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What I mean, of course, is that PRH could use its position to either improve its margins in relation to everybody else or to create proprietary distribution. Either way, it would expand its ability to make money on books, fueling further its ability to outbid rivals for attractive properties. That's why, when I looked at the Amazon agreement with Hachette and Simon & Schuster and the story of those negotiations, I thought first about whether they would tempt PRH to push for a better deal with Amazon than its rivals got.
The two most "obvious" opportunities for them to me, one of which appears to be anything but obvious to the people running PRH, are to build PRH-only general bookstores inside other retailers using VMI (vendor-managed inventory) and to start a PRH-only subscription service. They've never commented so I could hear it on my suggestion of the former; they continue to make it abundantly clear that they don't share my opinion about the latter.
A NY-based executive of PRH told me a year ago that I had the subscription thing all wrong. From PRH's perspective, it is unwise to offer a service and pricing plan that seems designed to give substantial discounts to your very best customers: those who buy and read many books. This is not a crazy perspective. If PRH sells about half the commercial books, then, on average, they get half the sales from these heavy book readers. Why would they want to help them reduce their book spending?
Last week, Tom Weldon, the CEO of PRH in the UK, issued an emphatic dismissal of the subscription idea. Weldon was speaking with Bookseller editor Philip Jones at the British digital publishing event, Futurebook. And The Bookseller reported it.
Weldon said: "We have two problems with subscription. We are not convinced it is what readers want. 'Eat everything you can' isn't a reader's mindset. In music or film you might want 10,000 songs or films, but I don't think you want 10,000 books."
Weldon also said the company did not "understand the business model", and who made money. But he acknowledged that subscription could work "in certain markets around the world in emerging economies where access to books and bookshops is extremely limited".
Nobody has more respect for the intellect and professionalism throughout Penguin Random House than I do, and that certainly includes Tom Weldon, whom I had the opportunity to meet once over a business lunch. But in this case, and assuming (as I do) that Weldon is speaking for his colleagues as well as himself, they seem just about 100 percent wrong. (And, of course, it is obvious that there are people in the home office at Bertelsmann who also don't agree with him, since they power the German ebook subscription service, Skoobe.)
Weldon is absolutely right that the consumer case for a reading subscription is not as powerful as it is for subscriptions to music or video. Particularly when comparing with music, the point that having access to many thousands of choices all the time is not nearly as valuable for books is totally correct.
But making the leap from that that "it is not what readers want" is a totally unproductive generalization. SOME readers want it, and Oyster, Scribd, and Amazon (as well as 24Symbols, Bookmate, and others) are signing them up. The Oyster and Scribd subscribers will have HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster books to choose from but none from PRH. It won't take a data scientist to prove that PRH will lose market share among those readers to competitors.
Perhaps Oyster and Scribd will fail. Is PRH essentially predicting that? Is PRH counting on that? Are they assuming that's what will happen? It would certainly seem from the combination of their non-participation and Weldon's remarks that they are. (Of course, it is also possible that Harper and S&S also think the subscription services will fail, but they don't mind getting some revenue for themselves and their authors in the meantime.)
But it is the second objection that is most mystifying. Weldon is saying he doesn't get the business model, which reinforces the idea that he doesn't believe in it and expects the big subscription services to fail. But that is not an explanation for why Random House wouldn't do this themselves. By definition, if a publisher starts a subscription offering for its own books, it is not the same business model as a third party offering it. There is one fewer entity feeding at the same trough. Oyster has to make enough money for themselves and for the publishers and authors whose works they peddle. Random House would only have to make sure their authors were whole, or maybe a little better than whole, and they could keep the rest.
Cutting out the intermediary supply chain, there's a lot of vig in there for PRH to be able to give consumers a reason to subscribe to a service that provides only PRH books without costing authors a penny.
The joker in the deck, of course, which Oyster and Scribd would only be too glad to point out, is the customer acquisition cost. But even if PRH didn't want to recruit subscribers for such a service by promoting it on the books themselves — certainly the most efficient and direct way to reach their customers — out of concern for how it would be received by the retailers selling their books, it has all sorts of ways to get the word out about what should be a bargain for many of their readers. Penguin Random House has been building its database for direct customer contact for years. It can reach literally millions of readers virtually free, and in many cases would know the names of their favorite authors which is nice ammo for the subject line of an email to get it opened and read. And it also has millions of page views through author sites, both those PRH controls and those where an author could be recruited to help.
And unlike the other services. PRH wouldn't have to maintain a whole apparatus to make deals to bring in the content; they're already doing that! Presuming they could make the right white label deal to manage the subscription service, they wouldn't really have a "critical mass" issue either. And instead of being on the outside looking in as the extant subscription services sign up readers they could only get access to by putting their books into somebody else's proprietary platform, they'd be building their own unique distribution that nobody else would have.
And, frankly, a service offering all of Penguin Random House's books, whether they put in the new ones or not, would deliver a selection at least comparable and perhaps superior to any existing subscription service.
Why they'd simply dismiss this idea is very hard to understand.
Reading tea leaves, I have gotten the impression that PRH is preparing a licensing program to make its content available for use in schools, another very disruptive thing they could do by themselves that could only be effective for their competitors in combination with each other somehow. Maybe my tea leaf reading is wrong; we'll see if that comes down the pike in the coming months or not. Of course, this kind of subscription licensing is completely different, and they could well believe that the customers do want this and that the business model makes sense.
It has seemed to me for some time that all of the Big Five houses could peddle a subscription service for kids ebooks that would be a reliable generator of cash flow and customer acquisition as well. Many parents would love to be able to let their young kids take the iPad in hand and "buy" books, as long as they weren't actually spending any money. The big houses all have extensive juvie publishing programs. Each one could offer a subscription service that would keep many kids amused for months. It could be a "totally cool" 6th (or 5th or 8th) birthday present. While it is true that there are others competing for the kids' market, any of the Big Five could pull something like this together very inexpensively and, over time, build a customer base that would be both proprietary and lucrative.
With the number of ebook subscription services for consumers proliferating, surely the tech to try this out on a smaller scale is getting cheaper and more accessible. In fact, if Weldon is right, and the subscription business model is wrong, then maybe even Oyster or Scribd will want to build a service provision model into their next pivot. And if they succeed, imitators in many ways will follow.
Subscription is here as a tool to sell ebooks that any publisher totally ignores at its peril. And whether it ultimately becomes a significant channel for general trade ebooks or not, it will be tried in many forms and many ebooks will be moved that way in the years to come.
We have a great panel discussion on subscriptions at Digital Book World, Jan 14-15, 2015. It will be moderated by Ted Hill, who co-authored a BISG study on subscriptions earlier in 2014 that is looking increasingly prescient. Ted will have both Oyster and Scribd on the panel along with two publishers providing them with books, Simon & Schuster and Kensington. Kensington, being a non-agency publisher with no choice in the matter, is also a provider to Amazon's Kindle Unlimited. The discussion will be prefaced by a quick presentation from Nielsen's Jonathan Stolper around what Bookscan has learned about the reading patterns in subscription services. This should be a very informative discussion.]]>
We don't know — or certainly I don't know — precisely what Amazon wanted from Hachette in the negotiations that became a public spat last Spring. All we know is that whatever they asked for (or demanded) was sufficiently onerous to make Hachette take an enormous amount of pain to resist it. The standoff held for six months.
The standoff wasn't pain-free for Amazon either, although it certainly didn't have nearly an equivalent commercial impact. Amazon could have expected when the dispute started that Hachette authors would pressure their publisher to settle. They could also have expected public attention to focus on Amazon "fighting for lower prices". Neither of these things happened and, in fact, Amazon was demonized for their tactics by some pretty high-profile writers. And, although it was almost certainly unrelated to the impact of the Hachette fight, Amazon themselves had some tough financial reporting to weather during this period.
In any case, there was no way Amazon could use the same set of tactics they used on Hachette with another publisher at the same time, and it would appear they didn't try. Simon & Schuster and Amazon came to a deal last month which both sides suggest they're pleased with. When that deal was announced, it seemed likely to me that anything S&S would accept, Hachette probably would too (and would have at any point). With the announcement yesterday that Hachette and Amazon have now come to terms, and with the wording of the deal announcement being so similar (but not precisely the same) to what was said when the S&S deal was announced, it would appear that surmise has been justified.
Where the announcements diverge is that it was suggested that S&S has ceded Amazon some limited rights to "discount" from the publisher-set pricing but that suggestion was absent from the Hachette announcement. The more limited the discounting allowed, of course, the more the new arrangement constitutes "agency as it was intended to be". But forbidding discounting is a double-edged sword. It "protects" print-in-bookstores from price competition from ebooks, but it also potentially disadvantages those price-protected books in the ebook market against other ebooks.
(Of course, an agency publisher can lower prices themselves, but if they do it that way, they reduce their share and the retailer's share proportionately. If they "allow" discounting, the retailer does it entirely out of their part of the sale price.)
I would now expect that Macmillan, which is about the same size as Hachette and Simon & Schuster, will be offered and will accept a similar deal and probably so will HarperCollins, although they are more than twice the size of these others. How each of these houses will view "strict" agency versus "looser" agency is an open question.
But Penguin Random House is in a different position. Now that it has been demonstrated that Amazon's most muscular tactics didn't bring Hachette to heel, why wouldn't PRH, which is several times the size of Hachette, look for a contract that gives them some real separation from the rest of the pack either in terms of their margins or to get more aggressive with discounting through publishers' biggest account? Let's remember that Random House originally outflanked the others tactically in 2010 by sticking with wholesale when everybody else went to agency, putting their ebooks in a price-advantaged position and scoring millions in extra sales as a result.
The overall direction of the book market continues to tilt toward Amazon. Although the dual shifts to ebooks from print and to purchasing of print online rather than in bookstores have slowed down sharply in the past couple of years, the chances are those trends have not yet run their course. It is not a guarantee that those shifts will continue to grow Amazon's market share but they certainly favor them. It would seem somewhat more likely that Kindle will suffer some competitive erosion as multi-function devices gain more of the ebook share than the online bookstore will, but the chances are that both will continue to grow their share. And, at the same time, the self-published share of the market will continue to grow, mostly to Amazon's advantage, and so will the impact of other Amazon initiatives including their lending library and subscription service.
The reset ambitions that might have been somewhat premature in 2014 may be achievable in 2018.
But a lot can happen between now and then. Four years is a long time. Four years ago, Random House was still gaming the agency system and Nook was gaining market share by leaps and bounds. Four years before that, there was really no ebook business at all.
Assuming that Macmillan and HarperCollins make a deal similar to what Hachette and S&S have done, the big publishers have little to fear from their biggest trading partner for the next few years. But how they'll cope with their biggest competitor, particularly if PRH gains either additional margin or greater flexibility around discounting compared to the others, might move to the top of their list of concerns.]]>
This is what we should call "entity self-publishing", as opposed to "author self-publishing". The success of indie authors has gotten a lot of ink lately, partly fueled by the Amazon-Hachette dispute which has brought into bold relief that authors can make a living self-publishing — mostly by exploiting the capabilities of Amazon — without a big organization of their own. But entity self-publishing is ultimately far more threatening to the publishing establishment trying to make a profit because it could, in time, bring a lot more content into the marketplace with a lot more marketing muscle behind it than individual authors will. And sometimes the motivations of those content providers won't include the need for profit.
(It also can be seen to offer opportunity to the establishment, to the extent that they find it productive to craft their own service-offering on-ramps to be flexible partners for entities.)
Companies abound that offer the core services that support publishing. Big organizations like Ingram and Perseus are mainstream providers and deliver the full suite of capabilities, including putting printed books onto store shelves. (In fact, if you're big enough, you can get a Big Five publisher to do this for you.) Digital distributors like Vook, INscribe, and ePubDirect can turn a file into ebooks and put them into distribution around the world. Lulu and Blurb will also deliver printed books for you. The subscription services like Scribd and Oyster (not to mention Amazon, Ingram, Overdrive, and the other ebook retailers) will give you distribution. And, both as part of those larger offerings and as stand-alone services like BiblioCrunch, it is increasingly easy for an author (or self-publishing entity) to find editors, cover designers, marketers and web site creators, and just about any other specific skill set that is required to publish a book successfully. In fact, publishers themselves have relied for years on freelancers for many of those functions.
But entities have challenges that individual authors don't.
An individual author knows what is to be published: what they write. And because most authors are most comfortable in a particular genre, they don't have to worry much about consistency as they build an audience. They are inherently consistent. (Authors who want to span genres or write outside what they're best known for have a tougher row to hoe to make themselves commercially successful as self-publishers.)
Of course, they have plenty of challenges outside their writing skill set: editing, cover design, even pricing and marketing. And those challenges are enough to make many authors prefer to have a publisher who will take care of them, even if they would otherwise be willing to give up the marketing and distribution clout of a professional publishing house. There are big per-copy-sold margin advantages to doing it yourself as well as being set free from the constraints and delays that come with working with a larger organization. There are still plenty of "how" questions, but there are very few "what" questions.
But when an entity commits to self-publishing, even one like a newspaper or a magazine that knows how to create the intellectual property, they suddenly need decision-making they're not equipped to do, and it begins with "what" to publish.
They need a publisher. In the metaphor of the song lyric, they need a "captain".
The position of "publisher" exists within the magazine and newspaper worlds as well, but it means something subtly different than it does in books. In either case, the publisher governs the whole enterprise, not just the editorial decisions. Because the revenue for magazines and newspapers comes primarily from advertisers, the publisher's time, bandwidth, and focus are directed there. The publisher certainly has responsibility for things like marketing and distribution, but those tend not to require a great deal of issue-by-issue attention.
But the nature of book publishing is that each book is its own separate marketing challenge as well as an editorial one, and the two are interrelated. If the right book for a market should cost $15, you make a different book than if the right book would be $30, or $8. If the book is ready for publication in September but the right time to bring that book to the market is February, it's a publisher who decides to hold it back.
And if there are 20 or 30 or 100 books an entity could do, it is a publisher who decides whether to do five a month or five a season, which ones to do first, and which ones should always come out in June.
In a post over a year ago, I cited the example of what publisher Bruce Harris did for Microsoft founder Nathan Myhrvold's audacious (and successful) $625 cookbook. Myhrvold had the concept and the intellectual property and the business acumen to make key decisions. But it took Bruce, or somebody with his considerable experience and publishing sophistication, to orchestrate the inputs from marketers and publicity experts, coordinate it to the realities of the publishing calendar, and provide the direction to make best use of Ingram's industrial-strength services.
This kind of expertise is even more important to structure lists within an ongoing publishing program.
Vook has certainly experienced some of that. Their new website announces them as "author-centric" (and they'll move more and more in that direction), but they have totally cottoned to the idea that entities are a big part of the self-publishing future. They've provided critical infrastructure services to enable ebook publishing for The New York Times, Forbes, Thought Catalog, Fast Company, U.S. News & World Report, Frederator Studios, and The Associated Press.
Providing business intelligence has been a crucial part of Vook's strategy for working with entities. Matt Cavnar of Vook told me:
"We're tracking data on over 4 million books — print and digital — and we use that information to generate pricing recommendations to maximize revenue for the books our partners publish, to then adjust the books within the marketplaces, and to find specific categories where they will more be likely to rank on bestseller lists. We also coordinate the standard digital marketing and merchandising with the retailers. Thus, we're acting as the infrastructure and data backend platform for these partners to be as successful as possible — allowing them to focus more on the creative and developmental side of their publishing program."
But, of course, that data needs to be acted upon by a publisher at the other end. Vook's client list is heavy with media organizations that can provide some version of that title-by-title, list-by-list decision-maker to make use of Vook's tools. Because Vook thinks hard about offering services to authors, Cavnar knows what it is like having focused direction and acknowledges the point.
"That's right. That coordinated/creative decision maker on the partner side plays the role of the author in a sense."
The news arrived over the weekend that Blurb, the publishing services company that grew out of an initial print-on-demand offering, had hired veteran publishers Molly Barton and Richard Nash to help them build a network of support services that they will, presumably, operate as a stand-alone business and as an on-ramp to their core business. Blurb has seen this coming for a while and the move made made sense: two publishers with vast experience know how to find and vet all the service offerings for every component of what it takes to publish a book successfully.
But I suspect that for most of the newbies who find editors and cover artists and book marketers in the network Barton and Nash will help Blurb deliver (and, one wonders, how much overlap and qualitative distinction there will be with what BiblioCrunch and a Google search would offer), it would be Barton and Nash themselves, and people like them and Bruce Harris and other veterans with experience with many books and many lists, who would be the most valuable service providers. The most ambitious of the new entrants to book publishing, coming to it to build on knowledge and a reputation established in some other ecosystem (even one that is "media"), would be wise to see that, like all the other tasks, the orchestration of a publishing program is best done by somebody with experience. And the person providing it doesn't necessarily have to be on staff.
And another, not unrelated thought.
In the world outside book publishing, a lot of content is being generated for "content marketing". It has been part of my job in programming Digital Book World to understand how the world of content marketing and the world of book publishing connect.
The way a publisher instinctively wants to think about it is "if people are getting paid for content, can I sell some?" Of the three possible interactions with the world of content marketing, that's likely to be the least productive one. The content marketing world is all about creating precisely the right content for a brand's marketing needs. It's not a particularly efficient approach to search the world of existing content for that, then have to license it and live with the licensing restrictions, and almost certainly have to modify it for marketing use. So, with some limited exceptions, scratch that.
Another potential interaction might be around distributing what is or starts out as marketing content as ebooks. I first made this suggestion to a law firm that had created a white paper on Trademark Law. Why not publish it as an ebook, I said? They said, why bother? I thought, don't you want to show it to people who search Amazon for "trademark law"?
But when I talked to Joe Pulizzi, the head of the Content Marketing Institute, about ebooks, he said "well, sure, they might make sense in some cases, but there are so many other things that are more important to a marketer." He's talking about blogs and Pinterest and YouTube and the wide world of web and apps where content can be made to show up for the people who would be most interested in it exactly when they need it. In other words, "I see your point, but frankly, we usually have much bigger fish to fry."
And that points to what publishers most have to gain from the business of content marketing. Publishers have tons of content, but they are far from having figured out every best way to use that content for marketing. That's an adjacent science for us, not one in our experiential wheelhouse. That's why we have Pulizzi speaking on precisely that subject — using content to build an audience and how to apply all those things that work better than ebooks — from the main stage at Digital Book World. We even gave him a breakout session to follow because there are going to be tons of questions from publishers (and their marketers) who will want to put these capabilities in their arsenal.
Many of the companies mentioned in this post are speaking at Digital Book World, Jan 14-15, 2015. Blurb and ePubDirect are sponsors who will also be on the program. Speakers from Forbes, Ingram, Overdrive, Oyster, Penguin Random House, Perseus, Scribd, US News & World Report, and Vook are on panels. From the main stage, we will hear a presentation from James Robinson, who does web analytics in the newsroom at The New York Times, and Michael Cader and I will have a conversation with Russ Grandinetti of Amazon.]]>
Another slide in the deck (slide 28) says that we are already at a point where during the vast majority of every person's waking hours, they are engaged in media or communications activity between 40 and 70 percent of the time.
Evans and others are suggesting that these changes will remake our use of web sites and apps and make us much more reliant on "cards", system- and device-agnostic digital objects that can provide both information and the ability to act on it. We see the beginnings of that now in the book business with Ron Martinez's Aerbook, which puts "content into the social stream" and Linda Holliday's Citia, which has pivoted away from card applications aimed at the book business to serving the advertising industry.
I think book publishers would be wise to focus on the marketing and consumption opportunities these shifts enable (or require) rather than letting this tech change entice them down the enhanced ebook rabbit hole yet another time. Mobile device usage replacing PC usage actually favors old-time book-reading, since limited screen real estate is not a handicap. But the processes of discovery and the means of purchase could be radically shifted.
One very thoughtful piece I read (but can't find) suggested that all this means a sharp reduction in email use, which Evans confirms in a chart (slide 31) showing that 12-15 year olds (in the UK) don't use it much. They have shifted to instant media and social media like Facebook and Twitter as communication channels. They don't even talk on the phone. There is a new category of "emphemeral media"; IT does its thing and then the communication disappears. Of course, we don't really know how to project people's communication behavior at ages 12-15 to what it will be 20 or 30 years later, and email is still extremely powerful for marketing.
Meanwhile, attempts to improve email continue, including this recently from Google.
There are two big changes that are really mandated by the migration to mobile.
The obvious big change is a reduction in screen real estate on a mobile device compared to a PC. The less obvious one, but the one that threatens email use, is the loss of full-function and full-sized keyboards.
These two big changes haven't been called out specifically in the presentations I've seen about this, including Evans's.
The screen switch might turn out to be the more minimal disruption. While the growth in mobile is real, so is the ubiquity of screens of many sizes in many places. The tech to allow something brought in on a phone to be "thrown" to another screen is pretty trivial — bluetooth already exists and other new things, like Chromecast enabling mirroring an Internet-enabled device to a TV, keep arriving. It isn't hard to imagine that larger screens will be available for mobile devices to inform just about anywhere. And while there will always be a natural tendency to prefer viewing on the device you hold in your hand from which you control all your navigation (a big advantage for books), if a larger screen is required, it is increasingly going to be available whenever your need it.
But the keyboard problem might be tricker. Portable and foldable keyboards have already been developed, and they are already used to make tablets into laptops. Whether they will be as widely available or as easily compatible as screens is doubtful. They didn't catch on for Palm Pilots and we're still waiting to see how widespread their use will be for the Microsoft Surface.
What mitigates the loss of keyboards is the increased use of vocal dictation to replace typing. Every time I click on my Google app on the iPhone, it invites me to just tell it what I want. Of course, transcribing dictated text introduces new possibilities for error. Even so, hobbled keyboards might not be as crippling to email use by the substantial part of the population that is not now 12-15, but will still be communicating for decades, as the 21st century users' current habits seem to suggest.
You can, of course, just ask Siri (or Google) out loud what that top-of-the-chart NY Times bestseller is and to take you to a site where you can sample or buy it, and you'll get there.
There is even more reason to believe web sites will persist even if cards become more ubiquitous. As content creation atomizes (more and more content creators, any of which can be very small), understanding their "authority" will be increasingly important. As of now, Google is the one company we depend on most to tackle that challenge (others who attempt it include Bong, Wolphram Alpha, Duck Duck Go), and web sites are a fabulous tool for Google to understand who somebody is and whether they know whereof they speak or write.
That authority-vetting is likely to be more and more important and perceived by content consumers to be so. (In fact, it is happening now, even though most consumers don't realize it is happening.) If that's true, official, useful web sites (or equivalent owned or editable means to consolidate information around a person who seeks an audience — like Wikipedia, Google+, Amazon Author Central, and other authoritative pages) may continue to be important to Google, and therefore to the rest of us.
What is certain is that in the developed world just about everybody will hold a computer in their hand all the time that can get at just about anything on the web or in any app. (This is already largely true, if also underemployed or taken for granted.) We are getting increasingly comfortable operating freed from the constraints of time and place. We can also be freed from ignorance most of the time, if we choose to be.]]>
Of course, we're learning too. The challenge in "scaling" Pete's knowledge is to get people in our industry, with their uniquely complex stakeholders and requirements, to be able to buy the services they need him to direct without taking a lot of his very precious time. (If you take his time, we can't be economical, which we're trying hard to be.) Our approach is to "productize" our offerings but, of course, our clients and potential clients each have very specific needs by their own lights. The challenge we almost always face is not "whether we can" but "how we can" deliver what they want in a way that works for us and for them. And we keep finding new ways to morph each product idea into another and then another to address those needs. The evolution of our thinking and our business probably provides useful clues for anybody trying to tackle the beast that is digital marketing of books in an evolving marketplace.
Although it is not simple to harness Pete's knowledge, it would be absolutely impossible to replicate it. He's read (and understands and remembers) every patent Google has ever filed about search. (Don't try to start gathering that knowledge now; Pete started it in the 1990s.) He works with a huge number of listening and analytical tools. Some have obvious uses such as analytical and "SEO" tools, but some require a more interpretative approach to apply them to create better marketing. They numbered 140 when we last counted, but he seems to discover a new one or two just about every day. So far, I haven't met anybody else in publishing who claims knowledge of a fraction of that number. Pete's knowledge of Amazon's algorithms and behavior similarly outstrips everybody else's, understandings partly gained through a capability he had at Random House that nobody else we've met has ever had: an unlimited number of affiliate codes that allowed him to track conversion across a wide range of A/B tests and other variables.
(It should be noted that the unlimited number of affililate codes came about through serendipity, not any official negotiations or favoritism. It was not a formal "policy" move on either side.)
Knowing how the clicks you send Amazon convert is beyond very important. As an example of what this can reveal, Amazon loves it if you send them clicks that convert. When they see that happening, they help you. They don't like it if you send clicks that do not convert and when they see that, they (metaphorically) throw sand in your gears or, at least, don't put the wind in your sales. The many winds they can make blow happen at what for Pete are predictable kick-points. We don't have an unlimited number of affiliate codes at Logical Marketing, but we do know that if we're sending clicks that convert we'll see Amazon buy keywords to get more of the traffic. If they don't do that, the clicks aren't converting and we stop sending them. We have other ways as well to see when the winds are blowing.
How many of our clients know that? We haven't met one yet that did. That means that virtually every publisher is sometimes paying for clicks that are actually harming their sales. And they don't even know when that's happening. And I'd add that Pete himself doesn't believe this is among the most profound insights he has about optimizing Amazon sales.
We do our work across three loci of interest: titles, authors, and brands. Authors are brands, but so are publishers (B2B, B2C, or both), imprints, and series and, in rarer cases, fictional characters. We can do a quick and cursory look at a title or author, or a deeper and more comprehensive one. For authors and brands, we can do a "360 audit", which delivers a voluminous (80-100 page) deck, rich with data about how the author reaches their core and potential audiences. They tell you everything from how they sort on dozens and dozens of high-value search terms; their engagement in social media; the precise and thorough characteristics of their followers and, if they have them, "subscribers"; advice about how to optimize their owned web presences in terms of content, architecture and technology; and very specific recommendations to improve their discoverability and their sales.
We will also aim our analyses at any specific questions or concerns a client may have. For example, "how might we break this author in the UK market" or "can we reach and convert women into fans" are questions we can address. We answer based on what the data tells us and provide the degree of granularity and technology/publishing knowledge to act.
For a franchise author, or an author on which a publisher will spend substantially promoting their next book, these reports — costly though they may be ($5,000 and up) — are invaluable tools. They even tell you what days and times to tweet and which cities to choose for heavy print laydowns and tour activity. We've had several occasions where these reports confirmed hunches based on experience or a house's analysis but there are almost always nice surprises too. Those are not always fun to hear when they upset previous plans but they will result in more efficient sales reach if they're acted upon.
But sometimes an author or agent might be after information or analysis that is easier (and cheaper) to deliver because it is very targeted. One agent friend said to me, "I don't care about the title descriptions. Doing those right is the publisher's job and they wouldn't listen to me if I wrote a better one anyway. But I want my authors to be list-gathering machines. Can you show us how to do that?"
A targeted ask of this kind is much simpler than a 360 audit. We save time and effort when we're looking for very specific actionable data and then confining our report to just that. We analyzed three of that agency's top authors, with recommendations about how to improve their web sites for email list optimization, each for much less than half of a full 360.
As we've noted before, management of author web presences is a weak spot in author-publisher relations. We just did 360 audits for three different imprints of a major house. In two cases, the authors in question controlled their sites and the suggestions for improvement devolved into discussions of how to persuade the close friend or relative of the author who maintained the presence to make changes. (Having the authority of our very well-designed and thorough report would help, of course.)
In the third case, the house controlled the site. It turned out to be very important that they did. One thing we found in the audit was that this well-known author wasn't appearing for searches of "best thrillers set in London". We could see that he very likely could, easily and within short order, rank high for that. We saw that with great likelihood; it wasn't a guess. With a host of books that fit that description and rankings of 4.5 stars on Amazon and Goodreads, all it would take is a properly set-up landing page to make the author rank highly for the term, and the rank would be deserved in the eyes of Google and humans and likely to be self-perpetuating. That search is not only frequently employed, it would bring in likely customers who might well not yet know the author. It is roughly analogous to an evergreen end-cap with face-out display in just the right aisle for a book they will love by an author whom they probably have not read as yet, and one who happens to have plenty of books.
And setting up an optimized landing page is easy to do.
All you need to do is know that the term is important and that the author isn't sorting for it and probably can. But only using the methodologies developed and employed by Pete would assure you'd find that out.
Google's recently reported de-emphasis of Google Plus has led to widespread misunderstanding about Google Plus, but more importantly here, about author websites. One agent friend recently asked whether they just weren't necessary anymore and if authors could just focus on social media. That's a dangerous misunderstanding. An author's website along with an author's Google Plus account enables Google to understand who an author is and what is important about them. Author websites are as important as they ever were, as is an author's Google Plus profile. (And it isn't just about Google. An author's Amazon author page is critical for their success as well.) Any real-estate in the social landscape is rented, not owned and the leases change all the time.
The wisdom of our agent friend about the publisher's responsibility to write the descriptive copy has also been reflected in the evolution of our thinking. We have been selling SEO-optimized copy as the key deliverable for our "foundational title audit". The process to get to it involves research to find the right keywords, phrases, and topics to include in the copy and training our own staff in Pete's techniques to employ those in the copy itself. We're optimizing for multiple environments, primarily Google and Amazon, which complicates the task, but we've been able to train previously uninitiated people to do this effectively and fairly quickly.
But we've seen that most publishers don't believe that anybody else's copy is as good as what they'd produce in-house. They'd far rather have us give them the keywords and write the copy themselves. That's easier for us, and we can do it for less money, but then that requires us to train their team on how to use the keywords, phrases, and topics in the copy.
All that has led us to the latest addition to our offerings. When we started exploring this business nearly a year ago and launched it in the Spring, one Very Smart Publisher said "would you please just teach us how to do it ourselves?" I resisted that idea, partly because of the impossible challenge of replicating Pete's knowledge and how he uses it in a training course of any length. But as time's gone by, we realized that we did train our own staff. And Pete did a lot of marketer training at Random House. We have come around to the point of view that training people to do some things actually makes them appreciate even more the things we do that we can't easily train. It also empowers them to innovate in ways we might not see or to provide feedback to us on what we might offer that we've yet to identify.
So we've now formulated seven specific training programs. We offer three-hour courses (if delivered in-house, or three 1-hour webinars if remote) called "Audience-centric Marketing 101″, "Author Optimization 101″, and "Advanced Optimization" (with the last one only open to those who have taken the first one). And we have four 1-1/2 hour programs as well: "Social Media for Publishers, Agents, and Authors", "Supercharge Your Author Website", "12 Tools for Marketing Success", and "The 30 Chrome Extensions You Need Now". The "Marketing 101″ course would cover both the keyword research and the instructions on how to place them in the copy.
As a result of Frankfurt, we're now taking our talents and capabilities to other countries to work in languages other than English. We're about to start our first assignment for an Italian publisher and we have a big project pending that would take place in German. In both cases, we're getting help from our clients to make sure that what we find and do in Google Translate and other linguistic processing tools doesn't have gaps we can't see and to understand what we have to do to make it totally effective.
The digital marketing business is a global business as is all publishing these days and digital marketing, and the running of a digital marketing agency, is a process, not an event.
At Digital Book World next January 14-15, Pete McCarthy is moderating a panel on "Marketing Skill Sets Required in 2015″ with a star panel consisting of Angela Tribelli of HarperCollins, Hannah Harlow of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Jeff Dodes of Macmillan, and Rick Joyce of Perseus. There is a host of other marketing programming on the agenda.]]>
The "damage" to society that results from results being gamed in fiction is probably minimal, and restricted to Amazon promoting either its own published titles, its favorite self-published authors, and books from other publishers that have paid to play. But, with non-fiction, the consequences could be much more severe and of real public interest.
Imagine a persuasive book arguing that the government should sharply increase the minimum wage and let's also imagine that Amazon corporately doesn't like that idea. Is it really okay if they suppress the awareness of that book from half or more of the book-buying public?
My scenario was hypothetical and published at a time when the meme in place was that Amazon chose what it recommended to you totally by neutral algorithms which simply tried to discern what you would want to have promoted to you. (After all, that's how you make the most sales.)
Now, Paul Krugman of The New York Times has published an op-ed on Amazon, arguing that it is time for the government to look at whether they are operating as a monopsony — a market player with the concentrated power to bully the suppliers into lower and lower prices — where he has cited an example first reported by The Times's "Bits" blog (on September 30, well after my post) very much like the one I dreamed up. But this is real.
From Krugman:
Specifically, the penalty Amazon is imposing on Hachette books is bad in itself, but there's also a curious selectivity in the way that penalty has been applied. Last month the Times's Bits blog documented the case of two Hachette books receiving very different treatment. One is Daniel Schulman's "Sons of Wichita," a profile of the Koch brothers; the other is "The Way Forward," by Paul Ryan, who was Mitt Romney's running mate and is chairman of the House Budget Committee. Both are listed as eligible for Amazon Prime, and for Mr. Ryan's book Amazon offers the usual free two-day delivery. What about "Sons of Wichita"? As of Sunday, it "usually ships in 2 to 3 weeks." Uh-huh.
It is definitely not the government's job to step into commercial disputes to save big publishers. But if, as Krugman argues (with far more knowledge than I, so I will leave it to more informed people to support or dispute the claim) the marketplace power Amazon is wielding for books is comparable to what Rockefeller's Standard Oil did for oil a 100 years and more ago, then they apparently would have the legal justification to intercede in the public interest. (To my limited knowledge, no anti-trust laws that were on the books then that would have enabled the government to intervene have been repealed since.)
Perhaps monopsony behavior that relentlessly pushes down the revenues of publishers and their authors is legal or not a legitimate government interest. Perhaps Michael Tamblyn's recent series of tweets about what Amazon's "true" intent would be toward indie authors in the end is incorrect and, whether or not it is, perhaps it is not something the government need be concerned about.
But elevating books that favor your political friends — even when you're fighting their publisher — and burying political books that promote ideas you don't like is not something that society can comfortably accept from a retailer that is the principal book retailer in the country. (No other retailer has ever had comparable market share so this "problem" has never arisen as a public interest question ever before.) Whether they like it or not, Amazon (like Google) has virtually become a public utility, providing a service most of us depend upon to be objective and catering primarily to the interest of the individuals it serves, not its own.
The problem with Amazon's market share isn't just commercial, it is political. It is a legitimate topic of public concern. If Hachette chooses not to publish a book, even for political reasons, there are four other mammoth publishers and hundreds if not thousands of others that can bring it to the public. If Amazon chooses to bury a title, half the book buyers will not see it when they're shopping for books. In my opinion, that's not good for our democracy. I think this is a much more important question than how the pie is divided among author, publisher, and retailer.
Like Krugman, I shop at Amazon (not PRIME, like he is, but most of my books are read on the Kindle reader on my iPhone) and I admire the fabulous execution and customer service they provide. Their position of power wasn't stolen, it was earned. But that doesn't change the fact that it is a special responsibility to be the book recommender for more than half the book purchases and allowing that to be used for one entity's political and social preferences is potentially a very dangerous thing.]]>
But, like just about everything in our business, it is affected by the digital revolution.
It stands to reason that gatherings of publishing people (or any other kind, really) that require travel time and expense should diminish in a world where email and Skype and Google Hangouts are a normal part of everyday life. But the venerable events just keep going on. It was more than five years ago that I wondered how long BEA could last. They have an extreme challenge because BEA's DNA is that it is for publishers to show their wares to bookstores, and the number of bookstores has dropped precipitously for years. And London Book Fair, despite venue issues over the years which have them moving again next year, seemed from my visit last April still to be going strong.
The concerns I expressed five years ago that BEA might disappear have, so far, proven unfounded. Good show management that has brought in other players ranging from bloggers to meetings of BISG and IDPF, digital publishing's trade association, have, at the very least, postponed what seemed to me to be inevitable. Of course, they have their own venue change to navigate and it will be a tougher one because they're leaving NYC for Chicago in 2016. That is going to be extremely disruptive.
Frankfurt is an entirely different beast. It is really two mega-events that stretch over five exhibit days: Wednesday through Sunday. Set-up day is Tuesday, so it is really a week-long commitment. For the global book trade, and specifically for those of us in the English-speaking world that are the dominant players in worldwide publishing, it is a unique opportunity to trade rights face-to-face, on metaphorical steroids. Books published in English can have anywhere from zero to a dozen or more foreign language editions which, cumulatively, can bring in very significant revenues. What Frankfurt has done for us for years is provide an efficient venue for those deals to get made.
For German publishers, however, Frankfurt is also an opportunity to meet the public. For the non-German exhibitors and attendees, this is mostly a nuisance but a minor one because the English-language hall has been as far as is geographically possible in the Messegelende (which is about a dozen Javits- or McCormick Place-sized buildings on a vast campus connected by buses and moving walkways; 5-7 minute walks from one meeting to the next can be minimized by experienced fairgoers' planning, but are unavoidable) from the hall which houses the Germans. (Art book, sci-tech, and other language publishers are a lot closer.)
Global companies use Frankfurt as an opportunity to hold global meetings. I could see on the meeting signboard at my hotel that Hachette and Quarto had meeting rooms booked for the day before the Fair opened from 9 to 5. These are senior management meetings that bring the heads of various regions into the same room; the rights directors and acquiring editors who will be working hard at the Fair aren't necessarily part of those conversations. This is built into the travel rhythms of the big global companies. And the CEOs are often not fully occupied at the Fair itself. I don't know if it is part of Frankfurt's marketing plan to help facilitate these global meetings, but it should be. It cements the commitment of the biggest companies to that spot on the calendar.
(By the way, the global meetings combined with the long-in-advance planning publishers do for Frankfurt make it particularly challenging to run a successful conference ahead of the Fair. Michael Cader and I had a Publishers Launch event for three years — we didn't do it this year — and both recruiting speakers and gathering an audience was harder than it has been for any other event we've done. People schedule their Frankfurt time tightly, and in advance, so you have to have powerful programming posted well before the event to compel people to plan to take a full day of Frankfurt time to attend.)
But it was really obvious this year that Frankfurt — at least that part of it which is about English-language publishers buying and selling with non-English markets — is shrinking.
I stay at the (now Meridien) ParkHotel, which has the Casablanca Bar off the lobby. It has, for years, been the main hangout for the Brits at Frankfurt and, in years past, you could hardly get through the lobby to your room on Tuesday night, Wednesday night, or Thursday night. This year, the crowd hardly spilled out of the bar at all.
But what was really stark was the empty Halle 8 (this year for the last time, the English-language hall) on Friday. Up until about ten years ago, Frankfurt ran through Monday morning and Sunday was the last "real" day of action. My pal Charlie Nurnberg of Sterling was always the last big US executive there working; he always made deals there on Sunday. The biggest big shots had all gone home, and Charlie made himself accessible to lots of smaller players, who were delighted to sell to (or buy from) Sterling. The important point is that there were people for him to meet that day to do business with. Powerful people went home early, but lots of business was still being done.
People hated staying through Monday so the Fair in one recent year relented and eliminated the Monday, and Sunday became the last day. Pretty rapidly, Sunday became a desolate day. This was so much the case that in the past couple of years I've managed to persuade Gwyn Headley of fotoLibra, my British pal with whom I share a stand and then — most years — drive back to London, that we could leave on Saturday afternoon and get back to London on Sunday evening, rather than doing it all 24 hours later.
Doing this requires some arranging. The story is that you get "fined" if you abandon your stand early. (I have seen lots of deserted stands over the years and I haven't actually met anybody who admitted to having been fined. But I have friends who work for the Frankfurt Book Fair, I have partnered with them on conferences — I know them — and they all insist to me that it is true, so I take it seriously. I never yet left not wanting to have my stand again next year so I figure they can enforce the fine.) To avoid that problem, you hire a local young person to sit at your stand. They can't do any business for you, of course, but they prevent you from being fined. This year doing that cost me 180 Euros. It's worth it to get back to London a day earlier.
In the past few years since Monday was eliminated, Saturday became quieter but Friday continued to be kinetic and active. It was well known that the top execs, particularly the British ones, left after Thursday, but top editors and marketers were there in force through Friday. Not this year. Friday was the new Saturday. My Logical Marketing partner Pete McCarthy and I had a dozen meetings or more each day on Wednesday and Thursday. I had three on Friday. I had none on Saturday. We made a wisely efficient decision having Pete go home on Friday morning. (Frankly, his time is much more valuable than mine.)
You could have rolled a bowling ball down just about any aisle in Halle 8 on Friday and not broken any legs.
This is not really surprising. Global rights trading used to be an annual event, particularly for illustrated book packagers and publishers who had bulky samples and boards that needed to be seen for decisions to get made. Now it is a continuous effort with PDFs easily moved around the world in milliseconds. And that's on top of the fact that there are fewer and fewer illustrated books and a consequent reduction in illustrated book packagers and publishers.
Next year the English-language publishers move from Halle 8 to Halle 6. On one hand, this takes us closer to the rest of the Fair and we do a lot of business with Europeans who will be more proximate as a result. It moves the English-language publishing world closer to the kids' books publishing world (and they overlap, of course) and that's good. But it also takes us from a hall where we're all on one floor to one with a smaller footprint where we have to navigate three floors. Going up and down escalators only might pad time between meetings by three minutes or five, but when you're scheduling a sit-down every 30 minutes (as many of us do, at least on Wednesday and Thursday), that can mean reducing the productive time by 15 percent or more.
And while it puts us considerably closer to the tram stop that can take us into the Fair, it also puts the German public which uses that same tram that much closer to us as well. This is going to be particularly disruptive to the b-to-b trade business on Saturday and Sunday.
The Frankfurt Book Fair will remain an indispensable stop for the global publishing community, but it might have a real battle on its hands trying to remain a five-day event. I don't have 37 more Frankfurts to go, but I think I'll see more changes in publisher behavior around it before I'm done than I've seen since I started attending.]]>
Here are a couple of points about book economics that I learned at my Daddy's knee.
1. The investment in inventory is the single biggest capital requirement for a bookstore.
2. Given that the ability to invest in inventory is limited, the speed at which inventory "turns" (a measurement of how long a retailer has to hold stock before it sells) is a much more powerful determinant of a store's total gross margin, and therefore its profit, than the margin it earns on each sale (the difference between what it pays for the inventory and what it is sold for).
In simple shorthand, that means that a retail store selling books can improve its profit more easily by more closely matching what it buys to what it sells than it can by squeezing more margin out of its suppliers. It also means that a publisher can do more for a store's profitability by shipping quickly and allowing smaller orders at workable discounts (which make it easier to match supply to demand) and offering delayed billing than it can by offering extra points of discount (which is what added margin is called in the book business). The additional benefit of employing this understanding is that margin division is a zero-sum game, but increased inventory efficiency is actually synergistic: both the publisher and the retailer benefit from it.
This reality about bookstore economics explains the value to the supply chain of wholesalers like Ingram and Baker & Taylor. By offering the ability to combine orders across publishers and giving rapid, often next-day, delivery, the wholesalers enable stores to gain much more inventory efficiency at a relatively trivial reduction in margin. (Where the publishers' "deal" is sometimes better than the wholesalers' in a meaningful way is that publishers will often allow a longer period before demanding payment. Inventory "investment" only really begins when the books the store received are paid for.)
So, in fact, there is very little similarity between the economics of retailing print and retailing ebooks. The tech infrastructure for selling is not a trivial investment, and DRM — including customer service — is a significant expense that ebook retailers deal with that bookstores do not. The print retailer has to build a customer-friendly location and invest in (presumably knowledgeable) clerks. How those costs of doing business compare is a complicated question that changes over time as the tech gets cheaper and the cost of physical locations — driven by ever-higher real estate values in the attractive neighborhoods where bookstores tend to thrive — goes up.
But the things that change aren't nearly as important as the things that don't.
The stock turn of an ebook retailer is infinity. There is zero inventory investment.
Publishers first had to deal with the question of what the bookstore's margin should be on ebooks back in the late 1990s when Palm Digital and Microsoft created the first reflowable ebook platforms. Prior to that we had PDFs, which delivered — in the current jargon — "fixed page layout" ebooks which didn't adjust the number of words per screen to the screen size. At that time, the ebook retailers were inclined to sell at publishers' "list prices" and publishers tended to price ebooks at about the same level as print.
But nobody paid a lot of attention because the sales and revenue were de minimus. Since Palm had the most hand-held digital assistants (Palm Pilots) in circulation back at the turn of the century and because (as we have clearly learned since) portability is one of the big drivers of ereading, Palm's ebooks were the best-selling format. But Palm decided not to enable widespread distribution of their ebook format; they sold the ebooks themselves through a controlled vendor (originally called Peanut Press and then Palm Digital).
In fact, the mobi format that Kindle uses today was developed at the time as a bridging format, able to be read on both Microsoft and Palm devices. This was before the creation of the epub format used by everybody except Kindle today. When Amazon bought Mobi, it was apparently to prevent any other retailer from building a real ebook business selling to what was then the "entire" ebook market. B&N's one-time exit from ebooks was because they could sell only to Microsoft and not to Palm devices, which meant they had the smaller piece of what was a very small market. Amazon apparently figured then that they'd enter the market when they were ready, but they wanted to prevent B&N from building a foothold in it before then.
I'd argue that the biggest mistake B&N made in the history of ebook evolution was not buying Mobi before Amazon did.
So it became "established" that ebooks would be sold on a similar basis to print books with discounts of 40 percent or 50 percent off publisher-set retail. It should have been no surprise to anybody that once "real" retailers — not software companies like Microsoft and Palm — took the reins, they'd give away a lot of that margin to go after market share. That's what real retailers do; it's in their DNA.
In fact, the first wave of discounting of print in the 1980s by the Crown Bookstores chain followed very quickly behind increases in publishers' discounts to stores from the low 40s to 46 percent and up. Most people never noticed that; others think there's no connection. It always seemed to me that the increased publisher discounts and the discounting to consumers were linked.
In the early days of ebooks, the volumes were so low and the tech was still under development, so the significant margin the publishers offered — and the retailers employed — might have been necessary to have any ebook retailing at all. As time passes, the fixed retailing costs get lower and the customer service costs also tend to get lower.
Once a real retailer, Amazon, got into the ebook business, deep discounts off publisher prices had to follow, and they did. The move to agency pricing had purposes beyond the principal one, which was to remove pricing as a weapon from the retail competition arsenal. It also put publishers on a path to set realistic retail prices for consumers and to reduce the notional share given to the sales intermediary from around 50 percent to 30 percent.
There's reason to believe that even 30 percent is too high, given the plunging cost structure for retail and the economic reality of infinite turn on inventory investment. A senior Random House executive told me during the period they were not in agency (the first year it existed) that part of the reason they stayed out is that the 30 percent figure Apple wanted and the other publishers agreed to seemed "too high". As it turned out, Random House came in a year later and accepted the 30 percent. They said at the time it was because indie bookstores were attracted to ebook retailing by the assured 30 percent margin and fixed retail prices, and Random House always wants to support independent retailers.
It was always curious to me that the preference of all the other retailers except those who can use the book business as a loss leader — Amazon, for sure, and perhaps Google — for publisher-set retail prices never made its way into the discussion of the publisher motivation at the time, nor to Judge Cote's reasoning, nor to the arguments which have taken place about it since.
Ebook pricing today is very confused. Apparently, many of the retailers will accept wholesale terms at a lot less than 50 percent, although this is not widely known and, indeed, isn't even really confirmable. Discounts of print to bookstores were published, standard terms. That's not the case with ebooks (because they're not really sales, they're licenses, no matter what anybody says, and they are individually negotiated contracts, the terms of which are kept private). Nobody outside Amazon really knows what margin Amazon actually takes from ebook sales; it is certainly true that most of the ebooks are discounted from whatever prices publishers "suggest". (And sometimes those publisher-set prices may be inflated, particularly if the publisher is selling at a bookstore-like 50 percent discount.) Perhaps they only really take the 30 percent that they get from agency publishers and that they take from individual authors in KDP and that they have said in their arguments with Hachette is the "right" share for a retailer.
We actually still don't know what the "right" or "fair" margin is for retailers of ebooks. Random House had some idea of that in 2010 when they were holding out and they seemed to think "less than 30 percent". Comparing ebook retailing economics to print book retailing economics only tells us that physical retailers of print need a lot more to have a viable business. Dad also taught me is that the reason publishers give stores a discount off the publishers' retail price — which should be the price a publisher would sell the book at if a member of the public came directly to them — is to give stores the margin they need to operate. Because publishers want there to be stores. First purposes may have been forgotten in course of the digital transition.
There is programming relevant to this post at Digital Book World 2015 in addition to the main-stage appearance of Amazon's Russ Grandinetti main-with Michael Cader and me. We have a great panel discussion on "price promotion" with Josh Schanker of BookBub, Rachel Chou of Open Road, and Matt Cavner of Vook. And "Blue Sky in the Ebook World" where a panel of visionaries will talk about what is over the horizon for ebook retailing, rethinking simple ebooks, making complex ebooks, and creating ebooks with soundtracks. Jonathan Nowell of Nielsen Book's talk about how the profile of what sells in print has changed will enlighten around this topic as well.]]>
Since the chart showed publisher shipments, it was an imprecise gauge of sales. The third largest channel was "jobbers/wholesalers", and those books went somewhere else (if they got re-sold and not returned), but we don't know where. Basically all the other channels got those books eventually.
But it is noteworthy that of the eight channels enumerated (one of which is "other"), only two showed increased sales from 2010 to 2013: online retail and export sales.
Indeed, export sales are one of the real growth opportunities for publishers, and particularly English-language publishers, in the future.
The reasons for this aren't hard to understand. English is the most important second language in most countries that are not English-speaking. And, obviously, ebooks create no-inventory and little-friction distribution opportunities that make it easy for a publisher in New York or London (or Sydney or Toronto) to deliver to a customer separated by any distance or number of oceans.
In addition, the search engines are global so "discovery" can take place anywhere as well which can increase the demand for printed books as well as digital ones, even though the printed books present a more complex delivery challenge.
The opportunity brings along its challenges. One is that rights conventions need to change. Publishers often have their rights to distribute in some parts of the globe limited by contract. But even when rights aren't an issue, marketing — including both customizing the metadata and the pricing to a very large number of local territories — can be.
This opportunity has grown rather recently at the same time that many publishers have been preoccupied with overcoming obstacles in their home markets. Both the US and UK markets have been roiled by the relatively sudden emergence of a strong ebook market and the concurrent (and related) weakening of the brick-and-mortar infrastructure for print. Publishers have been scurrying to change many of their practices: licensing differently, learning to do SEO well and employing other digital marketing techniques, shifting their internal structures and workflows, and grappling with the opportunities presented by social media. Many have expended effort on apps and enhanced ebooks which were time and money traps in markets that briefly looked promising but then didn't pan out.
But in a more settled marketplace, which we have now (perhaps temporarily), the opportunities for growing revenue through export sales is going to get increasing attention from all publishers, who will be happy to know that entrepreneurial companies — some new but some quite established and familiar — have been building out the capabilities to help them.
There are three panels at Digital Book World that will really inform publishers that want to work harder to exploit this opportunity.
The mostly obviously relevant one is called "Global Publishing Tactics: understanding distribution, metadata, pricing, and marketing to maximize sales in different markets". Two of the panelists are Marcus Woodburn of Ingram and Gareth Cuddy of ePub Direct — we have other conversations pending — and moderated by Len Vlahos, the executive director of Book Industry Study Group. Marcus and Gareth and the panelist(s) who will join them have experience selling around the world on behalf of many publishers. Their insight and advice will be gold for publishers looking to expand their export sales.
We also have a panel discussion "Global Market Spotlights: reports from markets around the world". The four markets we'll discuss are Germany, Italy, Brazil, and Russia. The panel will be moderated by Thomas Minkus of Frankfurt Book Fair. Our panelists — all of whom are local players — will talk about the switch to digital reading and online sales in those markets, but will also give specific insight into the market for English-language books.
Another discussion which is a bit more tangential, but will still be informative for publishers trying to grow ebook exports, is one on "How People Read". What we're trying to get at here is to use the knowledge that ebook platform providers have about the granular detail of reading consumption: about devices, how far people go in various kinds of books, whether they read more than one book at a time, and how they respond to pricing changes. All of our panelists — Micah Bowers of Bluefire, Michael Tamblyn of Kobo, David Burleigh of Overdrive, and Andrew Weinstein of Scribd — are superintending global platforms. Another aspect of what they'll reveal is how these consumption patterns vary across markets, including how much English is read in various export markets. Chris Kenneally of Copyright Clearance Center, which also has an increasing international focus, will moderate.
We could well also learn more about global opportunities from the keynote talk we'll hear from Brian Murray, the CEO of HarperCollins, and Michael Cader and I will certainly be asking Russ Grandinetti of Amazon about how publishers can maximize their export sales through them.
So if export sales is on your current agenda, a visit to DBW on Jan 14-15 also should be. And, in that case, sign up before the end of the day on Monday and save yourself some dough. Early bird pricing ends on Monday night.]]>
The critical services publishers provide are marketing and distribution and those functions, as we all know, are undergoing change and revision as part of the digital disruption. And because they are rapidly changing, there is even greater-than-usual variability to how well these things are done across publishers and, within publishers, across their imprints and lists. Indeed, many authors at legacy houses are not enamored of their publishing experience, but the ones who are defending the publishers are also defending something of their own.
What is equally loud and clear from Amazon's own statements and those of their supporters (including many authors who would be less well known and less well off today if Amazon hadn't built the tools and market share they have over the past several years), is that the legacy industry doesn't appreciate, and perhaps doesn't understand, that commercial publishing was built on an ecosystem which is rapidly being dismantled and will ultimately be irrelevant. And they point out that what is replacing what came before delivers much lower-priced ebooks (print is another matter) to consumers and a substantially larger portion of the revenue to the authors than published contract splits would give them. (The fact is that those splits are irrelevant more than 80 percent of the time for the most commercial books because big agents get big authors advances larger than what they "earn", but that's another story.) The authors that work in the new paradigm also gain unprecedented control of their professional lives: publishing when they want to, pricing and changing prices as they want to, and playing with marketing opportunities (bundling print-and-digital, entering subscription services) or not, as they and they alone decide.
The fact that both options are commercially viable today means we might actually now be living in a golden moment for authors. Publishers are certainly aware that a brand-name author has a truly workable self-publishing option (although, frankly, the biggest surprise to me so far is that basically no major author has taken it, which is objective evidence that the execs running the big houses are navigating at least some aspects of the digital transition very well). And Amazon started paying authors 70% when publishers switched to agency and extracted 70% for themselves, a connection that seems not to have been made by much of the publisher-bashing commentariat.
While there is a symmetry to the two sides' dismay about what is appreciated or understood, there is a massive asymmetry here that is hardly, if ever, mentioned. And that asymmetry makes the motivation of the legacy defenders very clear — they're fighting for their lives — but actually suggests that the "side" fighting them (to the extent that it consists of indie authors) is at least sometimes simultaneously fighting against their own interests.
Those who feel well served on the legacy establishment side have much to fear from Amazon's continued growth and success. The clear self-interest of all the publishers, agents, and those authors fortunate enough to be continuously "employed" through book contracts — which includes many, and certainly the most recognizable, of the authors in the Authors United effort — who are fighting for Hachette to "win" (which means maintaining the publisher's share of the sales that flow through Amazon) in the current dispute is obvious, if perhaps insufficiently emphasized or acknowledged.
Cynicism about whether it is really the greater societal "goods" that get so much emphasis in their appeals that are really motivating these authors or whether they're just protecting their own gravy train is not unreasonable.
Assuming that the publisher-bashing commentariat, who could also be characterized as the "pro-Amazon" advocates, has a healthy number of authors whose revenue is as largely dependent on Amazon as James Patterson's is on Hachette, one can see the emotional motivations to fight for the home team could be similar. But the practical side of it is precisely opposite. It is obvious that Amazon getting stronger weakens Hachette's (or HarperCollins's or Bloomsbury's or Cambridge University Press's) ability to pay advances and publish more books, which directly affects various stakeholders and particularly steadily-working authors. But if Hachette "wins" — or if Amazon's margins on transactions with publishers are not improved — how does this injure the self-publishing authors who are working successfully that way now? Simple logic says that Amazon will treat them best when the possibilities offered by publishers are the best.
Do they really think that Amazon will offer them more if Hachette is weaker? History and logic would suggest the opposite.
In other words, publisher-published authors definitely lose if Amazon gains strength in relation to them. But Amazon-published or KDP authors (and the publisher-bashing seems to come from both flavors) lose nothing if legacy publishing remains strong. They are, allegedly, fighting for the "good" of those authors who are signing "exploitive" publishing contracts, but their own interests are not served.
This asymmetry plays out in another way in the Lee Child exchange on the Konrath blog. Child says, again and again, that he thinks it makes complete sense for authors to exploit the opportunities in KDP if it looks like the best commercial choice for them. Maybe I've missed it (and I admit that I am disinclined to read most of the publisher-bashing posts and I certainly don't make a habit of reading the bloggers who specialize in them), but the message I keep getting from Konrath, Eisler, and Howey is not "choose the course that is best for you based on the choices you have in front of you" but is more like "never sign one of those exploitive publishing contracts!" (Howey tells me he blogs about that "all the time" and cites this post of his. You can decide for yourself what you think, but it seems to me that he is saying "only sign with a publisher after you've built yourself up by self-publishing first".)
The motivation of the authors who spend a great deal of time and energy bashing big publishers has puzzled me before. Because "price-shoppers" are a core audience for indie ebooks, indies actually got a shot in the arm when the publishers and Apple put in agency pricing, which in its original form prohibited even the retailer from taking a loss to bring branded ebook prices down.
There's no way for an outsider to compile the data to prove this, but the chances are very good that indie author breakthroughs were easier to achieve during the years when the price gap between the majors and the indies was greatest. But most of the voices now demonizing Hachette (and the rest of what is being called the Big Five "cartel") also bashed agency pricing. I see the benefit to Amazon in that position, but I don't see how crippling agency pricing helped indie authors.
It is not only Judge Cote's decision which has changed things since, but also the growing awareness of publishers about the value of temporary price drops, or "daily deals" and services — most prominently BookBub — to amplify the effect of promotional pricing in the marketplace. But how did ending agency pricing benefit independent authors?
Hugh Howey maintains that he is better off if his books and those from the big branded authors are priced the same. Hugh's a smart guy so maybe I'm just not bright enough to get it, but that makes no sense to me. Except in the luxury goods market, there is virtually no situation where you gain advantage with a higher price than the alternative pitted against you. The bigger the saving you can offer, the more you'll sell. In fact, Hugh makes that argument himself when he claims that lower ebook prices will raise industry revenue because it makes the ebooks more affordable. It's fine to argue that the big publishers are dumb not to lower prices and sell more, but, even if it is true and especially if it is true and they pay attention and obey, how does that do him any good? (The answer from Hugh, by the way, is that we're all better off if all prices are lower.)
I have been persuaded in Howey's case that he personally rises above self-interest in his industry commentary. Hugh's a nice guy, a smart guy, and a socially-conscious guy. He and I have had many candid and mutually respectful exchanges. And I read "Wool" and recruited him to speak at Digital Book World long before he was such a celebrity on the anti-publisher side. I believe him when he says "I've made more money than I ever imagined I would; I'm grateful; and one benefit of that is I don't need to be motivated by money in my decisions."
Howey is a true believer and a crusader who is sincerely convinced that the standard publisher terms for authors are unfair and need to change. He has occasionally expressed skepticism and concern about some of Amazon's decisions and behavior, particularly around the complex compensation schemes for Kindle authors with their KOLL (lending library) and Kindle Unlimited (subscription) initiatives which buys him a certain amount of credibility. But I still can't understand why he's in KU but not Oyster and Scribd and 24Symbols, a set of decisions that strike me as being in Amazon's commercial interest but not his own. (One possible explanation is that going into additional distributions creates more "work", but I don't take that too seriously. Hugh can afford to hire people to do the work, and he does all kinds of other things, like his AuthorEarnings blog, purely to add to industry knowledge. It would add a lot of useful insight if he were in the subscription services and reported on it.)
Perhaps the problem has to do with Amazon's KDP rules, which apparently require "exclusivity" to be in KU. That is almost certainly not a requirement visited on publishers. If that's what is stopping Howey, it would be nice if he would say so. Could Amazon be preventing its authors from pursuing revenue opportunities? If that's true, wouldn't that belong in any discussion of an author's choices?
Another persistent Amazon advocate is author Barry Eisler, whom I first encountered during a brief moment when he was going to eschew taking advances and being published by somebody in favor of doing it on his own. (In the end, he became an Amazon-signed author.) When I posed the quandary that is the subject of this piece to Eisler, he referred me to this post of his which I don't believe addresses the question. You can check out the link and decide for yourself.
Trying really hard to understand this and think imaginatively about it, I can only really come up with two "selfish motivations" that make sense. One — and I think this is the one that is claimed — is that the publisher-bashing is designed to improve life for the victimized authors who choose those deals. Indeed, the content of the anti-publisher rants often includes specific suggestions, or demands: raise the digital royalty, make shorter contracts, pay royalties more often, etc. that are, no doubt, author-friendly. But it does seem a bit weird for people committed to demonizing, weakening, and ridiculing the big publishers to be the ones to tell them what they could do to stay competitive. If publishers accepted the suggestions, of course, perhaps Amazon would be pushed to improve author terms too, but that seems a pretty indirect and distant reward to explain all the time and energy some people expend on this. (Or are they promising to sign with the big publishers if they follow these suggestions? I don't think so!)
Another conceivable legitimate motivation, of course, is ego. These publisher-bashers have managed to "do it" without them, and continuing a high-profile running criticism of the establishment they outdid and outmaneuvered, particularly when you can get a lot of applause, might be alluring. But even that feels weak to me. If self-aggrandizement were what motivated these people, it would be even more impressive if their frame were "this is hard, but I managed to do it" whereas the message feels much more like "anybody can do this and you're a bit of a dolt if you don't."
None of this constitutes enough of an explanation to satisfy me. I am either missing something in plain sight or I'm not in possession of all the facts. Perhaps the "explanation" that the published authors defending Hachette pursue their selfish interests but that the indie authors who bash Hachette and the others do it out of public-spiritedness, even if their own revenue suffers, does it for you even though it doesn't for me.
Amazon has a strong case to make for itself. They really made online book retailing work through strategic brilliance and excellence of execution, without being first and against industry entities that should have had competitive advantage. They made ebooks into a thriving business for everybody pretty much singlehandedly, also without being first. They're entitled to feel that the powerful position they're in is because of the virtue of their model and execution, and they're entitled to feel that a different publishing industry than the one they came into is the future they have to work towards, whether or not they want to spell out that vision in full and whether or not the incumbents "get it".
If every argument being made by the publisher bashing commentariat were coming from Amazon, I'd understand the motivation and factor it in, as I do with Authors United or Hachette when they speak.
But I need to understand a rational motivation to put anybody's advocacy in context. And it seems to me the very best thing for indie authors is for all the existing publishers to retain their capability to hire authors on that model as much as they can for as long as they can. That's not the best thing for Amazon, but I really think it is the best thing for authors, and as true for those who do-it-themselves as for those who are published.
A senior Amazon executive, in a meeting we had two or three years ago, complimented me on the fact that I "understand entities acting in their own self-interest." My response then was, and my feeling now is, "I'm mistrustful when they don't."
After I wrote this, I found that blogger Chuck Wendig had asked a similar question, with far less editorial speculation than appears here, in what appears to be an undated, but recent, post. He framed it differently than I do and I'm not sure what I read at his attempt at irony ("why are self-publishers trying to save the Big Five?") was seen that way by his many respondents. My focus is narrower: this fight is being carried by a handful of very persistent and energetic critics, spending time and energy that one would think takes more motivation than is required simply to "have an opinion" on this subject one way or the other. "What fuels all this energy and vitriol?" is a different question than "which side are you on in the dispute?"
Early Bird pricing for Digital Book World 2015 is only open until next Monday. There will be lots of programming that will provide context and insight around all things Amazon. Michael Cader and I will have a half-hour wide-ranging discussion with Amazon's Russ Grandinetti. Judith Curr, the CEO of Simon & Schuster's Atria imprint, will present her view of the "publisher-or-self-publishing" choice authors face. An expert on the school and college market, Matthew Greenfield of Rethink Education, will include an assessment of Amazon's role in his review of what publishers need to know to compete for those sales as things change. Jonathan Nowell, the CEO of Nielsen Book, will use his company's historical data to look at how the mix of what sells in print has changed since ebooks took off. Media veterans and authors Walter Isaacson and Ken Auletta will let us see the book business alongside other media undergoing technological change, which is necessary for any valid understanding of Amazon. We have a panel of publishers talking about selling direct. Oh, and of course, Founder/President Josh Schanker of BookBub will be on a panel on price promotion! There's a lot more that is relevant, which you'll find if you scan the entire program.]]>


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get a bird's eye view
It has long been a human dream to soar like a bird on lofty thermals – and paragliding comes pretty close. There couldn't be a better place to experience the thrill than high above the beaches of Camps Bay and Clifton, and the Twelve Apostles.
A number of official paragliding sites are located in and around Cape Town, including Lion's Head, Signal Hill, Sir Lowry's Pass, Hermanus, Franschhoek Pass, Dasklip Pass (Porterville) and Noordhoek. The take-off point on Lion's Head is the closest to the city centre.
the technical details
Paragliding is dependent on the weather, but there are about 200 days of the year that are suitable in South Africa. Wind is not essential, but conditions are most suitable when it is blowing from 10-30km/h. Ideally, it should be blowing upslope with a tolerance of 15 degrees.
book your flight
For the central Cape Town area, a good choice is Para-taxi (www.para-taxi.com). Para-Taxi puts a lot of effort into promoting the sport, respecting the environment and making flight possible for the disabled and physically challenged.
In the northern suburbs of the city you'll find Birdmen Paragliding (www.birdmen.co.za), which is owned and run by Barry Pedersen. During a visit to Switzerland in 1996, Barry started paragliding and developed a love for this artful form of aviation. In 2003, his wife Candice joined him in running the company.
Barry is a qualified advanced pilot with more than 2 500 flights to his credit. He is also a South African Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association instructor for paragliding and powered paragliding, and a qualified tandem flight instructor for both power and mountain flying. To learn how to paraglide, experience a tandem flight or safely see Cape Town and the surrounding area from the air, you can contact Birdmen.
Manu Wegmershaus has been paragliding since 1994 and has completed thousands of flights. He formed Cape Town Tandem Paragliding (www.paraglide.co.za) on his arrival in Cape Town in 2005.
The tandem pilots used by Cape Town Tandem Paragliding are South African Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association-certified and all are paragliding instructors or assistant instructors. Their qualifications guarantee you professional pilots to ensure that your paragliding experience is safe, fun and professional. Cape Town Tandem Paragliding is affiliated to the South African Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association and Wallend-Air School of Paragliding.
There are a number of other paragliding companies in the Cape. Contact Cape Town Tourism on +27 (0) 487 6800 or email email@example.com to book your trip at no extra charge, or check out the full list of Cape Town Tourism-registered tour operators specialising in paragliding.
- Phone: +27 (0)21 487 6800
Abseiling in Cape Town
For centuries, mankind has looked upon climbing, hiking and scaling Table Mountain, our wonder of nature as the ultimate challenges – until the discovery of the exhilarating activity, Abseiling, that is!
Learn to Dive Today
Learn to scuba dive and extend your diving qualifications with the full range of PADI and SDI dive courses. If you are looking for a relaxed group of diving companions to do shore dives, boat dives, night dives and dive trips with, look no further.
Pointrunner Charters
At Point Runner Boat Charters, we are passionate about the ocean and all it has to offer, but most of all we strive to ensure that your boat charter is tailor made to suit you, from Eco Tours to Cape Point and Seal Island, Full Day Trips 50-miles offshore, we ensure that when you return to shore that you have had a magnificent day on Point Runner Boat Charters. At Point Runner Charters we offer a personalised private charter for groups of between 4 – 6 guests depending on what type of experience you desire.
SA Forest Adventures
The Ultimate Adventure!
SA Forest Adventures offers amazing quad (ATV`s) trails, White Water Rafting, Tubing, Sandboarding, Paintball, Zipline Tours etc – we cater for individuals as well as large groups for fun and adventure at any one of our 4 adventure farms in the Western Cape.
Supreme Sharks
Shark cage diving is one of the top attractions in South Africa. Whether you are in Cape Town on holiday or looking for a unique adrenalin rush, shark cage diving is the answer. You can rely on our experienced team and state of the art equipment to make your shark cage diving experience truly memorable.
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Umpqua® Red Hot Power Taper Hi-Vis Indicator Leader
- Integrated high-vis neon red indicator
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Roundhouse Combo
The Roundhouse Combo exercise works your inner thighs, outer thighs, butt, abs, arms, and obliques.
This next exercise is a roundhouse jab cross combination, and the good thing about kicks is that they really tone and help you sculpt the buttocks and the thighs. You're gonna start in your fighting stance with your right foot forward and both hands up. Pull your abs in tight. Now, step with your left foot, then extend out into your kick. Follow through the jab and a pivot into a cross. Here we go, step, kick, jab, cross; step, kick, jab, cross. Good. Keep it going. Step into that kick. Now, I want you to try to take it to 20 to 25 repetitions on each side.
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Shumlins finalize divorceStaff Report | April 03,2013MONTPELIER — After separating in 2009, Gov. Peter Shumlin and his wife, Deborah Holway, have finalized their divorce.
Shumlin, 57, first shared news of the divorce publicly in an interview Monday with the online news outlet BuzzFeed. Shumlin spoke to the outlet at its New York City office while he was in town on work as chairman of the Democratic Governors Association.
Administration spokeswoman Susan Allen on Wednesday confirmed the divorce was finalized in March in Windham County Family Court. The couple, who had formerly shared a home in Putney, have two college-age daughters.
"Even though divorce is a sad occasion, Deb and I will be forever blessed by many extraordinary years together and two remarkable daughters," Shumlin and Holway said in a joint written statement. "No parents could ask for a greater gift than Olivia and Becca, and Deb and I are grateful that we remain friends and will continue to share our strong family. We make this statement in light of my public office, but Deb and I will have no further comment on this private issue."MORE IN This Just InVermont hazardous-materials team members were at the Asa Bloomer state office building in... Full StoryHoliday Festival Full StorySpeed blamed Full Story
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