A local restaurant owner uses this tagline to promote his small chain of (of course) steak houses. This kitschy slogan made me think about traditional publishers and their value proposition: selecting manuscripts and turning them into books that people want to buy, and doing this consistently. In a way, they stake their reputations (brands) on and endorsing each manuscript that they select and decide to publish. The average reader might not know who publishes a given book, but likely believes that if “MacMillan” is on the spine, the book will meet a minimum level of writing quality, doesn’t contain typos, has all the pages (in order), and so on. Every reader might not like every book MacMillan publishes, but would, for the most part, agree that everything MacMillan produces is quality work.

But to be successful (i.e., turn a profit consistently), MacMillan (or any other traditional publisher) needs also to pick books that people want to buy; let’s call this buyability. With their endorsement, publishers ensure both the quality of the book and its buyability. Obviously, it doesn’t work for every book, but publishers stake their reputations on doing this—on enough books and repeatedly over time. It’s because of this endorsement, and thus reputation, that the large retailers (Barnes & Noble, Target, Walmart) stock their shelves with products primarily from traditional publishers. It doesn’t mean that a self-published book can’t make its way onto the shelves at Barnes & Noble, but it’s fairly unusual. Most self-published books are sold online.

According to a presentation given by Kelly Gallagher of Bowker PubTrack at the Making Information Pay 2009 conference, “41% of all book purchases are in a retail setting, versus 27% online.”  Likewise, Bowker finds “37% of books purchased are due to the title being on the shelf/spinning rack/display.” Traditional publishers pretty much “own” the brick and mortar channel for books and do just fine online as well. The online self-publishing industry appears to be flourishing, but for authors who want to make money, books need to be in traditional retail outlets (at least for now).

So, even though it is possible for an author to publish a book himself (by LuLu, CreateSpace, etc.), create buzz (FaceBook, Twitter, MySpace), and generate sales (online retailers like Amazon), writers still flock to traditional publishers to get their books published because the publishers’ “endorsement value” still translates into the surest way for an author to maximize the monetization of their work. The “endorsement value” of a traditional publisher—coupled with the continued power of traditional retail—still holds. It’s not the only way for an author to make money any more, but for now it’s still the most reliable. I’ll stake my reputation on it.

Next: The Online Impact of Quality and Buyability

There are complex brand issues that emerge from the “author-as-brand” versus the “publisher as brand” evolution (assuming the publisher was ever really the true brand). To me the central question is: What’s the relationship between the author’s brand and the publisher’s brand? In what model might they coexist in the marketplace? Hold that thought.

At the same time, authors (and publishers) are seeing advantages in building an online presence for an author—to attract a following who will buy books, content, and other stuff. But building an online presence and the following takes full engagement from the author for content, conversation, and engagement with readers; it’s not a one-time event, like a book release. The traditional book contract, however, revolves around the event of the book’s release.

Perhaps in the future, the relationship between writers and publishers will be more like professional athletes and the clubs they are under contract with—defined by a specific time period. Let’s say an author is under contract to Tor for two years. During that time they will blog on Tor.com, speak at the SFWA annual meeting, do a promotional tour with other Tor authors, and write a book. Perhaps they get a stipend for being on the Tor roster, in addition to bonuses for achieving certain goals (weekly blog reads, book unit sales, whatever). The author is free to work on other deals outside of his or her contract (movies, video games).

This analogy also models a good co-branding strategy. LeBron James is a brand, but so is the Cleveland Cavaliers. There are things that the two brands do together under contract (play basketball games, participate in certain charity events) and things they do separately (James has endorsements, and the Cavs sell Cavs merchandise).  Just like the author and Tor (well, kind of).

Does anyone know of time-based author contracts (versus book-based)? To carry the analogy one step further, publishers could also have farms clubs where young writers could develop… never mind.

One of the themes mentioned by just about every keynote speaker at the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference last month in New York was Digital Rights Management (or DRM). This is software that prohibits unauthorized copies of media (songs, e-books, etc.).  Cory Doctorow of boingboing.net fame gave an impassioned keynote titled “Digital Distribution and the Whip Hand: Don’t Get iTunesed with your eBooks.”  His central point was that the music industry has handled the whole DRM thing poorly (suing college students?), and that Apple swooped in with an awesome product (iTunes) that allowed it to be a dominant platform in the industry. The latest news, of course, is that Apple is dropping DRM on songs offered on iTunes. 

Doctorow’s pitch (as well as other keynoters’) was that publishers should insist on no DRM on their products to prevent third-party intermediate platforms (like the Amazon Kindle, which has a propriety DRM) from controlling distribution. Will people copy electronic files without DRM? Sure, but they already do. Check out PirateBay.org. As long as there is technological curiosity and cheap labor, there won’t be a way to stop copying files (with or without DRM). Of course, it was the evolution of technology—the Internet—that made DRM an issue.

The accompanying rights issue that floated to the top of the blogs over the last few weeks is the fact that the new Kindle Reader has a text-to-speech converter that the Authors Guild claimed infringes on the audio rights of its authors (discussed in this New York Times op-ed piece).   After the initial tussle, Amazon backed down and said that the publisher/author could decide whether the TTS function is enabled on a per-title basis.

But the debate isn’t over. Cory Doctorow addressed the TTS issue, saying that you can’t stop the technology from advancing.  I don’t believe so either: The computer voices will continue to get better, voice inflection at the right place in the text will evolve, and so on. Before long you’ll be able to pick the “voice” you want to “read” your book—James Earl Jones or Pee Wee Herman—which will raise a completely different set of rights issue. But I digress.

Neither publishers nor the Authors Guild will be able to stop the march of technology that consumers want; they’d better get in front of the freight train and put some energy into redefining what traditional rights mean, instead of clinging to past thinking. That’s what happened to the music industry. Let’s not let it happen to word publishing.

We at Creative Byline subscribe to many newsfeeds, blogs, and newsletters about publishing and writing. As a result, we come across many interesting perspectives and new insights about the business. Here are a few from the last week or so:

• On her blog, Gretchen McNeil featured an interview with agent Ginger Clark about the trends in the YA fiction arena, and why writers should care about trends.
• Author Hope Vestergaard makes a guest appearance on Alice Pope’s CWIM blog. Publishing professionals typically provide advice to writers; she turns the tables by providing dos and don’ts to editors, and then to agents.
• Although I don’t agree with everything in this TheBigMoney article, it’s a good read on why devices like the Kindle Reader can have a significant influence on the industry.
• According to The New York Times, a new alternative-incarceration program “allows felons and other offenders to choose between going to jail or joining a book club.” No comment.

Here’s another theme from the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference last month in New York: E-readers. New versions were demoed and, the day before the conference, Amazon had announced they would start delivering the updated version of their popular Kindle Reader. There have also been many articles and blog posts declaring the “death of the book” or questioning whether (when?) e-books will overtake traditional books in sales. I didn’t hear that at the conference; the prevailing wisdom was, as one of the speakers said,  “It’s not about the final format the content takes, it’s about the IP [content] itself.  Just assume, as publishers, your content will need to be available in a variety of formats. Don’t worry about which one.”

This makes a lot of sense, but it also brings up two other points. First, will publishers earn the same margin on different formats? Clearly, publishers are thinking not, because Amazon offering e-books for $9.99 seems to be raising a stink. Recently, Carolyn K. Reidy, CEO of Simon & Schuster, told the New York Times. “I don’t believe that a new book by an author should ipso facto be less expensive electronically than it is in paper format.” Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, argued to the contrary, saying, “readers are going to demand that [e-books are cheaper than printed books], and they are right because there are so many supply-chain efficiencies relative to printing a paper book.”

Secondly, as the popularity of varying formats grows (dedicated e-reader, mobile devices, traditional format, audio) what do authors need to consider that wasn’t important before?  For example, e-readers have crisp screens that can be read in just about any light, but they are [now] monochromatic. In nonfiction, color photographs won’t have the same impact; charts and graphs need something other than color to be meaningful. Or, for a fiction author, what are the pacing implications of reading a novel on an iPhone with smaller page sizes? Scott Meyers gave a great talk (“Authoring Challenges in a Multiplatform World”) on this at TOC.

I believe in addition to challenges for authors, these expanded platforms offer opportunities for new types of authoring that weren’t possible before (blog post).  E-books and e-readers will continue to gain popularity, but they will also push traditional thinking about books, publishing, and authoring.

I attended the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference last week in New York. It was well attended by an interesting mix of old-world publishing types and new-media technology types. There were a lot of predictions and pontifications, but  some common themes emerged. I’ll share a few of them—at least as I saw them—over the next few posts.

All but the largest imprints are a thing of the past. For those of us who came to the publishing industry from other industries, the whole imprint thing was a puzzle. Classic brand management suggests that the more brands you maintain, the higher your costs and the more you dilute your important brand(s). And in publishing, the end customer (the reader) could generally not care less about which imprint produced a book. In these tough economic times, publishers are consolidating imprints to reduce organizational redundancy and focus the brand dollars. Recently MacMillan consolidated their six children’s imprints into one division, under a brand (MacMillan Children’s Publishing Group) that will likely mean something to the end consumer.

At the conference, Michael Hyatt, CEO of Christian publisher Thomas Nelson, said they consolidated their twenty imprints into one (Thomas Nelson Publishing) two years ago. In addition to the cost and brand-focusing benefits, he has recognized that their organization is benefiting from being more clearly all part of the same team.

So, what brand is important to consumers in the post-imprint world? Authors’ brands—or, as many of the conference attendees called them, “author platforms.”  That makes a lot of sense to those of us who read books. We buy authors, not imprints. To this point, Simon & Schuster launched a new website in January; you won’t find any mention of imprints, but a lot about authors. And look at this quote from the press release announcing their new site:

“Additionally, the site serves as a curator for the author’s brand, aggregating author-related content from around the web so fans can follow activity either by or about the author, whether it is news, Twitter, or blog posts, national and local appearances, and much more. Fans can also be notified about such author activity via an email alert.”

This is great news for authors, but with it comes responsibility to work to build their own brands. As published authors have known for years, the responsibility of promotion of books (and brands) is falling more to authors (and less to publishers) all the time. Writers need to use the web, blogs, and other social media tools to build their brands and create networks of followers who will pay to consume their books and content.

Lately, it seems, not a day goes by without an article, blog post, or interview regarding changes the publishing industry is going through and likely will continue to go through for some time. These changes are affecting all forms of traditional publishing: Magazines are scaled-down versions of their once-robust selves. And have you noticed how thin newspapers are getting? Ad dollars are clearly moving online. Book publishers are scrambling to produce “books” in multiple formats–traditional, e-reader, audio, installment. And, obviously, self-publishing has had a significant impact on book publishing.

One topic that gets less press, but likely will have the greatest impact on reshaping traditional publishing (all forms) is the impact of having lots of creative content available on the web. I read many of the articles that discuss changes that are taking place in the publishing industry–it’s important to our business, because we believe we are part of the change!  But there hasn’t been much prognostication about creative content on the web, I think, because it’s very unclear exactly what will happen. A recent essay in Time magazine (of all places) does a pretty good job of laying out a model for the role the web and publishers might play in the new frontier. What do you think?

There are advantages to working for a large corporation–nice conference and travel budgets (well, this used to be an advantage). Back in my corporate days I attended the TED Conference a number of times. The conference is an interesting mix of people all working at the intersection of three disciplines–Technology, Entertainment, and Design. One year I saw Geoffrey Katzenberg preview an animated film about a big green ogre. Another time Dean Kamen demo’ed the stand-up wheelchair he designed before designing the Segway Personal Transporter. The last time I attended TED I heard Yo-Yo Ma perform on a variety of ancient Asian instruments. Amazing.

Although not TED material (at least not yet), I believe that Creative Byline is at the intersection of the same three disciplines. To share our inspiration, we’re going to add a list of links to cool websites we believe exemplify one, two, or all three. Check out the links to the left, and if you have a favorite you’d like to nominate, send it along and we’ll check it out.

Most of the recent posts on Literary Magnet have been about the book publishing business and writing. But I ran across this article about entrepreneurs, and since Creative Byline is a start-up and I’m an entrepreneur, I thought I’d include it. I’m pretty sure that this isn’t the most flattering view of entrepreneurs, as Guy Kawasaki, a former Apple executive and entrepreneur, says in the article: “You need to be in denial or in ignorance about the huge challenges you face.”

There’s a fine line between being tenacious and bull-headed when trying to create something new. I quickly dismissed the unflattering comments (denial) in the article, and started thinking about the “creating” elements of entrepreneurship–is it a creative endeavor? Are there parallels to other creative crafts, like writing? Conversely, do creative writers (or other creative types) need to “be in denial or in ignorance about the huge challenges [they] face” in their work at creating?

With the radio news and the daily papers headlining the economy every day, it’s a little hard to put the subject out of your mind. That’s led me to think about the economics of the writing life.

It’s one thing to be hired to write an article or a brochure and to be paid immediately when it’s done. It’s another to write a novel or a memoir and then to spend time looking for a buyer. Unlikely as it seems, this reminds me of my experience leading product development teams in my past life.

Our goal was always to get as quickly as possible from the investment in development (materials, time, equipment) to the income (dollars from people buying the product). I learned this motivation in Econ 101 as the “time value of money,” which said, in short, that money now (when I can do something with it, perhaps making more money) is better than the promise of money at some future date.

Which brings me back to writers, and the logic for Creative Byline. Once a writer has finished her manuscript, she wants to have a sale as quickly as possible. Whether it’s the writer sitting on the project, the hurdle of locating an agent, or waiting for an editor to respond, that “time value of money” starts to add up as a cost.

Getting a fast response matters. Nine out of ten writers using Creative Byline know within three weeks whether an editor is interested–ten times faster than responses to unsolicited submissions through the traditional process.