Tools of Change for Publishing: Search Results

Does Digital Cannibalize Print? Not Yet.

Andrew Savikas
August 7, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (10) | Listen

One of the big risk factors publishers think about when it comes to digital books is that they will cannibalize print sales. Factor in the lower prices we're seeing for ebooks, and it's a quite reasonable concern.

Looking at data on sales from our website, at first glance that would appear to be exactly what's happening:

Over the past 18 months, we've gone from print outselling digital by more than 2:1 to just the opposite.

But that's not the full story. If there really was cannibalization happening, you'd expect to see our print sales underperforming the overall computer book market, but that's not what's happening. Here's a comparison of how our sales (as measured by Bookscan) stack up against the broader computer book market. The data here is normalized (the first period in the graph is set to 100, and subsequent results are calculate relative to that period):

Roger Magoulas, who heads up our Research Team (which is doing some way cool stuff with App Store data) put it this way in a recent backchannel email covering this as part of a larger analysis:

By looking at the data and these charts we infer that while O'Reilly physical book sales are down compared to last year, this seems more the result of the drop in demand for computer books since the financial meltdown than the impact of ebook sales. Since O'Reilly is a relatively prolific publisher of econtent we would expect that ebooks would affect O'Reilly's physical book sales more than other publishers and we don't see that evidence in these results. Even if ebooks are taking a bite out of O'Reilly physical book sales, we see no negative effect on O'Reilly's slightly increasing share in the physical book market nor on how O'Reilly's sales correlate with the overall market for physical computer books.

So, for now, if what we infer is correct, you can put away your exorcism crosses, ebooks seem more a legitimate expanded market opportunity than a projectile vomiting Linda Blair wannabe.

Twitter Scorecard for Publishers

Mike Hendrickson
May 21, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (12) | Listen

Recently Publisher's Weekly published an article The Twitter Scorecard that showed which Publishers were using Twitter. I found the piece missing key elements that would provide more insight to their question "So who is twittering, and how effectively?" I believe that if you are asking how effectively we are using Twitter, there is considerable more data needed than was presented. In my opinion, the number of Followers is not a complete measure of effectiveness. In fairness, PW did not say they were attempting to be comprehensive or complete in their scorecard, so I thought I would provide the data that is available mixed with some of my own obtained by scraping. So, I'll attempt to fill-in the scorecard a bit more.

First a note on who is behind the publisher accounts. O'Reilly as a company has oodles of Tweeters who blog about work, life, interests, etc., including @timoreilly who is nearing the half-million followers threshold. I suspect other publishers have the same army of tweeters too, but the data below is is just for the publisher account only. Oftentimes, these sort of accounts are run by PR groups in a Publishing company.

Below, you will find the same list of publishers contained in the original article with the addition of the following column headers and data:

Pub_Twitter is the Publisher account on Twitter. This list was created by PW and am not sure what the criteria was. Followers is the number of people that are following the publisher. These numbers are already off as many of these publishers have added many new followers since the original writing. I kept the same number that PW reported. Following is how many users the publisher follows. Updates is how many tweets the publisher has posted since the account was created. Content is the most popular words the publisher uses in their tweets. Url is a link to a wordle that visualizes the corpus of tweets for the publisher. At the bottom of the table, you will see All Publishers which shows averages and the link includes all words in a visual wordle.

Pub_Twitter	Followers	Following	Updates	Content	URL
@AAKnopf	1,581	390	495	Book, New, Read, RT	http://twitpic.com/5k982
@AtriaBooks	1,809	1,813	257	Book, ChetTheDog , Dog, New	http://twitpic.com/5k97i
@BantamDell	1,987	1,125	244	Blood, Page, Free, Literary	http://twitpic.com/5k95r
@ChelseaGreen	5,003	5,296	4185	Green, RT, Thanks, Book	http://twitpic.com/5k93w
@DCComics	2,176	0	0	---
@DoubleDayPub	1,057	622	137	Lost, RT, Pygmy, New	http://twitpic.com/5k908
@FreePressBooks	516	387	16	Book, Check, Mason, tinyurl	http://twitpic.com/5k8yu
@GrandCentralPub	3,726	3,004	671	Thanks, RT, Book, UR	http://twitpic.com/5k8xd
@GroveAtlantic	268	59	297	Wetlands, Hely , Books, tinyurl	http://twitpic.com/5k8uc
@HarlequinBooks	2,187	159	776	Harlequin, Romance, Author, Free	http://twitpic.com/5k8qn
@HarperPerennial	805	459	149	RT, Book, Story, Read	http://twitpic.com/5k8oq
@LittleBrown	5,999	6,238	1359	RT, Author, Scarecrow, Book	http://twitpic.com/5k8mj
@OReillyMedia	7,340	3,640	2073	O'Reilly, RT, New, Book	http://twitpic.com/5k8l2
@ThomasNelson	678	834	182	Announced, List, Best, Times	http://twitpic.com/5k8g8
@TinHouseBooks	892	162	58	Forgot, New, Tin, Books	http://twitpic.com/5k8c7
@TorBooks	3,995	2,056	1525	Post, Tor, Blog , New	http://twitpic.com/5k89z
@VintageAnchor	1,643	1,278	237	RT, Tonight, Book, New	http://twitpic.com/5k86u
@VintageBooks	783	448	348	Vintage, Book, Read, Books	http://twitpic.com/5k84j
@WorkmanPub	1,485	562	174	RT, Book, Great, Books	http://twitpic.com/5k80s
All Publishers(avg)	2,312	1,502	694		http://twitpic.com/5k9p4

I am thinking of making this a quarterly scorecard for 2009. Before I do that, are there meaningful and obtainable measures you would like to see added to the scorecard? What are the real measures: Sales increases? Information disseminated more efficiently and targeted? Increasing the feeling of community? What elements do you think should be measured in a Twitter Scorecard? Finally, if you are a publisher using Twitter and want to be included in future scorecards, let me know. I am mikeh {at} oreilly {dot} com or @mikehatora on Twitter.

Tags: marketing publicity social networks Twitter Scorecard for Publishers

Are Ebook Device Makers Missing the Market?

Andrew Savikas
February 16, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Over on Dear Author, Jane Litte suggests current ebook device marketers aren't effectively targeting what is likely the most influential segment of their market -- women:

The idea is to get women thinking that the vehicle fits into their lives, rather than the woman fitting her life around the vehicle. The most recent Kindle 2.0 ad shows a business man leaning up against the post reading a Kindle and a woman on the beach reading her Kindle, all alone. Seriously? What woman has frequent escapes to the beach where she is alone!

...

Ads need to show women reading on the bus, train, subway. Ads should show a woman leaning against a post waiting for a ride or in her SUV waiting to pick up the kids from practice or in the lunch line or grocery store line or waiting at the post office or in the doctor's waiting room. The point of the ads should be that the device is there whereever a woman is, whenever a woman wants it. It should not point out that the only time you can read an ebook is when you are alone and in the park.

Lot of great stuff -- the full post is well worth a read (and props to the Dear Author folks for a killer iPhone version of their blog).

Tags: ebooks marketing sales

Extraordinary Piece on the Future (and Past) of Digital Books

Andrew Savikas
February 2, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Listen

Over on Ars Technica, John Siracusa revisits the history of the ebook, and explains why he thinks there's very much a future in digital reading:

If you remain unconvinced, here's one final exercise, in the grand tradition of a particular family of Internet analogies. Take all of your arguments against the inevitability of e-books and substitute the word "horse" for "book" and the word "car" for "e-book." Here are a few examples to whet your appetite for the (really) inevitable debate in the discussion section at the end of this article.

"Books will never go away." True! Horses have not gone away either.

"Books have advantages over e-books that will never be overcome." True! Horses can travel over rough terrain that no car can navigate. Paved roads don't go everywhere, nor should they.

"Books provide sensory/sentimental/sensual experiences that e-books can't match." True! Cars just can't match the experience of caring for and riding a horse: the smells, the textures, the sensations, the companionship with another living being.

Lather, rinse, repeat. Did you ride a horse to work today? I didn't. I'm sure plenty of people swore they would never ride in or operate a "horseless carriage"--and they never did! And then they died.

Siracusa goes on to eloquently elucidate why this market is extremely attractive for a publisher:

What are the publisher's costs for this deal? Well, there may be a one-time, fixed cost to prepare a digital incarnation of the book to hand over to the e-book seller. But the publisher probably already has such a thing, e.g., for use in the editing process prior to traditional print publishing. In fact, these days, most authors produce the original work in digital form to begin with.

Let's see, what else? Um, that's it. The publisher hands over a file. Then, every month, a check arrives from the e-book seller. There is no additional cost to the publisher per unit sold. There are no printing costs, no warehousing, no trucks or planes to deliver merchandise. There's no forecast of demand, with the accompanying dire consequences of unsold inventory or unrealized income if the predictions are wrong one direction or the other. There's no tracking of and accounting for unsold books, no retailers cutting the covers off of paperbacks and shipping them back to the publisher as proof of their destruction. (These days, an affidavit is accepted as proof of the books' destruction, which is only slightly less wasteful and absurd.)

In short, the terms are unbelievably favorable for publishers. It essentially moves them from print publishing margins to software publishing margins: pay once for the creation of the content, sell an infinite number of times with no additional per-unit cost.

The full post is lengthy, but well worth a full read.

(And of course ebooks and digital publishing will be a big part of the program at next week's TOC Conference in New York. If you haven't signed up yet, register today while there's still space left.)

Tags: business models ebooks marketing toc '09

iPhone App Outperforms Most Print (Computer) Books This Holiday Season

Andrew Savikas
January 7, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (20) | Listen

Conventional wisdom suggests that when choosing pilot projects, you pick ones with a high likelihood of success. It's hard to argue that iPhone: The Missing Manual was a reasonable choice for testing the iPhone App waters. But while we knew it would do well, we've been quite pleased with just how well:

If the iPhone App by itself had been a book, it would be a top 10 seller in BookScan for Computer Books this holiday season, based on just 17 days of sales
The print version appears to have been unaffected, retaining a solid position in the top 3 for Computer Books in BookScan
A full 1/3 of those buying the app are outside the US, mostly in countries where the print book is not readily available

There are certainly some who don't care for the book-as-app approach, preferring the library model (where one app enables reading multiple titles). It's also clear there's substantial customer interest in both options, and we strongly believe that offering a variety of options and letting customers choose is the right approach. This is a time for experimentation, and we'll be doing quite a bit more of it (format, pricing, content) in the digital -- and especially mobile -- space in the coming months.

Tags: book publishing books business models devices digital digital books digital content digital publishing distribution ebooks economics iphone ipod touch itunes margins marketing mobile sales sales figures

Conversation is the New King

Mac Slocum
January 5, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Kate Eltham calls out publishers who blog through a PR lens and points the way to publisher blogs that fully embrace the medium:

It used to be common wisdom that content is king. But the popularity of social media has demonstrated that what internet users are really seeking is connection. A blog may be a cheap and easy way of publishing web content but its biggest strength is that it is a platform for conversation. [Emphasis included in original post.]

Tags: blogging blogs digital content marketing publishing social media

Publishers Need to Get In on the Conversation

Peter Brantley
November 19, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Kassia Krozser has a Cluetrain-like manifesto for publishers. From Booksquare:

It's time to get your hands dirty, to dig into the real-world conversation. It's a weird thing, and sometimes awkward and uncomfortable, especially if you're accustomed to public relations-speak and the cheerleader behavior that accompanies marketing messages. When you talk directly to real people who read and buy books, they tune you out when you try to stay on message. If they wanted to rehash cover copy, they'd read the back of the book.

Tags: authors blogs branding community conversation marketing publishers readers retailers social media social networks

How Should Authors Promote Themselves Online?

Kate Eltham
October 23, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (5) | Listen

As the director of an organisation for writers I was curious about the announcement of Random House's new Web toolkit to assist RH authors to set up and maintain their own Web pages.

booktrade.info reports:

... the toolkit allows authors to customise their pages with a choice of backgrounds, fonts and colours. Authors can then select different types of content to add to their pages, such as profile or biography information, links to favourite sites, audio and video clips, book reviews, bibliographies, photo galleries, blogs and newsletters.

The web pages will be hosted on a community-based website called AuthorsPlace and once authors have created their web pages they can choose whether to interact with other authors on the site, or whether to use their pages as a standalone website.

There's a couple of things worth discussing here. Firstly, a system that allows users to set up their own page and add content such as audio, video, images, etc. sounds awfully like a blog platform. If the goal is to put this power in the hands of your authors, why bother to build your own, possibly expensive, proprietary Web architecture instead of educating your authors to use Wordpress, Movable Type or Blogger for themselves?

The obvious answer would be to control the platform. No matter how much customisation users can achieve with colours, fonts, images, etc., the pages will ultimately be constrained by the limitations of the platform. This could have both advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, if Random House wants to drive attention to their authors' Web sites they only have to concentrate on doing it for the one online community instead of dividing their efforts among titles or writers. If Random House gets good at SEO this could be a powerful benefit to RH authors. On the minus side, it would presumably be very costly to keep a platform like that up to date with relevant features. Why bother to invest in the software development cycle when other companies are doing it as their core business and a lot faster? Some, like The Lazarus Corporation, are even offering artist-tailored solutions free and open source.

Secondly, I'm interested in the idea of the AuthorsPlace, because alongside Authonomy, this is another example of a community where writers talk to other writers. I question the value of this to Random House and to its authors, at least in terms of book sales. Obviously there are a lot of benefits to writers who can be supported by professional communities of interest. But I think publishers' efforts are best spent on assisting authors to connect with readers. That's a much harder task. It means you have to understand and be good at search. You have to to stick with the conversation long after the book is launched. You have to be open about, and even encourage, sharing and spreadability of digital content, even when that content is the book. (See what Paulo Coelho thinks about that.)

Finally, all this raises the much broader question of how authors should be promoted online for best outcomes. I'm a firm believer that nobody can do this better than the author themselves, but what is the role of the publisher in online promotion of their authors and titles? How long can they realistically commit resources and energy to any one particular title or writer? Who controls the message? Given that, as Mac suggested in this post earlier this week, the shift is towards two-way conversation, it would seem that the best results will be achieved by authors who are genuinely prepared to put in the time to engage in that conversation.

What do you think authors should do to promote themselves online? How much should publishers get involved?

Tags: Authonomy authors booktrade.info marketing promotion publicity Random House

What We Talk About When We Talk About XML (Apologies to Raymond Carver)

Laura Dawson
September 30, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Acronyms and initialisms are mysterious and potent, and frequently hide meaning and become shorthand for larger concepts. Just as ONIX became shorthand for "metadata,, XML (at least in book publishing land) is becoming shorthand for ... well, a lot of things. Repurposing content, creating templates for book design, tagging -- all of these are encompassed in the term "XML workflow."

So no wonder people get confused. Particularly people who are in the business of creating content, not formatting, categorizing, packaging and marketing it.

So what are we talking about when we're throwing around this term? It depends on what you do for a living.

If you're a writer, it might mean using Word a little differently, quite possibly according to specific author guidelines given to you by the publisher. It might also mean including lists of keywords along with your manuscript. It may mean including lists of keywords for each chapter.

If you're an acquisitions editor, an XML workflow may mean deciding whether you want a book to merely exist as a print product (as a single source of revenue), or whether it's also appropriate as an ebook, to sell by the chapter (as numerous textbook publishers are doing), to publish iteratively (as O'Reilly does with its Rough Cuts), to make excerpts available for free download, etc.

If you're a book production editor, an XML workflow will be very concrete -- you tag a manuscript according to its format ("chapter heading," "illustration," "copyright page"), and those tags are applied to a pre-defined style sheet.

If you're in marketing, an XML workflow allows you to work with the author's keywords, target specific audiences for the content, and package the content in appealing ways.

Could you do all of this without XML? Sure. You could use a relational database and shove your manuscript, chapter by chapter, into tables in SQL. You could assign keywords in a relational database. But you couldn't do formatting. You could use InDesign or Quark to do your formatting. But you couldn't break up your manuscript into "chunks" and repackage those "chunks" into new products with those programs. XML has the capacity to handle both, and handle them well.

Like most acronyms, XML is a tool. It's not a goal in itself, but a way to get to your goal.

Tags: authoring editing marketing production startwithxml xml

Visualizing the Advantages of StartWithXML

Mike Shatzkin
September 22, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Here are two ways to think about why a StartWithXML workflow can be important and valuable:

1. Until very recently, we lived in a world where the book was the sun and everything else orbited around it. Now the CONTENT, the IP, is the sun, and the book is relegated to one of the satellite bodies (still often the biggest, but it is a lot different to be Jupiter than it is to be the sun!) When what is at the "core" is different, the processes to create it have to change.

2. A StartwithXML workflow effectively makes the content file into a database. Just about any information relevant to the book, or any piece of the book, can be associated to the content in an XML file, just as it can in a database. Up until now, this has been seen primarily as a tool for production: the database holding information about document structure that translates into the presentation in each iteration. But the capability applies just as well to rights data, marketing data, or fragment identification.

Can these things be accomplished in other ways? Almost certainly, yes, but XML has the advantage of being an accepted standard, and although it may (will) require some dialog between entities sharing it, using XML is the fastest way to enable machines to talk to machines about anything related to a book's content.

Tags: Chunks databases Fragments Marketing Rights startwithxml xml

Sports Illustrated Offers Ad Space through Web Bids

Mac Slocum
August 18, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Sports Illustrated is using a Web-based bidding system to sell advertising across its online and offline properties. From Advertising Age

Executives at the Time Inc. title, the first one to try an online auction, said the move was partly to recruit those advertisers that aren't in close touch with the sales force anyway.

"There are many advertisers out there that would like the opportunity to understand what the Sports Illustrated brand is about, what those offerings are, that we just physically can't get to," said Mark Ford, president of the Sports Illustrated Group.

Ad auctions are already commonplace in Web-based advertising, most notably through Google's AdWords program.

(Via mediabistro.com)

Tags: advertising magazines marketing print revenue web content

What Authors Can Learn from Silicon Valley

Mac Slocum
July 21, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Sramana Mitra of Forbes.com sees parallels between author Elle Newmark's grassroots audience development and Silicon Valley's software process:

In Silicon Valley, we do alpha and beta products -- small prototypes of our vision -- and recruit a small number of customers to gain early validation of the products' viability. These alpha and beta products, along with early customer validation, help us sell our ventures to investors and raise millions of dollars in venture money.

In Newmark's case, she spent less than $10,000 of her own money to "bootstrap" her self-publishing effort, she found customers online, and then she recruited William Morris agent Dorian Karchmar as her "investment banker," who then got her Simon & Schuster as a "venture investor." Newmark's deal with Simon & Schuster is widely rumored to include a seven-figure advance.

Tags: authors grassroots marketing promotion web publicity

"Lost" Builds Community through Book Club and Web Games

Mac Slocum
July 14, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Producers of ABC's "Lost" often sneak books into the fabric of episodes so die-hard fans can hunt for clues (or red herrings) in external literary sources. Seeing an opportunity, ABC is launching the official "Lost Book Club" through ABC.com and iTunes. From UPI:

Also available on ABC.com will be a message board to discuss the titles, a synopsis of each book, along with when and how it was referenced in the show, and an introduction by co-creator/executive producer Damon Lindelof and executive producer Carlton Cuse, ABC said.

Two years ago, Hyperion published Bad Twin, a book "written" by one of the passengers on "Lost's" ill-fated flight Oceanic 815 (if you're a fan of the show, you'll recognize the author as the guy who got sucked into the engine moments after 815 crashed).

Response to Bad Twin was tepid, but the universe beyond "Lost" episodes has been successfully mined through a number intricate alternate reality games that reveal clues about the show's secondary mysteries. Speaking as a full-fledged "Lost" junkie myself, I know of a number of folks who spent dozens of hours playing these games.

Book publishers with mythology-laden source material may want to take a note from "Lost," "Harry Potter," "Star Wars" and other series. These franchises create organic affinity communities that thrive on interactivity and story expansion, and they can be fostered through forums, social networks, and real-world meetups at related events. Outside observers and casual viewers may not understand the impulse to dress like Boba Fett or write "Lost" fan fiction, but the ardent enthusiasm of a dedicated community presents opportunities that should not be tossed off.

(Via Publishers Weekly)

Tags: books branding community community tools content marketing movies television web

Artist Brand Building: An Idea Born from Free Debate's Middle Ground

Mac Slocum
July 10, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur and a critic of free models, says publishers can carve a niche by helping writers build their personal brands. From The Bookseller:

Keen said that publishers should not be seduced by the new technologies but use them to build brands, and nurture the expert through live events. "The future is the expert," he said. It was no longer about the copy, the selling of the book, Keen said, but about managing the talent. Addressing publishers, he said, "you are the nurturers of talent, and you will have to convince the creatives that you can build their brand."

Free model advocate Mike Masnick has been pushing a similar "big business as brand builder" option for record companies:

Some musicians can try to go it alone, but for many it doesn't make sense. These new business models still require plenty of business smarts and the ability to do marketing -- and that will require experts in those areas. It's just that the expertise needs to be in applying those skills to the new business models (using the content as promotional material and selling scarce goods), rather than the old model.

I find it interesting that the diametrically opposed Keen and Masnick and both discussing similar solutions for traditional content companies. Perhaps the middle ground of the free debate is where the fertile ideas lie.

Tags: artists authors bands brand building branding free free economy free models marketing

Study: Web Video Audience Stabilizes and Consumes More Streams

Mac Slocum
June 18, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

A comScore study finds that the overall size of the Web video audience is stabilizing, but folks in this group are consuming more online video streams than they did a year ago. From MediaWeek:

... while the number of total streamers appears to have leveled off after a rapid growth period several years ago, those streamers are watching more clips each year. comScore found that viewers averaged 82 clips per month and 228 minutes of video viewing in April [2008], versus the 63 clips and 158 minute averages recorded nearly a year earlier.

A stable audience footprint combined with increased usage suggests the Web video space is maturing past its anything-goes stage, which means book trailers, pre-roll/post-roll advertising, and other business oriented video initiatives could also gain broader adoption.

Tags: marketing online marketing video web video

Reading Campaign Taps Web Trickery

Mac Slocum
June 4, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

The following is for entertainment/information purposes only. Don't blame us when you get fired for reading Animal Farm on the job.

Read at Work is a Web site that displays a Windows XP overlay on your computer (in itself not all that impressive ... especially if you're on a Mac). But look closer and you'll see that the clickable desktop folders contain poems, short stories and novels -- all rendered in fake PowerPoint files complete with cliched PPT navigation and generic clip art. It's certainly not the best way to read a classic, but the increased job security should offset any formatting annoyances.

The New Zealand Book Council launched the site as part of a reading campaign. More info is available at BestAdsOnTV.com.

(Via BuzzFeed.)

Tags: digital publishing literacy marketing reading campaign web publishing

"Ask a Ninja" Creators Use Web for Shot at Hollywood

Mac Slocum
May 22, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

While we all wait for the digital domain to grow up and replace established revenue streams, there are lessons to be learned from the digital pioneers who have already cracked the sustainability issue.

Silicon Alley Insider breaks down the per-episode and annual revenue of the popular "Ask a Ninja" Web video series. According to the Alley Insider, "Ninja" founders Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine net $3,900 per spot. They produce 40 episodes a year, so their annual take-home is around $156,000.

"Ask a Ninja's" Web success is unusual. It consistently draws 2-3 million views per month (a huge audience in Web terms), and its ad inventory is managed by Federated Media, an outside firm that works with high-traffic Web sites [disclosure: Tim O'Reilly is an investor in FM]. The increased attention from the "Ninja" series has also led to burgeoning movie careers: Nichols and Sarine are working on an update of the B-movie classic, "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes." Nichols discussed the "Tomatoes" deal on his blog:

By going to straight to features, the entire showbiz world is still open to us. We'll be able to move freely up and down the aspirational chain without being pigeonholed as the web guys. And actually we'll be even more valuable since we have a deep understanding of the new media landscape.

We want to have careers that stretch into decades. That means diversifying and trying [to] succeed in larger, more established businesses.

The real lesson here lies in the two-pronged revenue approach Nichols and Sarine have employed: they've achieved a degree of short-term stability by monetizing their Web success, but they've also used the increased notoriety to create new opportunities in the old-school film industry. Similar motivations catalyze many of the innovations and experiments in the "free" meme we've discussed in recent months.

Tags: attention free marketing publicity video web publishing

Profile of Hay House: "An Attitude is Not a Business Plan"

Andrew Savikas
May 19, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

A recent New York Times article on self-help publisher Hay House is a glimpse into the fascinating life of founder Louise Hay. Whether you believe she really cured her own cancer is up to you, but beyond the human interest part of the profile are some great insights about publishing, including the importance of keeping practical business concerns in mind:

But an attitude is not a business plan. Hay House was not, in the beginning, very well run. The employees were mainly “people I knew,” Hay says, “a friend, or somebody who turned up, or somebody who wanted to work for Louise Hay. ... Meanwhile, large trade publishers, like HarperSanFrancisco and Tarcher/Putnam, were seeing the potential in New Age and investing heavily. Hay House would have failed quickly, or been bought out, but for the vision of Reid Tracy, who joined the company as an accountant in 1988 and became president in 1998. He invested his own money, too, and now owns 35 percent of the company; he is the sole shareholder besides Louise Hay herself, and everybody at Hay House, including its founder, considers Tracy the true leader.

That itself isn't terribly novel. But Reid Tracy's recognition that for authors (and savvy publishers) books are often just a means of enhancing their reputation in order to sell speaking engagements and ancillary products presaged the current buzz around using free content as a promotional tool:

[Tracy] realized more than 10 years ago that much of the money in New Age was to be made in items other than books: in card decks, audio tapes and page-a-day calendars. Major authors like Wayne Dyer and Marianne Williamson, who first came to Hay House just for ancillary products, later abandoned big trade houses to also do their books with Hay House.

And while the content Hay House published arguably couldn't be farther from what we publish, O'Reilly editor Andy Oram (who shared the original article link) pointed out some notable parallels to our eponymous brand:

They realized that their authors had many channels for making sales besides conventional books, and they use all these channels to bolster one other.
They recognize that their authors' work complements each other, and bring their authors together in group seminars.
They play up the celebrity of their founder, who tends to choose trusted people based on intuition.
They have a brand that goes far beyond the significance of any single offering, and fans accept what they think up next while staying true to the brand.
They tend to follow their star authors wherever they take their ideas, and trust them.
They're very self-consciously branching out into specialized products that also hold interest for children.

Tags: business models distribution free marketing publicity publishing industry

Trent Reznor Continues to "Get" the Value of Free Content

Andrew Savikas
May 7, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Radiohead may have gotten more of the press for their "name your price" album, but Trent Reznor continues to demonstrate that he understands the value of free content as a promotional tool, and perhaps more importantly that what he's promoting can be quite far from free. Content Nation has a nice post on the ultimate goal of free-as-promotional:

In other words, this group of artists is recognizing that content's primary value in media formats is to help people build valuable relationships. While there's money to be had in mass-produced intellectual property, the high-margin business in content is in person-to-person relationship building that results in both executed business and a more multi-dimensional relationship that can be leveraged in many more ways than mass manufacturing can manage.

Tags: free marketing promotion trent reznor

Measuring Success on Self-Published Titles

Andrew Savikas
April 23, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Over on his blog at Adobe, Bill McCoy comments on the numbers used in a Wired article to demonstrate "success" for a self-published book:

No insult intended to author Zeraus nee Suarez who "is planning to release a sequel". It may be great stuff. But [1,200 copies sold] are not stats to write home about, much less to hang a "who need Random House" thesis on. Per an established literary agent: "Less than 5000 actual sales, result: misery ... A solid midlist novel would reap on the order of 3,500-7,000 hardcover sales and 10,000-25,000 paperbacks in the US."

Bill is absolutely right that as measured by the yardstick of trade publishing, 1,200 copies can't rightly be called a success. But do self-publishing authors use that yardstick? Let's build a simple scenario and run some numbers. Of course every author is different, but I think it's fair to say that for many authors, two big goals for writing a book are to (1) make money and (2) elevate their reputation.

I'm assuming that for #1, most authors interested in self publishing are modest enough to not expect to get rich from their first (and self-published) book. Instead, they'd like merely to earn the equivalent of a fairly standard advance on royalties. And for #2, let's assume that the marketing outreach needed to sell that modest amount (through, for example, blogging or bootstrapped book tours) will effectively elevate their reputation enough to be counted as a success. That ties the two goals together so they can both be measured via sales numbers.

To make things easy, I'll use my own book, Word Hacks, as an example. In order for me to earn out the advance O'Reilly paid me, the book needed to sell roughly 8,000 copies. Certainly not a blockbuster, but according to Nielsen BookScan data, only 2% of the 1.2 million books sold in 2004 (the year my book was published) sold more than 5,000 copies.

If I'd instead gone the self-publishing route, based on the cost structure of working with Lulu.com, how many books would I need to sell to earn the same amount as that advance? Roughly 500.

Number of copies needed to earn equivalent of publisher advance.

Traditional	Self-published
8,000	500

Granted, selling 8,000 copies and having the association with a well-respected brand like O'Reilly is certainly going to do more for reputation than something self-published. But the recognition I'd have had to build with bloggers and their audience to sell those 500 copies would arguably put me among the top choices if and when a publisher like O'Reilly goes looking for their own author.

If you accept my generalizations, the numbers above suggest that in terms of author income, selling one self-published book is roughly equal to selling 16 through a publisher. Getting back to the Zeraus nee Suarez book (that's a pseudonym, btw), 16:1 is the conversion factor needed to make a (somewhat) more accurate comparison with trade sales. Self-publishing and selling 1,200 is therefore more like selling almost 20,000 through a traditional publisher. Not too shabby.

There are some flaws in a rough comparison like this, but my point is that if publishers use their standard sales measures to judge the performance of self-publishing authors, they are underestimating the "success" of those authors.

Tags: marketing pod self-publishing

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Entries tagged with “marketing” from Tools of Change for Publishing