’t consciously “teach herself” the way he did, but she also does what I just can’t get: she reads in chunks, rather than word-by-word.)

Kirsch loved writing those daily book reviews and teaching the classes, but he hated the admin involved in being the book editor. So around the time I graduated from college, he took his best student from UCLA, Digby Diehl, and made him the Book Review Editor. (I am deliberately not checking this story with Digby — with whom I have a friendship that goes back to those days — prior to posting but I’m going to tell Digby about the post and invite to “revise and extend” my remarks as he sees fit as a comment.) Kirsch once, in a weak moment, said I was the best (or maybe he said “one of the best”; I didn’t have hearing aids yet back then but needed them) student he’d had, but I wasn’t old enough to be considered for the job. I wouldn’t have been as good at it as Digby was anyway.

The first course I took from Kirsch was on “Criticism” and the first assignment he gave us was to write “Your Critical Credo.” What are your rules for yourself when you write criticism of literature or movies or art? What are your standards? This was typical of Kirsch, assigning you something that forced you to think about how you think.

Another assignment that stands out in my memory was a movie review we did for his class. Bob arranged for us to see a movie screening of a Campus Christian Crusade film called “Up with People”. We saw the film in an evening screening and had to turn it our reviews at class the next day, just like real film critics!

A number of us stayed in touch with Bob Kirsch after our college years. I remember an assignment he had in London in the early 1970s and recall his pretty and youthful and blonde wife wearing a leather skirt she had bought on Carnaby Street in London (according to Bob.) We lost him far too young; he succumbed to pancreatic cancer in the late 1970s. Even the nature of his death, as it was told to me, bore his special stamp. When he got the diagnosis, he and his wife moved to a beach cottage in Santa Barbara where he lived out his few remaining weeks without treatment or any fanfare. He accepted reality. I think that was a hallmark of his intellect.

Of course, the realities of Kirsch’s time didn’t include disappearing newspapers and disappearing book review sections covering a disappearing trade book business. But I can only begin to imagine what he would have done with digital reading. Plenty, I’ll bet.

My wife, Martha Moran, and I managed a rock and roll band 25 years ago. They were called The Drongos. They were four intrepid young New Zealanders who had come to America with an itinerant theatrical troupe and stayed when the itinerants moved on. They made pretty close to a living playing on New York street corners through little Mouse amps and passing the hat. They’d been a band for a couple of years when we started to help them in 1981.

There were four Drongos. Stanley John Mitchell, the drummer and principal songwriter, now lives in Brooklyn with his wife Alice Barrett, a film, TV, and commercial actress. Richard Kennedy, the lead guitar player and a lead vocalist, has stubbornly made his living as a solo performing guitarist and singer, based in Frome, England. Tony McMaster, the bass player, and Jean McAllister, keyboards/guitar/vocals, are the married parents of four children in Auckland, New Zealand, and still very much involved in music there. 

The Drongos were established performers on a circuit through upstate New York: Woodstock, Albany, Ithaca, Rochester, Binghamton over the 4 years or so we worked with them. We never made the match for a record deal with a major label — there was a lot of conversation but it never quite jelled. So we put out our own records.

Fortunately, but quite coincidentally, I was consulting at the time for a UK-based company called Proteus Books, which had bought into my idea for a niche strategy. We published books, mostly bios, on pop music and film. Only. The idea was that we’d do books in an assembly-line way that could sell in all English speaking markets and through bookstores, music stores, and record stores. That allowed us to have an integrated, rather than a book-by-book, marketing campaign. It also gave me a passable front for our self-produced, self-delivered records (and they were, primarily, vinyl records at that time.)

There are two reasons I’m telling you about The Drongos.

One is that I am proud of the promotional flyer I slipped onto the back cover of every copy of their first record. At the top it says, “If you like this record be sure to call your local radio station. It helps.”

And below it says, “The very best sound qualify of The Drongos Album is available only on Proteus Records or Tapes. No home taped version may lawfully be offered for sale. However, home taping to spread the word about this album is encouraged. Please buy your blank tape in a store carrying this album.”

That was my doing. How many of us have such a well-documented record of seeing through the folly of self-defeating copyright protection before there was digital distribution? (And this is documented. Our old friend and major Drongos fan Ira Nonkin has a reproduction of the flyer on his Facebook page. I’m not hip enough on Facebook to know what deal you have to make with Ira to see it, but it’s there!)

Here’s the other reason.

Richard Kennedy is an amazing guitarist. He’s a lefty who plays a normally-strung guitar upside down. You have to see it to fully appreciate it. I just discovered this YouTube video of him playing and singing Don’t Touch Me, which was probably the Drongos’ most popular song. It was a rocker back then; it isn’t in this version, but it sure is amazing. I hope you’ll enjoy it. (If you do, here’s a bit more.)