Since I posted this two days ago, one of the Big Five CEOs pointed out some things I missed that are important. These are addressed in a post-script at the bottom. Subscribers to the blog would have received the original post without the “correction”. My apologies.
The announcement this week that John Sargent has apparently moved up another notch in the global Holtzbrinck hierarchy reminds us that the cross-border and now cross-language integration of the publishing giants, a very complex undertaking, continues to develop. Sargent was already the global “trade” head for the company, which suggested that integration of the publishing strategy and operations across Macmillan (Holtzbrinck’s trade division) companies was already an important priority. Now he is EVP of the entire global entity.
This follows an announcement a few months ago by HarperCollins that it was appointing digital head Chantal Restivo-Alessi to be EVP, International, to oversee the publishing through Harper’s growing foreign language capabilities.
Until very recently, just publishing simultaneously in a coordinated way across English language companies located in different countries was a seldom-attempted challenge. HarperCollins and Holtzbrinck seem to be shooting right past that hurdle and are setting themselves up to publish in multiple languages in a coordinated way, which is a much heavier lift.
The publishers who are doing this are seeing at least two things that motivate them.
One is that selling books is considerably more profitable for publishers than selling rights. This fact has been behind the creation of the global trade publishing behemoths in the English language. Until things began to change in the 1970s, there really were no trans-national book publishing companies. Since then, acquisitions have given us five big global trade book publishing houses. The only American-owned one, Simon & Schuster, and the French-owned one, Hachette, seem to have the least integrated global English trade presences. Simon & Schuster just has less in the way of foreign-based assets. Both Hachette and Penguin Random House have a federated structure by which the local companies report up to the parent, not to a global trade head. Macmillan and HarperCollins have both been more aggressive about integrating their international English publishing efforts.
And now both of them appear to be interested in extending that integration beyond their English-language companies.
The logic behind this kind of integration is both clear and unassailable. In the Internet age, as we’ve seen for a long time, there really is no such thing as “local” publication anymore. Anything announced anywhere is heard everywhere. And it actually requires active controls to stop anything that is available anywhere from also being available everywhere. Because English is so widely known beyond native English-speakers, the English language editions of new high-profile books sell in many countries for which the first language is not English. This has become a new factor in placing non-English rights.
Until the Internet really “arrived” two decades ago, the rights-trading activity could take time and it didn’t matter, even within the English-speaking world. I remember about 20 years ago when my friend George Gibson discovered the bestseller phenomenon “Longitude” by Dava Sobel. He published it in the US and it became a big bestseller. But even though it was a story that took place in England, it took him a year or more to make a sale to a UK-based publisher. (When he did, “Longitude” went on to one of the longest-runs of all time on the UK bestseller lists.)
A story like that would be very unlikely today. Gibson owned those rights to sell. The chances are the search traffic numbers alone would have accelerated the process of finding a buyer. Or else the US publisher, even a tiny one like Walker, where Gibson was at the time, would have released the ebook for global distribution and made some sort of deal for print to be made available as well.
Because the marketing of each and every book starts with the enthusiasm of an acquiring editor, and because each new deal an agent can negotiate is a new opportunity to get a publisher to overpay, both agents and publishers were comfortable with the process as it has always been. Relatively few of the high-profile agented books are even sold for “world English”, let alone with rights beyond the English language. Just like publishers’ value is directly related to the number of accounts through which they find customers for a book, an agent’s value is directly related to the number of deals they can make for each property.
If an author can get the reach they need through Amazon alone, then it is hard to accept a royalty from a publisher of a third or less of what Amazon will pay directly. Amazon, the publishers, and the author community are all very aware of this. It is one of the two main reasons why publishers try so hard to shift share away from Amazon. (The other, of course, is that the bigger Amazon’s share of the market, the more leverage it gives them to push for a bigger share of each sale.)
And if we see a trend where one publishing deal gets an author just about all their revenue, it will also be harder for authors to accept paying a full 15 percent agent’s commission to get it, particularly once the author becomes a global brand. (And the big brand authors are precisely the ones whose books will benefit the most from a coordinated global publishing effort.)
The structural impediments to publishing this way are not trivial. It will be a very long time — not in the working careers of any of today’s executives — before coordinated global publishing is important for any but the biggest books on the list. Most titles that each of the local companies puts out will be territorially constrained, as they have always been.
But it will, indeed, be the biggest ones — probably fewer than five percent of the titles that could earn half the revenue — that the coordinated efforts will affect. These are the books that every big global house needs to sustain itself.
Nielsen, through its Books & Consumer data service, is able to create individual author profiles for approximately 350 authors: those with substantial enough sales to enable digging down into the demographics of their book buyers and getting useful information with granularity. I’d guess those profiles will make popular reading as the publishers develop their global capability, particularly since Nielsen is also tracking across both countries and languages. And those 350 authors are almost certainly among the 500 top candidates for this type of treatment.
Sargent and Restivo-Alessi are blazing a new trail. Integration of publishing efforts this way will affect advances, royalties, workflows, and marketing strategies. They will effectively create “new propositions” to put in front of the biggest authors in the world. Penguin Random House and Hachette, because of their internal structures and S&S, because of its relative US-centricity, will be challenged to keep up. (Until their internal structures change, of course, or until they make some other adjustment. Which they will.)
Agents for the biggest authors in the world will be hearing the new pitch. On the one hand, they’ll be looking at opportunities to do record-breaking contracts. On the other hand, they’ll be doing what used to be two, three, four, or more deals in one and, in the long run, probably making at least some of their authors wonder whether they should have to pay that same hefty commission the next time around. When an author in this category asks for a fee reduction to continue the relationship, I suspect that most of the time, they’ll get it.
Of course, working in multiple languages and territories is something Amazon can also do very well. But they will probably stay out of this competition, at least at the beginning, because it will be a high-advance environment and Amazon has shown no taste for that as a strategy.
Nonetheless, the signs are that the ecosystem at the top of the commercial pyramid is going to have some new distinguishing characteristics. It has been noted many times in many places by many people that the economy the Internet creates favors the winners and exacerbates power law distribution. This is about to become another example.
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And now the postscript.
In fact, the “structural” differences are not as dramatic as the post describes them, although there are differences and, indeed, HarperCollins and Macmillan are best-positioned to offer and execute on global multi-language and multi-territory deals than the others.
Markus Dohle is the CEO of Penguin Random House. He has the same “authority” as Murray and Sargent do. But Random House has always been highly “federated”, with a lot of power in the imprints. That makes coordination across territories that much more challenging, as does the fact that PRH is twice the size of HarperCollins and six times the size of the other three. Being of a “certain” size is necessary to make global publishing possible, but the larger you are beyond the minimum required, the harder is coordination. It could even be that smaller global publishers — there aren’t many, but Quarto is one example and Bloomsbury another — could execute on this concept even better than the Big Five. On the other hand, smaller publishers won’t compete for the massive books like those of the 350 authors that Nielsen tracks.
In Hachette’s case, Arnaud Nourry in France holds a position above all the companies as well. All the English-language Hachette publishers report to him, as well as others. But since the biggest books have their biggest share of sales in English, and because Hachette too has given great autonomy to the local companies, it is still likely that they would find it difficult to engineer the kind of coordination we’d expect to see from Harper and Macmillan in the relatively near future.
And, finally, Carolyn Reidy of Simon & Schuster is also a global head, but the company doesn’t have nearly the resources across languages and countries that the other four do.
Since I’m adding this post-script, I will also report that a couple of significant agents pushed back at me on Twitter, saying that they were very skeptical of the potential for big company coordinated synergy across the world. They’re saying they’ll be hard to convince. But, then, so did the original piece.