Tag Archives: publishing

All hail the book machine

Posted on by

Those of you who know me personally know that for many years I’ve worked as a marketing communications professional supporting some pretty big, name brand companies, including one fondly known as an anchor company here in Rochester, NY. And as it happens, over the course of my career, I’ve had occasion to write about some of the more sophisticated printing devices these companies manufacture — machines that can produce one-off items from digital files.

Since I also follow the book publishing industry, I’ve been waiting for years for the day when book publishers would embrace the technology.

Good thing I wasn’t holding my breath.

Oh, I know, per-book cost goes way up — it’s a lot cheaper, per copy, to do a traditional print run of 10,000 or a million books than produce them in onesy twosies.

But in a world where just-in-time manufacturing principles are now the norm, it would seem a no-brainer to work these POD technologies into the production stream somehow. Think about it. You’d have a database of your content on the back end. Orders come in from distributors via a front-end web portal and are automatically sent to the printer — nobody would need to touch them (lowers your overhead right there). Suddenly the backlist is relevant again, it’s available to respond to demand. And as new media arises — ebooks, say — you just hook up a new output path, kind of like the Smashwords Meatgrinder.

I suppose the idea of transitioning to such a radically different production model was too wearying for publishers. Heck, they don’t even have their rights tracked in databases yet, apparently.

That said, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the entire industry will shift to a just-in-time model, albeit belatedly. But in the meantime, bookstores are installing POD systems, essentially taking over the production piece of the publishing business.

The above link is a story about The Expresso Book Machine, invented by Jason Epstein, 83, the guy who also came up with the concept of mass market paperbacks(!)

The Expresso Book Machine is basically a digital POD printer + book binder.

But get this. The article’s author, Ilya Marritz, first notes:

People in the book industry revere Jason Epstein, but they are increasingly skeptical his latest innovation will take off. The Espresso Book Machine is bulky, its menu of books limited mainly to backlist and public domain titles and users can’t operate the machine on their own – they need help from trained bookstore staff.

Guys, the reason titles are limited to backlist & public domain is that the publishing industry hasn’t realized, yet, that it needs to support POD with current titles. So it’s kind of two-faced for “people in the book industry” to be “skeptical.” Instead of being skeptical,  how about building an infrastructure to feed the POD stream?

Sigh.

Contrast with this a couple paragraphs later:

But the machine has proven to be a hit with customers. More than 1,000 books were printed on the machine in the first four weeks for prices starting at $8 apiece. Kurtz said the main attraction to the Espresso Book Machine is that it is a tool for self-publishing.

Not surprising that self-publishing has emerged as a strong use case. Indie writers “get it.”

But IMO, if this were marketed properly, with the proper front end, it would be a huge hit with consumers as well.

There is absolutely no reason on earth I shouldn’t be able to go online, order a book, the book gets printed at my local bookstore (or library. or supermarket) where I can pick it up — or maybe a courier brings it to my house later that day —

I should be able to do that by clicking on a link of a book review I read on a blog or online newspaper, or from my e-reader.

I should be able to do that from a kiosk in a bookstore.

Think about it. Bookstores would no longer have to be mammothly expensive warehouses (that’s all a big box store is, when you think about it — a warehouse with carpet and escalators). They could be salons, gathering spaces designed more like living rooms than commercial spaces.

Bookstore managers could stock based on real time data about what is selling or to support promotions they’re running. Poetry reading tonight? Print one or two copies of books by major poets and set them out for sale. Holiday coming up? Local paper run a review of a new title? Author in town for a signing? Ditto.

But most of your titles, you’d sell not by putting out physical copies but by generating opportunities for word-of-mouth sales and by running in-store promotions. I love golf, for instance. Think I wouldn’t notice if a local bookstore kicked off spring by hosting an event by a local teaching pro in conjunction with a sale on golf titles, make it a Masters tie-in?

The possibilities are endless, literally.

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz once said that he envisioned Starbucks as “the third place” — the not home/not work place you spend time because it’s comfortable and familiar and you feel welcome there.

There is absolutely no reason bookstores couldn’t also become “the third place,” but only if the business model supports it–which means you have to lower overhead. Smaller footprint, no more warehousing books based on publisher push instead of local market pull, and emphasize creating communities rather than moving product.

Could happen. Would like to see it, personally. I’d hang there.

“I’m out of the advance business and I’m out of the inventory business”

Posted on by

Just watched a 6-minute interview with Jane Friedman, former CEO of Harper Collins. She’s now CEO of Open Road Media, a publishing company she co-founded to so she can play exclusively in the digital space.

Key things in her remarks that caught my attention:

She describes advances and inventory as the two things that caused her most stress when she was in traditional publishing. Little wonder: an advance is a gamble and inventory is a huge cost-burden.

She describes her new digital venture as entrepreneurial. From her lips, that’s code for “I believe there’s a lot of money to be made.” One source: author’s backlist titles. “Backlist was always something that completely interested me.”

She places a huge emphasis on her new company’s ability to market its authors. I find this interesting because as we know from reading writers like Dean Wesley Smith and J.A. Konrath, that writers no longer need “publishers” for . . . you know, “publishing.” So what’s left for “publishers” to do? That would be marketing.

She envisions ebooks as multimedia. “We are bookending the text with video.” “Enhanced biographies” embedded at the end of some ebooks include text, video, photos etc.

Pop goes the book bubble

Posted on by

In NY Daily News, Alexander Nazaryan — writing about Border’s troubles — makes an this observation:

What happened to real estate is now happening to books: An industry colluded to push an overpriced product on a public whose purse strings were tightening and whose tastes were changing. Demand dropped steadily, but supply kept soaring – only now is it coming down to earth. Nothing reminds me so much of those tracts of foreclosed houses in Florida as stack upon stack of hardcover books, desperate to be bought for $25.99.

[UPDATE: link no longer works… sigh.]

If you scan the covers of vintage pulp fiction books, one of the things you may notice are the prices.

The vast majority are 25 or 35 cents.

What would a 35 cent book cost in today’s dollars? According to this online inflation calculator: $3.09.

When’s the last time you saw a brand new $3.00 paperback in a bookstore?

Some might argue that the reason mass market paperbacks have doubled or tripled  in price is that there’s now an infrastructure that, in aggregate, raises the quality of our books. They’re better vetted, better edited.

But I suspect that if the quality of the writing is better, today, it’s thanks to the vast industry devoted to teaching craft. The writers are better.

What’s really happened is that the publishing industry isn’t set up to keep prices reigned in. That’s never been a priority for it.

And as a result, print books are overpriced.

And with a quarter of a million or so titles published every year in the United States alone, of course the whole thing was ripe for a collapse . . .

New Kindle feature a soft sell tool for writers?

Posted on by

Article on the MSNBC Technoblog by Wilson Rothman [UPDATE: link no longer good, sorry] leads with the news that the next Kindle OS is going to support “real” page numbers.

That’s a good thing — but what really caught my interest is another upcoming new feature, “Before You Go . . . ” which Rothman says will let readers more easily rate books — and buy new ones:

Just as you’re finishing a book, you’ll now get a “seamless” invitation to rate the book, share it on Twitter or Facebook, and of course, buy more books like it, or by the same author.

It will be interesting to see how this is handled.

On the one hand, this might help writers build audiences. After all, what better time to sell another book than when your scintillating prose is fresh in a reader’s mind?

But I also wonder whether I might personally find it a bit annoying to have my e-reader suggest I take an action of some kind.

Will there be a forced interim step between the last page of a book and the home screen?

Will it seem intrusive?

UPDATE 10/1/2011: New post on how to rate a Kindle book.

Too old to write?

Posted on by

In a blog post that also appeared in The Guardian, Amanda Craig voices her suspicion that publishers favor younger women writers. [UPDATE: link no longer works.] “Up until the 1980s,” she writes, “it was expected that novelists would be people of some age and experience.”

Today, however,

publishers would far rather I were some stripling of twenty-five. Novelists now regularly get their teeth done (I am not going to mention Martin Amis, because his really were a medical necessity.) We all, if female, discuss plastic surgery with increasing urgency and interest, and every so often one or two disappear and return looking strangely fresher.

Holy denouement Batman!

Being a writer now requires a gal to become superficial and obsessed with her looks????

Deep breath.

Okay.

I could take some cheap shots at “the publishing industry” here, but I won’t, because A. you don’t need me to, you can compose a few zingers just as well yourself and B. I rather like the publishing industry and feel a bit sorry for it, and want to leave it alone.

And publishing, as a business, is more like gambling than anything else.

I can understand the inclination to place a bet on someone who is at the dawn of her professional life, rather than someone who spends weekends shopping for cemetery plots.

But where does that leave “the novel” — you know? The novel as an art form. That “the novel.”

Let me tell you a secret. I tried to write novels when I was in my 20s.

I couldn’t. And I know why, now. I had  nothing to say.

When it came down to putting something to paper, the only time I felt I was being honest was when I wrote poetry, because the only thing I “had” was emotion; the only thing I could do as a writer that had any integrity as I understood it was to wallop a handful of emotion up against some lamp post or car door or fella and put some words around what it felt like.

It’s a limitation common to every young writer. It has to be. It takes time to build a rich enough frame of reference to do anything else. It takes years and years.

How does a young writer get around that?

Why, by studying the “craft” of writing. You know! Because by using the “craft” of writing, you can fashion something out of nothing. You add a little verby glue to your nouny sawdust and mold it and sculpt it into the dearest characters, the most fetching characters, the most charming plots. Anyone can do it! Anyone can.

Only tell me this. What does such a novel accomplish?

I’m being serious here.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot, because I often abandon novels half-read. Very often, appallingly often. And these are “well-written” novels in the sense we’ve come to understand “well written” today. But there is something missing from them — they leave me with the feeling that they are wasting my time. So my question is: for what am I trading the three, four hours that it takes me to read a novel? What I am getting in return? Entertainment? Diversion?

Diversion?

If that’s all, then “craft” is all the novelist needs. Bless you then, dear writer, go off and craft to your heart’s delight. Goodness knows there’s a huge market of people who crave diversion.

But what if I want more? What if I want my life to be changed? What if I want to be the guy who read David Gemmel’s The Legend, and then when he saw another guy being beaten up, he heard the words “What would Boromir do?” and intervened, and saved a man’s life?

What if I want the novel I read to somehow become a transformative experience for me?

Can such a novel be written by a 20 something equipped with nothing more than craft and a handful of emotion to wallop up against things?

Seth Godin outside the publishing box

Posted on by

Lots of different ways to look at this story. Jeffrey Trachtenberg gets it right in the WSJ, IMO, by characterizing what Seth Godin has done as trying “a new business model.”

It’s not exactly the same as no longer using a publisher — Amazon is his publisher. Consider this, for instance:

[N]either the author nor the online bookseller would say whether Amazon has an equity stake in the imprint.

Hmmmm.

One thing is obvious. As the traditional publishing model breaks down, Amazon is stepping into the power vacuum as an “alternative publisher.”

How will that affect writers who want to leverage Amazon as a channel? Does this put Amazon in competition with writers who would care to dispense with the middleman altogether?

The future of print books

Posted on by

Ed Driscoll’s blogging at Pajama’s Media about the latest news from Borders. Which isn’t good.

In the comments, no surprise, the conversation turns to the future of print books.

Here’s my prediction.

Print books are going to be around but as a product group they are going to split into several new categories.

There will be very expensive, “collector’s edition” type books that will be produced in limited print runs. These will include coffee table style books as well as limited run editions of books by best-selling authors or celebrities. They will be produced as hardcovers. By “very expensive” I’m talking well over $50 a copy. And they’ll be tricked out nicely to help justify the price. Think gorgeous, embossed covers, high quality paper, color plates, that sort of thing. Luxury market books.

Second will be a thriving market for used books. That’s going to be around for a long time. There are so many millions of print books in circulation; today a lot of them are nearly worthless (think boxes of books at garage sales, stacks at thrift stores, the books your local library throws away every year). Over time, these books will increase in value as print books become gradually more rare. But they’ll still be pretty affordable, for the most part, simply because there are so many of them, and as Boomers downsize & sell all their stuff they’ll continue to flood the market.

Third, there will be a new category of very cheap paperback. This category will emerge when publishers find they’re unable to keep the bottom from dropping out of ebook pricing, and they have to create a paperback category able to compete. Bear in mind that the pulp novels of the mid 20th century, adjusted for inflation, sold for the equivalent of a buck or two in 2011 dollars. So we know the publishing industry can do it–it’s just not going to until it has no choice. Many of these will be print editions of e-book releases. They’ll be sold primarily through channels like Walmart and Costco. The quality will be very low–expect the paper to be yellowed by the time you hit the denouement.

Finally, there will be one-off printed books that you will be able to buy at your local bookstore. Already available, but will become commonplace. Another option for peeps who don’t want to read on Kindles. Don’t expect high quality here, but moderate pricing and the ability to hold in your hand a copy of virtually any book every produced. Which is way cool. You’ll be able to order them from kiosks within the store or place orders from home. This will also chip away at one of Amazon’s advantages, which I blogged about an age ago — that it’s so much easier to search book titles via computer than hunt for them in a physical bookstore.

So what do you think? Does this make sense, or do you predict something different?

Old but good

Posted on by

Jeffrey Trachtenberg wrote about an interesting publishing trend in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required): issuing new translations to boost sales of classics.

Many of these books are in the public domain, although in some cases the translators get royalties.

I’m in awe of people able to debate the merits of particular translations, i.e. in terms of how faithful they are to their originals; it’s beyond me, I’d never presume–translations are always approximations, how can you compare one approximation to another unless you’re fluent in the original language? I’d never presume. (I read Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch in the original in college, having learned enough Spanish to manage just that, and to acquire a bit of humility on the subject of foreign languages . . .)

So set that aside, and take a look at the sales data.

The Oprah Effect: since she picked Anna Karenina for her book club in 2004, the 2001 translation by Pevear and Volokhonksy has sold 635,000 copies.

Translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey by Robert Fagles, published by Viking Penguin in the 1990s, “were highly praised and have now sold an estimated 1.5 million copies.”

A 2006 edition of War and Peace (translated by Anthony Briggs) has already sold nearly 11,000 copies.

A successful translation can “generate sales for 30 years or more.”

Those are good numbers. Trachtenberg notes that fewer than 1000 of the 170K books published in the U.S. last year were “literary works in translation,” but it appears to be a solid little niche, doesn’t it. Solid little corner of the “neglected middle” ;-)

Editors’ noses knowses

Posted on by

POD-DY Mouth sponsored a contest this week: she posted excerpts from 24 novels. Some were from commercially published books; some were from POD books.

The object of the contest was to figure out which was which.

I tried it and got half of them right. Nobody scored more than 80 percent.

But here’s what’s most telling, from her post-contest post:

The statistics are interesting, though–far more on point that I would’ve imagined. Here are the average scores broken down by group:

Average Score, Editors: 63% (19 exams)
Average Score, Agents: 60% (26 exams)
Average Score, Authors: 53% (72 exams)
Average Score, Other: 46% (550 exams +/-)

So it turns out editors and agents have a keener eye than I’d guessed. I suppose it makes sense that unpublished works go from author to agent to editor. Looks like we’re not turning the publishing industry on its ear anytime soon.

Yeah. And if you want someone’s advice on whether your WIP is publishable, you’re better off trusting an agent’s rejection letter than a lay person’s high praise.

But we already knew that, didn’t we ;-)

(Btw, POD-DY Mouth doesn’t support permalinks, so if you’ve come across this post after 7/28/06, you’ll need to scroll down to the entry from the 27th to find the post from which I’ve quoted.)

It’s all in the margins

Posted on by

For unpubbed writers, it sometimes seems that the “standards” held by agents and publishers are, at best, too stringent; at worst harsh, opaque, even perverse or malicious.

I don’t subscribe to that view. I think the actions of both agents and publishers are completely understandable when you consider the margins in the print publishing business. According to this New York Times article, for instance,

Publishers generally receive a wholesale price for new books that is about half of the retail cover price, or $13 for a hardcover book with a $26 jacket price. Thirty percent of the publisher’s share, or 15 percent of the cover price, goes to the author as royalties, and another 40 percent of the publisher’s take goes for the production, distribution, marketing and publicity costs of the book.

That leaves about $3 to $4 a book for the publisher, before accounting for the cost of corporate overhead or the books that will be returned — on which the publisher earns nothing.

For paperbacks, authors generally earn only 7.5 percent of the cover price as a royalty. But the lower price also means publishers earn far less, about $1 to $2 a book, before returns.

If you look at these numbers, it’s obvious that publishers can’t make too many bad acquisitions or they’d be bankrupt in a matter of months, if not weeks. Large publishers, in particular, can’t survive if they acquire books that only sell a few hundred copies. They need books that appeal to a wide audience, generate buzz, and inspire word-of-mouth.

It’s not their job to do me, the novelist wanna be, favors. I need to write a book that will meet their criteria. If I want them to publish it.