Don Trowden's Blog

When I founded Publerati ten years ago, one of my core guiding principles was to help The What regain lost power versus The Who. (I’m not talking about the British rock band.)

What do I mean by this? In our loud age of celebrity culture, reality television, and cable news, quietly excellent novels by unknown people have little hope of being published. Agents are looking for people with a large following. So are publishers. Let’s face it, this makes their lives much easier. Starting anything from scratch is a much more daunting (some would say naive) undertaking.

How does one evaluate art on its merits alone? Is this even possible given how subjective tastes are? I’m not here to debate the age-old question of what is art, but rather to make the case for rebalancing our business models and appetites for risk more toward The What and less toward The Who. This trend toward The Who accelerated back in the 1980s in book publishing, with the mergers of book publishers into larger entertainment conglomerates, with the odd, possibly unintended, outcome of deeper pockets but less risk-taking on new Whats.

There have been as many artistic and commercial failures coming from The Who’s as there have been successes from The What’s. Eventually some What’s become the new Who’s. My favorite examples are the courageous signings of first novelists who unexpectedly break out with commercial success, only to then be grossly overpaid for their second novel, which is both an artistic and commercial dud. The initial instinct to evaluate the first novel on its merits was sound, but then degenerated into infatuation with The Who in signing the next two novels sight unseen. It’s a bit like a gambler in Vegas. You were up before you were down. You had a sound strategy but lost it in the hoopla of the bright lights. And the “free” drinks.

So how does one evaluate The What free of The Who?  An easy place to start is to simply try. This means not always starting every evaluation process with the author’s track record, the size of the author’s social media presence, and the potential “reach” or sales. Instead, clear out all the judgments and read the first few pages free of prejudice, “like a virgin,” as Madonna might say. Only consider new projects first thing in the morning, before the travails of the day color our perceptions and attitudes. Do our best to be open to new people, ideas, and expression. Make some decisions based on gut instinct and not solely on financial projections. Work for a company that believes in this strategy and provides some protection from negative consequences brought about by individual courage. Otherwise you end up working in a culture of frightened sheep that produces . . . well, sheepishness.

And don’t completely relegate the gatekeeper task to unpaid interns or junior staff with good intentions but no power. Discovery of new talent should be a core responsibility of any worthwhile book publisher.

Here’s to rebalancing The What versus The Who. It’s difficult work but among the most rewarding.

Caleb Mason, Publerati

The chart you see above is from Gallup and Pew measuring the percentage of adults in the U.S. who have not read a single book in the year measured.

It was 8% in 1978 and has been hovering at 23-27% in recent years. This is not a trend one associates with a growth industry. Meanwhile, I see newspaper editors, authors, and book publishers celebrating the death of the ebook without looking at this long-term trend of reading decline.  Are they dancing on their own graves?

It seems likely that print book reading has been in decline since around the time the Internet came on the scene because of new entertainment choices.  We know from many studies that people are spending more and more time engaged with content provided on a networked screen: Netflix, Amazon Prime, Facebook, Instagram, streaming sports, and so on.

Yet in the traditional book publishing industry, the collective decision was made to raise ebook prices to about what paperbacks sell for to save the old industry. And in the process kill the only networked screen innovation the book industry could participate in, the digital book for Smartphone and tablet reading. Vested interests across the supply chain published stories about the inferiority of reading books on a screen. How people remember less when reading digitally. An active campaign was undertaken to ward off innovation by The Establishment. (Them again!)

The inclination in the face of change is to duck one’s head in the sand and hope you can make it though the storm.  Maybe YOU can make it, but what about future generations who want a viable book industry? This is analogous to the old wooden ship builders deciding not to enter the iron age. Or the suits at Kodak who smugly looked at industry-funded Photo Marketing Association research, ignoring what was happening in the larger world. Just as with AAP research, the photo industry research ignored the emerging players and their market growth quietly occurring outside the normal competitive landscape.  Do you remember when supermarkets sold food but didn’t make it available to eat in the store? Someone smart decided competition was happening all around them at restaurants so along came Whole Foods, where people now eat right next to where others pay.  Brilliant!

We know from looking at traditional publishing financial results that publishers gave up easy profits when they chose to ignore the future of the ebook and hide in the print past. The only way the old business models have survived is through continued consolidation, which means pumping through more titles in lower volumes to fewer readers to just about stay even. For now. When the next recession comes, that will change again. Those higher number of titles coming from fewer traditional publishers with less staff  has to translate into a poorer experience for authors as a byproduct.

Crossing the chasm from the old, which provides most of the current income, to the new is nearly impossible. This is why competition almost always comes from the outside, from new players who have no investment in the old ways so are free to seize opportunities while the old plays a difficult balancing game. I experienced this firsthand when the 35mm photo industry had huge investments in obsolescent technology and equipment, while needing to  also invest in the digital new, the sum being a very expensive, unsustainable business model, which was too much weight for the likes of Sony, Konica, Kodak, and Polaroid.

The publishing industry seems to have throttled back the digital new more than was needed. No one I speak with in the book industry can answer the important question: “How many sales did you lose when you raised your ebook prices to the same as paperback?”  If you apply the strategic thinking of dividing customers into clusters of Most Engaged, Somewhat Engaged, and Not Engaged, I would expect many in the Somewhat Engaged group bought fewer books once ebook prices went up to the current high (I would say absurd) levels.  Yes, the Most Engaged are stepping up as they always will in continuing to support the old print business and indie booksellers, but can publishers survive well into the digital future in a highly competitive screen-based entertainment marketplace with just the Most Engaged?  I doubt it.

A possible better way to straddle the change would be to launch the hardcover edition that all publishers currently offer for those Most Engaged customers, and hold off on both the ebook and paperback editions until a year later when released simultaneously.  Price the ebook at $9.95 intended for the Somewhat Engaged shoppers. The $16-$20 paperback sales should not be hurt much by this change, as those who prefer to read in paperback will pay $10 more. And the net margins should be higher, without returns and printing costs. Bookstore sales should stay flat, especially when Barnes & Noble is out of the mix. The smart indie booksellers can do well in this overall environment that allows publishers to play a new game, as well as an old one.

I hear authors and industry insiders blaming Amazon for lowering book prices and reducing everyone’s profits as a result. (Same thing they said about Barnes & Noble back in 1986.) They claim this is now (ironically) why Barnes & Noble is on the ropes. I disagree. Barnes & Noble is on the ropes because they are caught in the middle, too large to compete with indie bookstores and too small to compete with Amazon. The core issue is not Amazon and lower book prices, but an overall shrinking market for book reading. That is the challenge people should be focusing on, not whining about how the shrinking pie is being affected by unfair competition. Ebooks were that path forward, as a new competition for other forms of digital entertainment, but pricing ebooks at $14.95 will never attract those less engaged potential book buyers. Duck and cover is not a winnable long-term strategy. You can’t go home again. You can be progressive or regressive.

It’s the same old question: do you see digital as a threat or an opportunity? It is in fact both, so don’t forget about the opportunities.

Missing out on the digital revolution is not an option for book publishers who want to operate well into the future. Actively promoting and celebrating the decline of the one new good thing that has come along to make the industry competitive with all other entertainment options, strikes me as self-defeating strategy.

(This post first appeared on the BookBusiness Website.)

One of the great backlashes in our era of conglomerates is the steady growth of small-batch businesses. These are very small businesses that cater mostly to customers willing to spend more for a seemingly better and more controlled product offering.

There are many happy consumers who will buy a four-pack of local brew for $16, which when you think about it, is only $4 for a very good can of beer.  Compare that to the bar. I live in Maine where we have many small-batch breweries, and one of the things I love about these business owners is their commitment to buy local even though it means paying more.

For instance, Maine’s potato farmers now grow malt barley for local beer production, which is used by many of the state’s breweries even though the cost is far higher than buying “from away.” The farmers also make more on this new crop versus potatoes. The positive impact on rural areas struggling to compete is significant.

Lately I’ve been pondering the future for small-batch publishing, which is what I am doing with my company Publerati.  Identifying as a small-batch producer immediately shifts a lot of the norms for how products are acquired and produced. I have extensive background in the “pile them high and watch them fly” mass-market retail product areas. This method makes a lot of sense for high-volume mass- market products, including bestseller books.

Offset printing huge volumes of a title that will sell in huge numbers, and accepting that 20-30% of them will be piled high but never actually fly, is a reasonable business proposition for all concerned along the supply chain, from author to publisher to printer to bookstore to remainder company.

The problem arises for those books that do not warrant a large offset first printing, so are not actually represented by agents and published by the conglomerates. If you agree, as I do, that many of them should continue to make their way to readers through a traditional publishing gatekeeper process, it seems logical to conclude that the methods and rules need to change.

For me, so much of this small-batch publishing revolution hinges on two key developments: the increased use and access to inkjet printing of small quantities to ship; and the ability to get a fresh book printed at an in-store book machine, similar to what Espresso Books offers.

Fresh Beer… Fresh Books

Putting my small-batch consumer hat on for a moment, I like the idea of buying a book that was printed and bound in minutes while I was enjoying a coffee in the store. No one else has thumbed through it. I know it is new. Fresh. I also like the idea that this means there will be less waste going into landfills, or at least I think a reasonable consumer would assume so. This also allows the store to decide how many copies of a particular title to print to meet their local demand. They can print and display some on their own dime, so to speak.

Most consumers (other than writers) don’t think about this next point, but I also like knowing books are being kept in print that otherwise would not.  Many major publishers continue to be reluctant to offer their out-of-print backlist books through networks like the Espresso Book Machine, most likely feeling they will make them available on their own “down the road.” It’s the typical gorilla mentality, and one that does not benefit consumers in the here and now.

I like knowing the publisher of a particular title, like the maker of that local cheese, produces fewer products and devotes more time and attention to each one.  It’s the individual attention and care given to the creators of the products—the authors—where so much potential exists for small-batch publishers.

I was never comfortable working for a publisher knowing we did not actually produce the products (the content) that paid our bills. Across the spectrum of all products produced and sold, this is not normal. The risk is that more and more authors are shut out from the conglomerates and so look for someone more eager to show some love. This has been happening for years now with publishers like Coffee House Press and the many university presses that have published books thought to be “too learned or narrow” for the lay reader. They have done a great job filling a void.

Ironically, as we consolidate more and more into the “large-few,” it’s the “small-many” who continue to proliferate faster than we can keep up with. Both can live happily together, serving different customers with differing expectations. The large-few have many advantages of scale in distribution and labor. But so do the small-many, as long as they stay true to who they are. Acquisitions of smaller companies by larger ones can be a disaster, as I’m sure many readers here have experienced.

The processes of the huge factory are not the right ones for the small shop, and vice versa. I continue to be hopeful that the efficiencies of scale we are already witnessing in printing and distribution will allow all publishers to operate more efficiently in serving their customers: authors and readers.

So grab yourself a fresh brew and curl up with that just-printed book bought at your local store.   — Caleb Mason.

Let’s face it, writing fiction is a daunting undertaking. It’s heartening that so many people want to write novels, and we want to help you before you get too far along, by identifying some of the most common areas for improvement we see in submissions as well as in published works.

First, a lesson from the Japanese. This may be the most important word to keep in mind when working on your novel and living your life:

Kaizen (改善), is the Japanese word for “continuous improvement.” In business, kaizen refers to activities that continuously improve all functions and involve all employees from the CEO to assembly-line workers.

So when you find yourself tearing your hair out working on a first draft, or tearing your remaining hair out when revising, keep this important concept in mind. Everything, including your novel, can be improved.

Here are Ten Areas for Improvement:

Strive to be Original. The vast majority of submissions we receive are poor imitations of work already done very well by popular writers. Much of this imitation is subconscious, so pay careful attention to your premise when first setting out. Has it been done before? If so, then why bother?
Find Your Own Voice. Related to the above, try and write in a tone and attitude that is uniquely you. Much of the writing we read has no distinctive voice at all, but is just words strung together on the page lacking flavor. Like a bad soft-serve ice cream cone. Insipid. It might take you much of your life to find your voice. It will take plenty of practice runs with much work tossed in the trash before you finally start getting the hang of it. Listen to this voice as you walk around town. Finding it is a bit like hitting a baseball: you cannot try too hard or you’ll miss. It’s a delicate mix of passive and active living and effort, paying close attention to your subconscious mind.
Be Fearless. You must be confident enough in the mysteries of the creative process to not judge yourself as you write. Just start writing and go with the flow. Even though you cannot see over the next hill, you need to at least get to that hill, which means moving forward. Kurt Vonnegut described it as driving in the fog. What are you afraid of, anyway? If you don’t make the drive, someone else will. So go for it. Life is short. We’re all going to be dead soon enough. Let yourself go and become the characters on the page. It’s fun and rewarding, despite all the difficult work.
Read Great Works. The books you read while writing will influence you. So try and read great literature or non-fiction you admire, and study all the problems of fiction: what point of view (or points) is the story told in? How does the author handle time? What do the characters smell, hear, think, taste? How you tell your story is as important as the story itself. Maybe you have noticed this at the movies. The filmmaker and camera have a unique way of telling the story. Maybe we go into the future, then back into the past. Maybe a different character tells the story in each chapter, so the story itself becomes murky, conflicted, fascinating. How is Thomas Hardy telling his story as you read along? Virginia Wolfe? Jane Smiley?
Write an Original Metaphor on Page One. You’d be amazed how many submissions do not have a single striking metaphor anywhere within them. Yes, there are hackneyed ones, the ones stuck in your brain because they’ve been drilled in so many times over your lifetime you don’t even think about them as you put words on the page.  Metaphors allow us to better see inside our characters. A favorite example we cite is the recovering alcoholic, just out of rehab, who drives to the ocean.  “The sea looked like a giant Tom Collins.” This is great because it helps us understand how difficult it is for the character to just gaze at the ocean without thinking about the allure of a cocktail. Hit us over the head with an original metaphor on your first page.
Create Your Own Analogies for the Writing Process. This is how you think about and approach your writing. For instance, some writers consider their initial draft to be more of a sketch than a watercolor. But one needs a great sketch to create an even greater watercolor, with all the details filled in as you circle back over and over again, adding texture, detail, and depth. Another analogy is . . .

Please sign up for our newsletter to read the rest of this article and to download all ten tips as a convenient pdf. Thank you.

One would think well-educated, literate people, such as those who are attracted to and working in book publishing, would be able to write a rejection letter without using the dreaded “alas” word.

But it’s always there, in letters written by veterans and rookies alike. I’d like to suggest we break the pattern and either use form rejection letters that say nothing or try and write a meaningful response to those writers slaving over every word on their pages.

I mean, where else do you encounter this quaint word in modern usage to the extent we find it in Big Publishing rejection letters? Despite its common usage by publishers as “woe is me, if only I could, but now I must stab you in the heart, oh little one,” it actually means weary, stemming from the Latin word lassus.  As in lassitude. Is that how you want to present yourself to potential customers, even though it may well be true? Do you really want agents and writers to picture you asleep under your desk like George Costanza? Alas, methinks not (therefore I am).

Why does it matter, you ask? Think about it. Every writer wants to work with an intelligent, open-minded editor, who can appreciate and form unique expressions, same as they ask of them. Seriously, as a writer you can’t get away with using hackneyed words like  plethora, impactful, and no-brainer — unless you’re a sports announcer, which you ARE NOT.

It’s like—literally—unbelievably basically so absolutely not totally AWESOME.

Or compelling (ugh).

One of my favorite rejection letters goes something like this: “Thank you for submitting Honking Donkeys, which we loved! Someday we plan to read it.” I like it because it’s both funny and true.

I receive and write rejection letters at Publerati  (which Word wants so badly to re-spell as Puberty). Writing them isn’t easy and evaluating subjective works of fiction is especially difficult. But I know most editors understand there are common problems facing writers, and pointing these out via a standardized rejection letter might serve everyone better.

For instance, most submissions I read are reminiscent of some popular book already done better than anyone else is ever going to do again. Why bother? So try and write something unique to you. Do you have a voice of your own? Can you develop one with work and time?

Only the best writers are able to come up with metaphors that stand out from the crowd. As seen by the recovering alcoholic gazing at the ocean: “The sea looked like a giant Tom Collins.”

There are many common areas for improvement for writers, so at least offer some meaningful help.

Instead of pelting writers with a million hopeless alases, put together a helpful form rejection letter for each category you publish and send that instead. And whatever you do, don’t let your occasional personalized rejection letter make you sound like an antiquated stiff perched upon a high horse snoozing beneath a mahogany desk.

As you were. (Nap time yet?)

No, I’m not here to trash paper. I’m here to discuss different usages of paper and the ones that are more likely to become quick trash.

The recent Digital Book Printing Conference hosted by Book Business was a very interesting event with plenty of great presentations, facts, and figures. In particular, Marco Boer of IT Strategies kicked off the event with interesting slides about the trends for printed paper. Among other things, he noted that there were 16 trillion printed sheets/pages in 2007 and that number as measured more recently is 11 trillion. These pages are the pages we encounter in our daily lives as newsprint, magazines, books, and direct mail (catalogs, etc.). Newsprint and magazines fell precipitously during the recession but have hit a plateau in recent times in what could well become a new level of manageable stability.

This was an event about digital printing, which means in many cases printing lower quantities economically to improve efficiencies and reduce waste across all business segments. And Marco’s research estimates an ongoing 3% annum decline in this overall page count (11 trillion pages is still huge). His research also estimates that by 2020, 16% of all books will be printed digitally versus the favored and familiar offset method. (Personally, I think a lot of that depends on what happens with major retail book distribution. If megastores fade away sooner than later, then smaller runs become more of the norm for what will also be smaller publishers.)

The current trending towards digital book printing seems to be driven in part by the widening gap between the occasional blockbuster, which clearly needs to be printed offset, and the rise (or decline) of many more titles selling in smaller numbers, which makes digital printing economical. Stated conversely, this is precisely what helps keep those titles alive and in print. Much of the conference talk was about how inkjet book printing is now the rapid growth segment for printers and equipment providers, which included Canon, Kodak, and HP at this meeting.

What I found myself pondering following this presentation was the distinction between paper that is used for a sustainable amount of time, versus paper that is quickly trashed. Let’s call it Quick Trash Paper (QTP for all you acronym lovers). I’m talking about the actual consumer time spent with the printed paper. This thinking is partly shaped by my time in the defunct 35mm film and photo era, where we could make money producing lots of mass consumer prints (50,000 a night in one of ten plants alone in the U.S. on a busy summer night), but where the consumer actually only liked a handful of the 72 photos printed (double prints, remember?). This is some serious global Trash Talking! Quick Photo Trash (QPT). And it’s gone.

So let’s try and rank the waste of the remaining 11 trillion sheets of printed paper by category of usage. This is speculation, I have no facts. Worst has to be direct mail and catalogs, right? This is the only item of the four categories (books, magazines, newspapers, and direct mail) that in many instances has not been requested by the consumer. It’s push marketing, old-school mass-market style. It’s still effective and used as a driver of substantial business to the online store. The main uncontrolled variable for the marketer is the cost of postage, which the postal service tends to raise frequently. But from an environmental impact point of view, it just feels lousy emptying my P.O. Box, as I lean over the blue recycling bin at yet another post office (full circle recycling), depositing 99% of it into the trash. But I understand, all it takes is a 2-3% response rate and that catalog is paying back and covering a lot of fixed overheads. My hunch is this is one of the more stable paper sheet categories out there now, but one that may fall precipitously with the next recession, whenever that is. It’s real out-of-pocket money that can shift in cash-starved times back to ecommerce and social media drivers.

Next up in terms of consumer lifespan for a printed sheet is newsprint. Daily newspapers have contributed the most to the five trillion pages of lost print, and sadly journalism may have gone into the fire with much of it. But, again, it typically enjoys a consumer lifespan of one day, maybe a few days, but then is tossed, recycled, or if you live up north as I do, burned. (I have discovered some great articles while rolling paper for my woodstove, only to spare that sheet for subsequent reading.) But it’s far better than direct mail, because the customer actually asked for it. Paid for it.

Magazines have been in steep decline yet they at least hang around longer. Glossy printed magazines can be found months later. Old issues of Life and National Geographic are highly treasured items. So one might think magazines would hold the current plateau, same as what is happening with the printed book. This has a lot to do with the content of the magazine, ever-present and fast changing news faring far worse than an excellent foodie or style magazine.

Which brings me to the best usage of paper of these four categories: the printed book. People don’t buy print books and burn them in woodstoves. If a book is being burned, well, that’s a whole other sad story. No, print books are cherished possessions that last for years, that are carefully shelved and moved time and time again, the better ones with emotional attachments eventually passed along to heirs.

Five years ago, when I started what was to be an ebook-only literary fiction publisher (Publerati), I quickly heard from readers that they wanted a book to hold. “Can’t you just hold your Kindle?” I begged. The Espresso Book Machine provided me an immediate early-adopter solution, one scaled to my “narrow-casting” needs, and one I feel has tremendous potential as book retail changes. The good news for me as an entrepreneur writing checks from my own account is it appears that digital book printing of lower quantities is now opening even more new doors. I expect I will walk through some of those doors in maintaining low inventories of our books.

So many thanks to Book Business for hosting this event, where I learned a great deal, including some things that will help me grow my small publishing business. Printed books do make good sense, and digital book printing promises to reduce waste and create a more sustainable business model across the entire supply chain.

Do you agree that consumer time spent with the printed page will eventually dictate its usage by business category? Will there be a coming uproar against prospect mailings of catalogs over the holidays or will economic conditions determine its fate? Will some newspapers make it as digital dailies with Sunday and Wednesday print editions? Same for magazines? Ten years from now. What do you think? Does the amount of time spent with the paper produced matter?

 — Caleb Mason

(This first appeared under a different title on the Book Business Website.) Let me preface this by saying I run a literary fiction micro-publisher operating much in the mold of how full-service traditional publishing has for years, although because my overheads are so low, I pay my authors 50% of print and 70% of ebook royalties, something I realize large publishers cannot do.

As self-publishing continues evolving, it strikes me that traditional publishers are losing one of our most important services for authors: bookstore distribution. The very distributors publishers have relied upon for years are hedging their bets (and expanding their revenues) by tapping into the self-publishing market. For example, both Ingram and BookBaby offer authors distribution to chain and independent bookstores. And the Espresso Book Network continues to expand a new retail solution for bookshops, libraries, and others. Not to mention the obvious: more and more consumers simply prefer buying print books and ebooks from Amazon.

More than just distribution, though, these new upstarts also offer the production tools needed to easily produce print books and ebooks. So there goes the production expertise competitive advantage of many publishers.

I realize many authors ardently support their publishers. I also know many are frustrated that their royalties are not higher, especially for ebooks. Traditional publishers and reviewers mostly dismiss self-published titles as “trash,” but what happens when established authors with large followings decide to go out on their own? Did you see this week that five of the top ten bestselling books sold by Apple come from self-publishing?

Any author can buy editing services. Any author can hire a book PR firm with social media expertise and mainstream media connections. And now any author can gain distribution to all the places their titles are currently sold.

There are many good authors frustrated at how fast they are forgotten in the Big Houses who pump out thousands of titles per year. I would think a lot of authors would rather hire the editorial and marketing services they choose on their own dime, using a portion of the extra royalties they receive from self-publishing at both book launch and as part of a sustained multi-year effort. To take complete control of their own book’s destiny, as opposed to assigning it to a company operating with high employee turnover and low morale. (Take a look at the recent Glassdoor ratings of the Big 5 as an indication of current employee morale.)

I believe this threat is greater for books than it would be for some other product type. Authors pour everything they have, over many years, into writing their beloved books. Giving their babies away to others is a big risk, especially for those who feel burned or overlooked in the past.

All it takes to demoralize an author working with a Big 5 publisher is to lose your editor in a layoff. Without that internal champion, you are sunk. The ensuing organizational chaos that follows just makes it more painful. This is a huge gamble on a co-dependent relationship where neither side typically feels great about it all the time.

The big strategic question for publishers is increasingly becoming how much does an author need to pay you to provide equal or better services available from somewhere else? Right now, the number they are paying is larger than the newer markets demand. The one big advantage of traditional publishing to authors is the royalty advance. But the few big names are getting more and more while the rest are getting less and are in essence being asked by the publishers to fund those large advances with their reduced 25% ebook royalty rates. How long will they put up with this?

So what should publishers be doing that they aren’t already? I realize many are working to establish their own direct-to-consumer businesses, which is a good start. But I am a skeptic when it comes to this, probably because my career working in five different industries trying this same thing has demonstrated that people like to shop where people shop frequently. The supermarket. Or Amazon. Or the local indie bookstore. Remembering to buy once or twice a year from a manufacturer with their own unique reseller site is inconvenient. And in my experience, the costs to the manufacturer (in this case publisher) become actually higher than the margins they provide to resellers offering a variety of products. Those resellers own the majority of the customer transactions. The tech and staffing requirements to run an in-house direct marketing and IT team will surprise most who are new to that business model.

How about providing a sliding scale royalty on ebooks based on performance, same as done in contracts for print? 25% for ebooks up to a certain number sold, 40% after that. But I doubt this will happen and also am not sure the margin is there. The poor author, giving 15% to an agent and then 15% to themselves. The publisher and resellers are getting most of the slim retail margin for themselves. Which is why I feel the current rules of the old business are not sustainable going into the future. So do you let others disrupt you or try and do it yourself?

Worst of all for publishers, they don’t own the content they deliver. They are completely at the mercy of their authors’ decisions on how they choose to publish going forward. Contrast this with a software publisher who owns the product they make and sell. So, in the spirit of looking for new ways to survive, why don’t publishers focus more on offering content outright and sell it under their own name. The Random House Book of Birding. Random House is the author, the staff produces the book, just as software engineers do for Apple and others.

I post this in part to make sure publishers are paying attention to the services their distributors and laid-off editors and marketers are providing through new channels. This is precisely what I saw in the photo industry as customers and staff moved from Kodak and Polaroid to Epson (first digital camera), Adobe (editing), and HP (ink and paper). And then, of course, Apple, Samsung, Facebook, Instagram . . .

 

(This first appeared on Book Business, under a different title.)

One of the most fascinating aspects of new technologies is how they open doors for new business models. And this is very true in the evolving world of book publishing.

The book publishing model has many challenges, most notably how the established system of author advances, large superstore pre-orders, and returns limits what will be published. Consolidation has made it more difficult to gamble on new authors, so a significant portion of publishing has become about pumping out more of the same from the well-known writers with celebrity status.

Let’s face it. The best authors throughout history were not celebrity personality types! Writers and readers tend to be people eager for the contemplative life. I have been cringing while reading recent audience-driven articles about producing shorter works to feed increasingly distracted tastes. Great works have not been created to feed reader tastes. They have been written because the author had something important to add to our understanding of human existence.

I’m basically an optimistic pessimist, which means when all hope seems lost, mankind rises to the occasion with something better. And for many authors, publishers, and readers, I think print-on-demand is that meaningful, lasting innovation (along with ebooks).

I recently had an email from a reader who bought a Publerati novel through the Espresso POD network and the feedback was revealing to me. “I was surprised how high-quality the book is. I thought it would be a comb-bound pamphlet.” Wow! This reminded me of when digital photo first came on the scene and was just assumed to be inferior. (Side note: I am fascinated by the twenty-somethings I meet who are reviving vinyl records. They will pay more for what they perceive to be better quality. Innovations always confront a nostalgic backlash, I suppose. Or said another way, it’s cool to be retro and “not popular.”)

So maybe we need to overcome some consumer concerns around the quality of print-on-demand editions. That will take a more concerted industry campaign. The first thing I did was make a new page on the Publerati website with a quality statement along with a list of locations offering our titles. You can see it here and I welcome comments on how to make this better.

But the big opportunity of POD is to save the many excellent writers whose books will never sell in the huge quantities that the consolidated publishing industry needs. And in the POD model, these authors don’t necessarily require an advance. Why should they? Let’s get paid for what we produce, not what we have the potential to produce. Publishers have been burned time and time again with that hyped second novel that was a dud.

By only printing what each local market will support, we have a more responsible and sustainable business model. There is no need to prematurely mark an author’s book out-of-print to stem unexpectedly high returns. Now, the author’s book can be available for as long as the publisher wants and for as long as the reader wants. Isn’t that a much better system? Is that not a benefit publishers can offer mid-list and potential breakout authors?

When I see HarperCollins providing front list titles through the Espresso Book Network, I know change is underway. Change is always underway, but we can only see it after it has happened. The benefits to those on the front-edge of change are disproportionately high. Customers remember “who did it first” and their loyalty can be an immense barrier to entry from imitators slow to the new game.

POD publishing is already opening many new doors. What we cannot see from here is how fast this change will occur and who the early winners will be. I’m hoping many of these winners will be authors who can take more control of their publishing destiny. Enjoy the ride!

The more I read and hear from near and far, the more I realize that ebooks are changing many lives in positive ways.

Many writers no longer have to endure years of agent rejections before publishing their work. Many readers are discovering new authors because they like ebooks and like paying less than what the popular authors ask.

At last, there is a great new place for the less popular people to hang out, a place so big, it feels like infinity.  It’s the world of digital.

Publishing consolidation continues to make publishers more cautious about trying something new. They are surviving on the Donald Trump books and blockbuster novels from well-known established writers. There’s that word again: established. As in establishment. Increasingly becoming the common enemy that might possibly be the only way to reunite our country. But that’s what they do best and whom they serve best. “You get the customers you deserve.”

Worldreader is demonstrating daily how ebooks are changing lives in remote regions of the world. Not just ebooks, but digital reading. On phones. On network-connected screens that overcome the heartless barriers of geography.

Civilizations no longer need that one great river or port to flourish.

The new Nile of our times is the Internet. And this is great news for a better future. Which is why we are launching our new hashtag:  #ebookschange lives. Please come visit us in this new world, on Twitter, Facebook, and unknown worlds to come.

#ebookschangelives

Someone made the mistake of asking me for my opinions on book publishing. So I will be offering them through a new blog on BookBusiness called “Outsights on Publishing.”

Why the name? It’s my sincere hope that I can share something of value to others based on my many years working in the book industry, photo industry, mapping and GPS industry, and tourism industry, each different in their own unique ways but with similar challenges brought about by rapid rates of disruption from unexpected places.

My latest post concerns the possible negative impact on publishers’ profitability due to small gains in print book sales offset by much larger losses in ebooks. The big question in a world of disruption, is how many of those former ebook readers bought an ebook from Amazon or another source outside the AAP-measured traditional book industry?

Anyone have any reliable way to measure that?