The new opportunity to publish a book without printed inventory has been popularized primarily by self-publishing authors and by new fledgling publishing enterprises like Entangled and Byliner following in the footsteps of earlier pioneers like eReads and Ellora’s Cave and, more recently, Open Road. This changes the economics of publishing substantially, taking a very large part of the risk out of it and decreasing a publisher’s dependence on hundreds of stores to individually agree to commit their own capital resources to display printed copies.
There have been some experiments with no-inventory publishing from the major houses, all in genres. Last year, HarperCollins launched HarperTeen Impulse and Random House launched the digital-only imprints Loveswept, Hydra, Alibi, and Flirt. And Harl
Much of the promised innovation has been around publishing shorter works, works that might not have lent themselves to printed versions anyway, but they also were a way to reach out to self-published authors. Now Italy’s RCS Libri has come up with a really imaginative use of no-inventory publishing — also in a genre — as a way to test not only the appeal of a new author’s work but also the ability of fledgling authors to promote it. The concept appears to have succeeded commercially on its first attempt; it will be interesting to see whether it can be replicated by RCS Libri and by other publishers in other countries.
RCS Libri set up a new publishing arm called “Rizzoli Lab”, a new imprint dedicated to experiments in digital. For the first effort of Rizzoli Lab, they came up with a really nifty idea. It is a series of books called You Crime, by which RCS Libri is creating a new kind of collaboration they call “co-publishing”, by which they mean that they are combining the efforts of a publisher with the efforts authors provide as self-publishers.
You Crime has four published ebooks from Rizzoli Lab, each with four short crime stories within. Four of the sixteen stories, one in each book, are written by well known Italian crime writers. The other three stories in each book are by fledgling writers, whom the Rizzoli editors found by looking at submissions but then examining the authors’ presences on the Internet. They obviously have huge numbers of people who wish to publish with them. In addition to judging the writing quality of submissions and limiting to one genre (only crime: no romance, no fantasy), they tried to evaluate the authors’ attitude toward digital and their past experience with self-publishing. They refer to what they did as “digital editorial selection”. Since RCS Libri is investing in the entire initiative (and marketing of the series, but not author marketing) they wanted to be sure they had good content to offer to the readers and strong marketing efforts to let them know it was there. Of course, their editors knew how to judge quality content. What was new was the evaluation of the fledgling authors’ digital marketing potential.
According to Marcello Vena, the digital head at RCS Libri under whose leadership this has all happened, the established authors participated in the project at least partly because it provided interim exposure to the public between their major books. Of course, everybody got royalties and the established authors got a bigger share.
The twelve fledgling authors were charged with driving traffic, awareness, and sales of the book their work appeared in. Meanwhile, RCS Libri worked with the powerful national newspaper in their corporate family, Corriere della Sera, to promote the You Crime series generically and run its web site.
As it turned out, all four books in the You Crime series sold quite well. They all made the top 50 (among over 4,000 titles) for Rizzoli throughout the entire Italian ebook market (including in the Kindle store). RCS Libri promoted the series as a competition, like X-Factor. The fledgling authors were expected to add their title-promotion efforts to the series branding done by Rizzoli and Corriere della Sera. And now at least some of those writers will have their own full-length novels published by Rizzoli, having been introduced to the reading public through this vehicle.
Vena calls this new form of publishing “co-publishing”, where an established publisher effectively partners with aspiring writers, bringing established writers into the project to help with their content and their brands. He sees the authors and publisher as “co-responsible” for driving readers to the book.
I don’t know whether the competitive X-Factor aspect of this or the “co-publishing” label are the key elements. Of course, they might be. But, regardless of that, the concept of using established writers to entice sampling of new writers is definitely a very cool idea, and doing this in a “digital-first” publishing paradigm, seriously reducing investment risk, makes complete sense.
Obviously, we want to see this work again before we leap to the conclusion that it will work every time, or even regularly, but having four successes out of four and a large number of fledgling writers picked up for full-novel treatment is a powerful statement on behalf of an imaginative experiment. I think we should expect to see this tried again in other markets. And before too long.
Of course, we are putting together a panel including RCS Libri at Digital Book World 2014 to talk about “no inventory publishing”. That’s one of several pieces of programming we will have around “new models”. We’ll also feature leading innovative publishers and suppliers talking about subscriptions, new direct sales channels, agile content publishing models, and new product forms for non-narrative content. Register by November 8 for the best rate.