Category Archives: Publishing

Articles I Like: Publishing's dominant business model

PolyWogg.ca
January 22 2016

I love reading Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s business blogs about the publishing business, and her latest is no exception (Source: Business Musings: Poor Poor Pitiful Me Is Not A Business Model – Kristine Kathryn Rusch). In fact, her latest two pieces are about the same thing — a recent Author’s Guild open letter of lament about the state of publishing, and how their rights are being unfairly trampled by big publishing.

I spend too much time reading policy briefs at work though because I want to take her arguments, condense them into a tight little memo to the universe, and go even further. For me, I’d pitch it even stronger.

  1. Publishing is a business — Not just a cliche, but that publishing starts with a business contract between two business entities. On the one side, you have the supplier — the author who has created a great work, and now wishes to make money from it. And on the other, a small number of publishers who have lots of small suppliers they make deals with for product. This is not a partnership between today’s special snowflake and an evil empire, it’s two business partners coming to a deal.
  2. Fear is frequently a factor — since there are lots of potential suppliers, and only a few get to sell to the demanders, it becomes a buyer’s market.
… Read the rest

Articles I Like: Self-publishing disrupting the industry

PolyWogg.ca
April 9 2013

I admit that I have developed an almost unhealthy fascination with the publishing industry’s changes over the last five years. Separate from my own vested interest, I am also interested from an analytical perpective. People argue that “self-publishing” or “ebooks” are the changes that are sweeping their way through the publishing world, but I personally feel that it is more about the disentanglement of a previously integrated and controlled business model.

In the past, you had authors who produced content as a raw product, agents who marketed those raw materials to publisher after publisher, or editor by editor at each publisher, and publishers who took the raw product, massaged it, processed it, turned it into a final product, and took the sellable version to market. And there were huge barriers to entry into the market — agents wouldn’t take just anyone, publishers often wanted only agent-repped products, stores and libraries would mainly take books only from the Big Six publishers or their subsidiaries. Breaking into those areas would give you huge leverage, but they were jealously guarded corridors of power.

However, in recent years, the whole business model has been disrupted end to end…authors can get their books on Amazon and in ebook form without an agent or a publisher.… Read the rest

Articles I Like: Konrath on the Mystery Writers of America

PolyWogg.ca
May 3 2012

There are very few windmills that I feel strongly enough to tilt at…stupid people is one. Bullies are another. People pretending they understand policy and government, and being condescending towards others’ views — although that tends to combine both of the first two. But I have a pretty strong respect for the importance of human rights, freedom of association, etc. when they are used as swords to advance legitimate causes or shields to prevent oppression. Where the heck is this idea going? Membership in a society that basically holds itself out as representing an industry but then turning around and barring people from the industry who don’t meet their standards.

If you look back to some lovely research published in the 1980s and 90s by the Harvard Business Review, everybody thinks their job qualifies as a profession. Janitors think they’re a “profession”. Taxi drivers another. And when people of like mind and employment get together, and talk about their profession, they frequently start saying things like “Hey, that person isn’t any good, we should really have standards and block these yahoos. They’re not ‘professional’ like we are. Our ‘profession’ is slipping.”

This makes sense in some quarters where professional certification can and should be required.… Read the rest

Articles I Like: KK Rusch on royalty statements, audits

PolyWogg.ca
May 3 2012

One of my favorite bloggers writing about the publishing industry is Kristine Kathryn Rusch, a former “upper-midlister” who has moved into the world of self-publishing and prefers the results. She has lots of history in the traditional publishing world, ranging from short-story mags to full-length novels, and everything in between, and probably every form of publisher alive. However, unlike the evangelical nature of some of the newly converted, Kris’ posts tend to be more practically oriented — here’s a business issue related to publishing, here’s her experiences with it, here’s how she thinks it fits into a current business model, and here’s what she thinks is the best option for her. She’s not trying to convert the masses, she’s sharing info with the masses. It’s a great balance, and she treads it well. One of her latest posts is about royalty statements, and, basically, how screwed up they are. But she also goes on to talk about two other issues that I think are great — basket accounting and the audits by DOJ of the “colluders” who are being sued for the agency model agreements they colluded upon. See excerpts below:

Over a year ago, I wrote a blog post about the fact that my e-book royalties from a couple of my traditional publishers looked wrong.

… Read the rest

Articles I Like: DW Smith on publishing, early decisions

PolyWogg.ca
May 2 2012

Dean Wesley Smith is one of my favorite bloggers. As another blogger described him, Dean is an ex-midlister who has drunk the self-publishing Koolaid, is happy with his success in multiple worlds, and is happy to share his approach and results with others. He has a couple of blog-based ebooks going, where he writes a chapter at a time and posts it for digestion and comment. Then he cobbles them all together into an actual book. His latest endeavour, the second edition of “Think Like a Publisher”, is being “reposted” with updates in close sequential order. Here are some excerpts from Chapter 1:

Some of the earliest decisions a publisher has to make can be changed down the road easily. Some are difficult to change. So, I’m going to break down some of these early decisions into basic groups. And keep in mind, there are no correct answers on any of these decisions. Just what you want to do.

…

Get the business set up, do the chores, look at your start-up inventory, and then look hard and fast at what kind of publisher you want to be.

See the full post at Dean Wesley Smith » Think Like a Publisher 2012.
… Read the rest

Articles I Like: Remember Amazon is always the bad guy

PolyWogg.ca
May 1 2012

The NYTimes had an interesting article on Sunday from David Carr writing about an author, Buzz Bissinger, who had a book promotion going on with Apple that Amazon matched and thus must somehow be evil.

…Apple, which had been looking to get into shorter works in a digital format, decided to include e-books in a promotion that it does with Starbucks. It selected Mr. Bissinger’s digital sequel as a Pick of the Week, giving customers a code they could redeem online for the book. (Mr. Bissinger said he still received a royalty of $1.50 for each copy sold.)

Amazon interpreted the promotion as a price drop and lowered its price for “After Friday Night Lights” to exactly zero. Byliner withdrew the book from Amazon’s shelves, saying it did so to “protect our authors’ interest.”

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Mr. Bryant, who formerly edited a sports magazine for The New York Times, said that Amazon’s “price bot” had picked up the fact that the book was being given away as part of a weeklong promotion and responded by dropping its price to zero. (In an e-mail later, Mr. Bryant said that when the company told Amazon about the promotion, before it began, Byliner was warned the price might drop to zero.

… Read the rest

Articles I Like: Consumers vs. Publishers

PolyWogg.ca
April 24 2012

Jeremy Greenfield had an interesting post on Digital Book World about e-book pricing — but focused on the costs. The article tries to basically explain both why consumers think costs (and the price) should be a lot less, and publishers saying, “No, wait, costs are not that far off”.

Here are some excerpts from Greenfield’s post:

Publishers are making a killing on e-books because they cost nothing to produce, distribute and sell and are almost 100% pure profit. At least, that’s what many consumers think.

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While consumers understand the basic costs involved in the bricks-and-mortar retail world, they don’t understand the costs involved in selling something that is, well, much, much smaller than a bread box.

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“We still pay for the author advance, the editing, the copy-editing, the proofreading, the cover and interior design, the illustrations, the sales kit, the marketing efforts, the publicity, and the staff that needs to coordinate all of the details that make books possible,” said Bob Miller in February 2009 on the HarperStudio blog (which has been defunct since April 2010 when the publishing start-up folded) when he was president and publisher of that company; he is now president and publisher of Workman Publishing.

… Read the rest

Articles I Like: E-book lawsuit in Canada

PolyWogg.ca
April 24 2012

Marsha Lederman had an interesting article in the Globe and Mail on April 18th trying to put a Canadian spin on the charges in the U.S. of collusion and price-fixing by the Big Six publishers (Harper Collins, MacMillan, Penguin, Random House, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster) with Apple. Just to be clear, there are TWO lawsuits in the U.S. — a class-action civil suit launched by “consumers” against this group for trying to raise ebook prices above Amazon’s preferred ceiling of $9.99 (targeting all six plus Apple) and a completely separate Department of Justice civil suit that targets everyone in that list except Random House. I’m not including separate state plans in that list.

Here’s an excerpt from Lederman:

A proposed class-action lawsuit filed in B.C. Supreme Court by the Vancouver firm Camp Fiorante Matthews Mogerman alleges that Apple Inc. and a number of publishers engaged in a “conspiracy” to lessen competition and “fix, maintain, increase or control the prices of e-books.” It is the most recent of at least five such suits filed recently in courts in Ontario, Quebec and B.C.

It also alleges that the defendants or their representatives communicated secretly, in person and by phone, to discuss and fix e-book prices, in the lead-up to the introduction of Apple’s iPad, which can function as an eReader, in April of 2010.In

… Read the rest

Articles I Like: The Threat of Free Riders

PolyWogg.ca
April 23 2012

The Harvard Business Review has a great website, combining not only the articles from their magazine, but daily summaries of key articles, interesting statistics and a number of cool blogs ranging from “soft” HR issues to “hard” business articles. Frances Frei and Anne Morriss wrote a blog entry called, “Target and the Threat of Free Riders” that is pretty good. I know what you’re thinking — umm, doesn’t the heading for this blog entry say it’s about “publishing”? Yes, yes, it does. Because while Frei and Morriss are primarily talking about Target, the hidden subtext behind it is Amazon.

You might remember the big kerfuffle at Christmas time…Amazon released a new App that could scan bar codes, and they encouraged you while shopping in bricks and mortar stores to do some price comparisons. And then, *gasp*, buy from Amazon if the price was cheaper. They even had the audacity to offer initial discount coupons to those using the apps. The blogs exploded with stories of how Amazon was evil, how dare they do this, it was destroying the local infrastructure. They were essentially complaining that Amazon was being a “free rider” — the store chains have physical locations with large overhead costs they have to pay, and here Amazon was saying “go visit them, touch and feel your items in person, exploit their overhead, and then buy from us.”… Read the rest

Articles I Like: Critics of E-Books Lawsuit

PolyWogg.ca
April 23 2012

The Wall Street Journal has a pretty good article by Thomas Catan entitled Critics of E-Books Lawsuit Miss the Mark, Experts Say (link may expire). In it, Catan gives a pretty good overview of the Ebook “collusion” lawsuit and has some outstanding points about those who think the Department of Justice “got it wrong” (i.e. they went after the wrong company) and are really just puppets of Amazon:

U.S. antitrust law doesn’t seek to protect little companies against big ones, or even struggling ones against successful ones. Companies can grow as large as they want, as long as they do it through lower prices, better service or niftier innovations. Companies can even become monopolies, as long as they don’t get there illegally or try to extend their power by unlawfully stifling competition.

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“Price fixing is kind of the first-degree murder of antitrust violations,” Prof. Hovenkamp says. “They don’t have discretion to just walk away from what appears to be a strong set of facts that, if true, are one of the most central of antitrust violations.”

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The government might already have shown some leniency. For one, the Justice Department brought a civil, rather than a criminal, case, so no executives will go to prison.

… Read the rest

A different perspective on e-returns…

PolyWogg.ca
February 29 2012

I am an active follower of a lot of blogs, but very few discussion groups. For me, I often find that the discussion groups are too general with high volume (Dorothy-L), or too technical (some web-focused ones), or too narrowly focused (single app approaches, for example). I do however follow the “Murder Must Advertise” discussion group regularly as it seems the right mix of volume, topics, and valuable content. This past week, one of the hot topics has been Amazon allowing readers to return e-books for refund, and it got me looking at it a bit more broadly.

Not surprisingly, the people who are in favour of allowing returns are mainly readers, those against are mainly writers. Those in favour argue that of course returns should be allowed, since sometimes you buy the book with high hopes and confidence and it turns out that the thing is a steaming pile of armadillo dung. This happens despite reading previews, other reader’s reviews, etc. Those against allowing returns tend to follow one of four threads of thought:

  1. E-books don’t cost a lot of money, and for those less than $2.99 on Amazon, we’re talking extremely small profit margins. So authors aren’t getting rich here.
… Read the rest

Articles I Like: Share, don’t tell your way to marketing

PolyWogg.ca
February 16 2012

I confess that I’m a bit of a Blog ‘Ho — I’ll read just about any blogger that has something interesting to say that resonates with me. Click here, press add there, and I’ll follow their RSS feed pretty fast. If over time they start to fade, I can click and drop just as easily. Both for work purposes and my personal interest in writing, or an interest combining the two (writing about HR), I really enjoy the Harvard Business Review’s site various feeds. One of them is their feed on Technology (which often co-links itself to talking about innovation).

Today’s feed includes an article by Nilofer Merchant (Rules for the Social Era — note link may expire). An excerpt from her post appears below…she talks mainly in her article about lots of big companies are not adjusting to the new social era of supply-chain production that is more about being lean, rather than big and talking to your customers in a way that is integrated in product design, delivery, etc. rather than just market research. But, on the writing and publishing front, the best “shift” for me is the third one:

Sharing, not telling. When companies think of social media, they hope to get consumers to “like” them or “fan” them, as if that increased connection is meaningful.

… Read the rest

Online piracy, music and ebooks…

PolyWogg.ca
February 1 2012

One of the blogs I follow is Passive Guy (at his site called the Passive Voice), partly because he has a really good site for the latest news on the ebook front with several excerpts / re-tweets a day. And one of his posts today caught my eye given the whole Megaupload thing in the past week — the post was entitled “Piracy Does Depress Sales”. The post is an excerpt from another site by an attorney named Terry Hart, linking to a study by Stan Liebowitz at the University of Texas entitled “The Metric is the Message: How Much of the Decline in Sound Recording Sales is Due to File-Sharing?”. The claim from Liebowitz? That *all* of the decline in record sales could be attributed to file-sharing.

Now many of my readers know that I did a MA in public policy. Which means I also did graduate-level stats and economics courses. So, when I see an academic making such bold claims, two things happen — first, my interest is piqued … maybe they have some ground-breaking analysis and research to support this argument, after all it’s “published” and their careers depend on on it, and if not, maybe at least an innovative approach; second, my BS detector goes haywire.… Read the rest

Articles I Like: The world of ebooks

PolyWogg.ca
January 27 2012

Leslie Gaines-Ross has an interesting article on the HBR blog network today, dealing with business models in general (In a New Era for Marketing, Parental Discretion Advised — note link may expire). An excerpt from her post appears below:

Every well-trained manager knows about the “four P’s” of marketing. To make a sale, a company must offer the right product to meet customers’ needs, and at the right price. It has to be offered in a place they find convenient and, in order for them to know about it and how it can help them, it has to be promoted well. New research by my colleagues and me, however, suggests that another “P” is growing in importance. Customers also care who the parent of the product is.

For those who are interested, the article goes on to discuss basically how people are looking for who the parent company is, their corporate brand so to speak, and whether its someone with whom they want to do business. In fact, I would go one step further — not only do people want to know who your “parent” is (if your company has one) but also who your partners are, what they’re like, and if they reflect positively on your brand.… Read the rest

Articles I Like: The 99 cent price point for ebooks

PolyWogg.ca
January 24 2012

Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg has an interesting article in today’s WSJ that deals with ebook pricing models, and the 99-cent “impulse” price point (E-Book Prices Get Slashed — note link may expire). An excerpt from his post appears below:

The book world is discovering the 99-cent special. Nearly two years after book publishers forced a sharp increase in the price of newly released e-books, a new low-price trend is emerging. A growing number of publishers are experimenting with 99-cent temporary prices on e-books, in hopes of persuading readers to sample a wider range of authors.

The latest example is George Pelecanos’s new crime novel “What It Was,” which goes on sale Monday. The digital edition costs 99 cents for the first month, and then $4.99 afterward. While Mr. Pelecanos is known for his work on HBO’s gritty Baltimore series “The Wire,” he has also authored 18 books. But he has never been a big seller.

I’ll eventually get around to posting my own take on e-book pricing from an “economics” perspective i.e. what is an “optimal” price if the economists were tackling the question, but I like the idea that the “big” names are suddenly realizing they’re getting their butts kicked by the mid-listers or the newbies.… Read the rest

The Royal Wedding of Search Engine Optimization for writers…

PolyWogg.ca
April 19 2011

For anyone running their own website, one of the terms that comes at you fairly early on is “Search Engine Optimization”. This is a lovely term to basically say, “How do I get my website to show up higher in Google’s rankings?”. There are commercial companies that offer packages, individuals who offer tweaking services, etc…everyone wants to sell you tricks and tips on SEO.

Most of them are, umm, well, worthless. While some are outright scammers, some are just worthless because most of what they do is something you end up doing for yourself (my day boss’ regular comment is if you hire a consultant to tell you the time, they’ll borrow your watch first — as you’ll see below, a SEO consultant will quickly ask you for info to do the job for you). And it is a bit of a competitive crapshoot anyone. Certainly if anyone tries to GUARANTEE you a specific SEO result, run the other way — they’re scammers. No one can guarantee a result, they can only offer ways to LIKELY improve your results — your actual mileage will vary. And most of those suggestions fall into the categories below.

Background

For quick background, here’s what you need to know about how Google works.… Read the rest

The future of gatekeeping…

PolyWogg.ca
April 18 2011

As an aspiring mystery writer, I hang out on a listserve called “Murder Must Advertise” (named after the Dorothy L. Sayers book). And I glean a lot from their approaches, techniques etc. But the discussion of late has noticeably shifted from “what do you do at a signing” type conversations to “how is our world different in the world of e-books and e-book publishing”. Recently, a professor from England asked if the new “business model” was affecting reviews, and more specifically, if the independent world we were living in was creating a “killer online review site” that everyone trusted. I think this is a fantastic topic as it pulls a lot of business pieces together in the e-book world and gets to the heart of the question for readers — how do they find out about new books and what is worth reading?

Getting the book out there

The opening gambit of this chess game is that the new e-book world is rife with opportunity. Just as the vanity presses (both scammers and souvenir producers) and POD presses (a legitimate business model for some people) promised, you no longer need the Big Publisher with the Big Advance to help you. If you can write a book, you can see it published — no more angling for an agent, submitting query letters, getting picked out of a slush pile, hobnobbing with industry people, begging, pleading, praying, hoping for discovery.… Read the rest

DRM and contraband ebooks…

PolyWogg.ca
April 5 2011

This is a recurring question in ebook circles, particularly for authors — are people going to pirate my book, and how can I stop it?

One technical “solution” is DRM — digital rights management. And to know if DRM is right for you, the context is probably best understood in comparison with the music industry’s success and failures.

You may recall a small ruckus re: iTunes about 18 months ago when they removed DRM from their MP3s, at the industry’s request actually, not just customers. Customers who buy MP3s want portability across devices, and some aspects of DRM prevent that — it is designed to prevent rampant pirating but generally speaking, it can be bypassed by those likely to pirate rampantly, and those who would abide have no idea what to do when their legitimately purchased MP3 that they had been listening to on an Zune can’t be easily copied on to their new iPod (DRM tries to lock a file to a single user, or, in the past, often to a single device as well).

For ebooks, you have three barriers to rampant pirating — first, the price point. As with MP3s being dropped to 99 cents by iTunes, and the ease of finding almost anything at once, a lot of the pirate shops lost their edge (don’t get me wrong, they’re still there, just not with the same number of customers).… Read the rest