47 Tips for Cutting Costs Without Cutting Staff

(Book Business, James Sturdivant, 12/1/08)

With a battered economy dragging down just about every retail sector, a salient fact making headlines has been the ability of discounters to maintain sales growth—a sure sign that the “Wal-Mart Effect” has permeated every corner of the business world, and that raising prices is probably not the way to realize profits. This leaves cost-cutting, which, for obvious reasons, book publishers would like to pursue aggressively without sacrificing either product quality or valued employees. Here are some tips from a cross-section of the publishing world for reining in costs without sacrificing too much in the process.

Tips from...
Dwight Baker, president, Baker Publishing Group
Baker Publishing Group instituted a series of cost-cutting measures this fall and plans to review their effectiveness after 90 days. Baker says the company has not been forced to lay off staff despite the trying economic climate and is doing “everything possible” in formulating a comprehensive strategy to prevent future layoffs.

Short-term:

1. Reduce employee travel.

2. Reduce marketing budgets.

3. Freeze all hiring for new and vacant positions.

4. Reduce inventory levels.
The company is moving to smaller first printings and reprint quantities in offset. “We usually print a 12-month supply of trade books, and a 12- to 24-month supply of academic books. We’re reprinting smaller quantities lately,” Baker says.

Baker Publishing also has a digital component that handles about 15 percent of backlist titles, he adds. “We call the program short-run, because it is not technically an ‘on-demand’ model. We carry stock through the entire year, but never more than one carton,” he says.

5. Reduce book-packaging enhancements.
These include fancy covers with foil or embossing.

6. Reduce exposure at trade shows and conferences.

7. Make a push to sell overstocked inventory more rapidly.

8. Transfer work from outside suppliers/freelancers to in-house staff.

9. Hold off on all new equipment purchases.

10. Prohibit all overtime hours.

Long-term:

11. Avoid high-risk and expensive book projects.

12. Pace new book releases to match capacity of current staff.

13. Defer publishing expansion into uncertain sales categories.

Tips from...
Cären Yang, creative and production manager, Saint Mary’s Press
Winona, Minn.-based religious publisher Saint Mary’s Press has worked with vendor Transcontinental to realize savings in manufacturing and production by adopting lean manufacturing principles. “It affects how we make decisions,” Yang says, “by considering what’s the best way to implement [a practice] so it’s efficient for my upstream and downstream customers.”

14. Add a print-on-demand (POD) center.
For some publishers, it makes sense to add an in-house POD center, which reduces inventory and simplifies order fulfillment. (Saint Mary’s maintains its own shipping/fulfillment area.) “Eighty percent of the products we produce are produced internally,” Yang says. “So it’s a huge cost savings. We keep about one to two weeks of inventory on our shelves for those products.”

15. Set up an electronic inventory and warehouse management system.
Smaller publishers benefit from this as much as bigger ones, Yang says. It allows publishers to coordinate efficiently with printers in order to ship to their docks only what they need at a given time.

16. Use software to streamline workflow.
Saint Mary’s Press saves time and money by uploading documents via the Web for proofreading and other preflight work, eliminating costs for mailing hardcopy proofs. The system also allows errors to be fixed quickly and efficiently.

17. Drop the off-site warehouse.
Thanks to a well-coordinated printing, shipping and fulfillment program, Saint Mary’s now uses a small warehouse in its own facility rather than paying to rent a larger off-site facility.

18. Standardize your paper stock.
With so much volatility in the paper market, Saint Mary’s has worked to standardize the paper it uses. “We are ordering larger quantities of one stock for our products. … That’s been huge,” she says.

19. Print during off-peak times.
Work with a printer to utilize equipment at a discounted rate when not much business is coming in from other clients. With peak times tied to the religious/education schedule rather than other seasonal determinants, Saint Mary’s has gained significant savings this way.

20. Create more efficient PDFs.
Yang recommends asking your printer to share its PDF settings with your preflight specialist. Being in synch with a printer on settings for a print-ready file allows for smaller file sizes and fewer steps in the production process. “These are just little things, but sometimes the little things really add up,” Yang says.

Tips from...
Jim Kalajian, president & COO, Jenkins Group Inc.
Jenkins Group is an independent custom book publisher in Traverse City, Mich. President Jim Kalajian believes a cost-cutting campaign should be coupled with (and hopefully mitigated by) renewed efforts to boost sales—in his case, through lowering margins, offering new services and giving special incentives to smaller publishing clients that might be slashing their promotional budgets. “The bottom line, we have had to look at everything we do and determine if we can save money in some areas without affecting client service,” he says.

21. Ask for cost concessions from freelance designers and editors.
“Essentially, we have said, ‘If you want to keep getting work, you will need to do it for 20- to 30-percent less than last year.’ These changes are hopefully temporary during these slower times,” Kalajian says. Gaining a small concession on freelance costs can greatly improve margins and allow the company to keep in-house staff employed without reducing salaries or benefits, he says.

22. Shift work from freelancers back to salaried staff.
Staffers are now covering some design and editorial work that a year ago would have been sent to freelancers. Kalajian’s creative director will begin helping the marketing team with promotional material, rather than sending it to outside designers. “We also write 24-30 press releases a month for small publishers as part of our publicity-service offering,” he says. “Instead of sending all those to a freelance writer, we now have an in-house staff member write half of them.”

23. Reduce UPS costs bysending files to printers via FTP.

24. Use digital proofing more often to save on the cost of creating and shipping proofs.

25. Cut marketing spending that is not showing a positive return.
Kalajian recommends giving campaigns such as lead-generation or Google AdWords no more than six months to show results.

26. Switch Web site-maintenance services to a firm that bills in quarter-hour increments.
Jenkins Group has found that some firms charge $100/hour in half-hour increments, while others charge the same hourly fee, but allow quarter-hour increments—a significant savings when only a small tweak to the Web site is needed.

27. Cut office cleaning staff from once a week to twice a month … and do more clean-up yourself.

28. Modify a phone plan.
Money-saving measures can include cutting unused 1-800-number fax lines, and eliminating cell phone and pooled minutes across the company.

29. Reduce monthlycompensation of principles.

30. Reduce travel costs.
Kalajian reports a dramatic reduction by eliminating all marketing trips to New York.

Tips from...
Susan Spilka, director, corporate communications, John Wiley & Sons
STM publisher Wiley has been on the cutting-edge of cost-cutting, lately forming partnerships with other publishers and institutions to deliver services and information efficiently.

31. Electronically disseminate comp copies.
Working with other higher-education textbook publishers, Wiley has developed CourseSmart, a service providing digital course materials to consumers. Spilka says Wiley saves money by using Course-Smart to fulfill comp-copy requests, rather than having to mail print copies.

32. Offer supplementalmaterials on-demand.
Wiley has put textbook supplement transparencies in an on-demand program, whereby professors choose a transparency online, and orders are printed and shipped one at a time. This avoids inventory obsolescence for these expensive-to-produce items.

33. Institute a well-functioning content management system (CMS).
“Developing a companywide content management system … allows us to cost-effectively repurpose our assets” Spilka says.

34. Offer online options.
For journal customers, Wiley promotes the option of online-only subscriptions, which helps move toward shorter print runs and lower materials costs.

35. Move CD content to a Web site.
Some publishers have found savings by taking expensive four-color graphical elements and putting them on accompanying CDs. Wiley has taken this a step further by moving such content to Web sites associated with textbooks and other releases.

Tips from...
Dan Tucker, president, Sideshow Media
Sideshow Media is a small, independent book producer, creating illustrated books for publishers and corporate entities.

36. Expect more from your employees.
With today’s efficiency tools at hand, publishers should expect employees to wear more hats than in years past. Sideshow hires smart people and trains them well, says Tucker (who is also president of the American Booksellers Association), allowing them to work more efficiently and do more in less time than would have been possible a few years ago.

37. Keep an eye open for new suppliers.
“We are always looking for [lower-cost] suppliers,” he says. “We do a lot of manufacturing in China, and with costs going up, we are looking at other possibilities, such as India and Egypt.”

Tucker says he is willing to consider suppliers closer to home if the value of convenience and time/cost savings in shipping equals or exceeds the lower manufacturing costs available in Asia.

38. Be flexible.
Smaller publishers should leverage the assets that come with maintaining a leaner, more malleable supply chain, Tucker says, meaning they should always be on the lookout for better deals in printing or shipping, and ready to take advantage of these, especially in a volatile world market. “The difference between how we operate from a [major publishing house] is that, for them to alter the supply chain, I imagine is like trying to turn an aircraft carrier around in a pretty narrow straight. We are more like a small powerboat.”

39. Consider alternate staffing arrangements.
Sideshow has had success with employees working in remote locations and other positions being converted to half-time. These arrangements have led to some cost savings, according to Tucker.

Tips from...
Alex Holzman, director, Temple University Press
Temple University Press specializes in books on the humanities and social sciences. Holzman says university presses are used to operating frugally, but nevertheless can be subject to unexpected budget mandates from their parent institutions. “When cuts have to be made … they aren’t always made wisely,” he notes.

40. When you cut, cut judiciously.
Holzman advises thinking through the impact of any cuts on net revenue, noting that an in-house efficiency that results in declining sales is not a good idea (unless it somehow increases margins). “This probably sounds mundane and obvious, but it’s necessary to at least make an effort to avoid encountering unexpected consequences,” he says.

These consequences can ostensibly be non-monetary, yet affect sales and profits in the long run, he warns. An example would be a cost-cutting measure that damages author relations.

41. Embrace POD.
POD and “born digital” printing allow for tighter inventory control and fewer write-downs, Holzman says. “POD [also] helps with distribution overseas as one can print a book … [overseas] rather than shipping across the pond.”

42. Use electronic marketing tools.
Holzman reports success in steering people to online seasonal catalogs, thereby reducing runs for printed versions. Temple has also experimented with sending PDFs to book reviewers, though Holzman notes such practices must come with appropriate safeguards to avoid the risk of piracy. Marketing efficiencies are also realized by having books on Google Book Search and Amazon Search Inside the Book, he says.

43. Incremental workflow efficiencies add up.
Temple University Press uses Blackboard technology to transmit projects to its editorial board, cutting paper use. It also utilizes electronic copyediting tools and is starting to use XML workflows. “The former, of course, saves time and paper; the latter saves coding later,” Holzman says.

44. Leverage institutional talent.
University presses can sometimes benefit by drawing expertise from other departments, avoiding expensive consulting or service fees that commercial publishers often face when introducing new efficiencies. “For example, a university IT department can often provide very helpful guidance whether or not it also implements any change being contemplated,” Holzman says.

45. Trim paper costs.
There are many ways to incrementally decrease the amount spent on paper, such as, in manufacturing, considering alternative stocks and eliminating jackets for some hardcover titles. For in-house paper use, he says, “We use two-sided copying wherever possible. We try to send electronic files rather than create and then have to ship printed manuscripts. None of this is earth-shattering; you just take every bit of incremental saving you can get.”

Tips from...
Larry Bennett, vice president, Spanish language materials and POD, Replica Books
Replica Books, a division of Baker & Taylor, provides solutions for publishers looking to combine short-run printing of older titles with marketing and distribution services.

46. Use POD to automate the reprint process.
Work with a digital printer to save money by setting up an automatic reprint system for some “long-tail” titles, whereby books are printed and orders fulfilled without passing through a publisher’s hands. Bennett says this makes the most sense for expensive, low-volume titles such as textbooks and art volumes. “Your cost savings comes in avoiding inventory obsolescence and remaindering, and in the inventory-carrying costs. The more expensive the book, the more it makes sense,” he says.

47. Shop around for the best POD solution.
Different publishers have different needs, and one printer’s fee structure, manufacturing and shipping capability, and distribution network may make more sense from a cost-saving standpoint than another’s, Bennett points out.

Don't Pull the Plug on Print Yet

(C) 2008 Business NH Magazine. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved - Business NH Magazine

Jack Cummings has been around the printing industry for pretty much all his life. His grandfather stalled Cummings Printing in 1914. Young Jack forged his printing career working after school and during the summers, toiling in the mailing department, bindery and the pressroom. He also drove the company truck. After college, Cummings took a job in the typesetting department and eventually landed in sales at the Hooksett-based company. It was while he was in the sales department in the late 1990s that he realized that in order for Cummings Printing to weather the desktop publishing and Internet revolutions occurring at the time - and position the company for a more secure future - it had to become more than a local sheet-fed commercial printer.

In other words, Cummings Printing would have to become a company almost unrecognizable to his late grandfather and his small commercial press. To do that, Cummings invested heavily in new technologies and changed its business model. "If we had not laid it on the line and taken major loans to become a magazine and catalog printer - a Web printer versus a sheet-fed printer, which is what we were and what differentiates us from your local printer - then we would not be enjoying the success we am right now," he says. (Editors note: Cummings prints Business NH Magazine.)

Even with his firm conviction, however, Cummings endured his share of nerve-tacking moments - along with just about every other printer during recent yeas. Industry watchers predicted at the turn of the century that the Internet was going to make printers a thing of the past. "I thought we were dead. I thought we were in real trouble," Cummings says.

Today, Cummings employs 107 people and has embraced the Internet for all that it can do for today's printer. For example, its Insite prepress portal system streamlines customer interactions, allowing customers, via Internet, to track job activity and status, proof print jobs, collaborate with Cummings staffers, and approve jobs.

During the past decade, change has been one constant for printers. "Printing industries are less of a trade now, and things are more push button," Cummings says. "What used to take an hour of a skilled artisan's time now takes 10 minutes of a person with computer savvy." Gone are the jobs of the linotype operators, film strippers and conventional printing plate makers Cummings says.

When asked what his grandfather would think of today's Cummings Printing, the grandson says, "I think he'd be sad from a trades perspective - that the trade is much less a part of the industry. But also being a good businessman, he'd be proud that we stayed with technology, we've been able to remain an industry leader, and we've been able to evolve from a commercial printer to being a publication printer."

The Technology Blessing and Curse

The late '90s digital revolution has threatened the printing industry, but it's also enabled printers to become more efficient by allowing them to cut legacy machinery costs, trim headcount, speed up customer interactions and job delivery, as well as offer a wider range of digital services. "We're able to handle any file you can throw at us: from Word files to Publisher files to InDesign and Quark - all the different types of [design] programs out them," says Kevin Boyarsky, co-owner of Print Solutions, a commercial printer in Concord with seven employees that offers one- to four-color offset printing, and digital duplication services. His customers also use FTP (file transfer protocol) Internet technology to transmit computer files to Print Solutions. Boyarsky estimates that typical turnaround times have been cut in half, down to less than a week, from 10 years ago.

But all those efficiencies reaped from new and faster technologies have come at a cost. "Copiers and digital machines that used to last five years are now almost obsolete after two, and they're expensive," Boyarsky says. "We constantly have to re-invest in the company. We have invested a significant amount of money upgrading software, and digital and offset capabilities."

Re-investment in new technologies is an economic reality for Cummings as well. "Either we buy this new piece of equipment, which is going to cost us a lot of money, or if we don't buy this, we won't be competitive," he says. 'The companies that didn't buy them and didn't take the calculated risks, they're hurting now."

Peter Church, owner of Keystone Press, LLC in Manchester agrees. The company spent a quarter of a million dollars this past summer to install two digital presses to improve printing quality and efficiency. "It's state-of-the-art today, but it will probably be outdated in five years, so we have to make it profitable quickly," Church says of the challenge of keeping up with technology advances. "There are two kinds of printers - those who are not keeping up with technology and those who embrace it, invest in it and evolve with it."

Shrinking Industry

The most recent data from Printing Indus-tries of New England (PINE) shows that the Granite State ranks second to Massachusetts in terms of value of shipments each year ($1.2 billion) as well as number of printing-related businesses (226). Printers employ more than 7,500 people in NH; most significantly in the Manchester, Nashua and Portsmouth-Rochester areas, and the majority of the printing businesses have fewer Nan 20 employees, according to PINE.

At the national level, there's been a decrease of 200,000 printing industry jobs since 2000, according to an August 2007 report from the Rochester Institute of Technology. "Most of the decreases in employment can be accounted for by the increasing amount of automation present on printing presses and other printing equipment that traditionally had to be nm by hand," the report states.

The printing industry has long been known for its skilled craftsmen and artisans who worked the presses. But new technology has erased much of the need. "Highly skilled printing tradespeople aren't needed like they once were, and many of the skills that were once needed don't exist anymore," Cummings says. His business, for example, em-ploys 107 people, down from 165 six years ago. 'New technology has eliminated manpower and made it cheaper to run," he adds.

New Hampshire printers say that finding qualified people is difficult today. "There's plenty of people who apply for a job," Boyarsky of Print Solutions says. But there's not a lot of people qualified for the jobs."

The Rochester Institute of Technology report notes that many printers "have been having trouble finding qualified, trained workers to replace their retirees." In addition, there has been decreased enrollment in printing programs at colleges and other institutions across the United States. "Now that graphic design and other computer-based fields of study have become more popular, many graphic arts programs at high schools have been shut down due to a lack of participation," according to the report.

Boyarsky points to a troubling workforce gap in NH. "I don't think the people coming out of the schools necessarily have the skills because the focus isn't on the print side - it's more toward the Web," he says. And then there's the older people who came out of the old typesetting design, and they didn't upgrade their skills to the new technologies. So there is probably a gap in the number of qualified people."

New Hampshire printing executives all say that there are fewer printers in the state now than 10 to 15 years ago. But that doesn't necessarily mean that print is dying or there's any lack of competition. "I wouldn't say there's a dearth of printers around' Boyarsky says. "I think that the printers around have been able to do that same volume of work [when compared with I0 years ago], with less equipment because we am more efficient."

Church says his business is an example of the trends the industry will likely see more of in the future. He owned a smaller printing business when he acquired Keystone Press two and half years ago and merged the two businesses. "You will see a lot of that happening - two smaller companies merging to form a larger, more capable company," Church says. Keystone Press has 21 employees housed in an 8,000-square-foot facility in Manchester.

Challenges

New Hampshire printers are facing the same macroeconomic pressures as other industries face: economic belt-tightening and credit-market wariness, sky-high fuel and utility prices, and increases in health care costs. The printing industry, in particular, has witnessed steady price increases for paper and ink. The industry saw two rounds of price increases for most paper grades this year. "It used to be once every couple of years," Boyarsky says, "but it's now twice this year."

While there may be fewer local NH printers today, say printing executives, competition has only increased. A "survival of the fittest" mentality is apparent through digital printing trends, retraining or hiring employees with new skillsets, and investing in new technology. "There's a lot fewer players-" observes Frank Laguna, president of Papergraphics in Merrimack, a 14-person commercial printer founded in 1982. "But the equipment is more efficicntbecause there's more capacity, which leads to more healthy competition."

In 2000, Papergraphics was able to complete one or two color printing jobs in a day now the printer can do 10, he notes. An investment in a new HP Indigo 5000 digital press in 2007 has allowed Papergraphics to offer same day or next day turnaround on print jobs. That, in turn, has allowed Laguna to deliver short-run printing jobs simply not available just five years ago, he says.

Competition is not just about another printer in your town or one in the city 10 miles away. The Internet and its global networking reach have made any printer a local printer. Sophisticated venture capital-backed e-commerce printing Web sites are both technologically advanced (with design and other applications built in) and able to gain economies of scale that am tough to match - let alone beat - for some local printers, says Boyarsky. "I can't compete in that marketplace," he says. In addition, the desktop publishing revolution and its more user-friendly design software has enabled commercial and retail customers to do much of the work once resented for printers. "The common color copier being networked to a desktop has more bearing now [on the printing business]," Laguna says.

Church says customers are expecting more services, but for prices to remain stagnant. That's a challenge in an industry that is seeing its costs go up, he says. "You have to provide superior customer service," Church says, which will mean fewer customers bid-ding projects to other companies.

Lastly, the growing need to go "green" has affected some pieces of NH printers operations as well as their customer offerings. Boyarsky says that while "no printer can he totally green if they're doing offset printing," new innovations - such as assortments of recycled paper, soy-based inks and waterless presses - allow printers to be "as green as we can be with the technology were using."

Differentiate or Die

Even with the enormous army of challenges in front of them, NH printers are not hacking down. "When has this business ever not been competitive?" implores Cummings. "I've been here 31 years, and there's always some kind of competitive threat."

Print Solutions' Boyarsky says, in this economic climate, printers need to "look for other products and services to serve your clientele." For example, Print Solutions is looking at wide-format printos capable of producing outdoor banners and other types of large signage. "The machines have come down in price and become more friendly to the environment," he says. "That's enabled people to get into markets that otherwise they couldn't have."

The Rochester Institute of Technology report notes that many printers am attempting to reposition themselves as a communications or marketing partner and service provider as opposed to solely a print or commodity supplier. "Becoming a marketing partner or communications company involves going beyond taking print jobs to offering a wide range of print products and marketing solutions to consumers," states the report. "Thus, printing companies - manufacturers and suppliers alike - are striving to grow and sustain creativity and innovation to keep their competitive advantage in an industry faced with many challenges."

Church of Keystone Press says his company is increasingly working with marketing managers at companies where the company previously worked with purchasing agents. Church says he can help companies customize marketing pieces, such as a postcard campaign a company may be sending out. Keystone can individualize each postcard with customized photos and messages, and address them as they are printed.

Lisa Landry, president of Print Savvy in Manchester, agrees that targeted marketing and customization of printed pieces is the future of the industry. She points to Macy's, which developed a specific campaign for its bridal registry, as an example. After a couple was married, Macy's sent them a customized printed piece informing them of the items they did not receive on their registry and what's on sale. Landry says those customized pieces yielded a 70 percent return for Macy's. She says printers will need the capability to work with clients to deliver more pieces like that instead of flooding the market with a generic mass-marketing piece. "It will be more like harpooning. It's going to be targeted and specific," Landry says.

Print Savvy, which celebrated its 10th anniversary this year, has built its success on being a marketing partner with clients. The company manages printing projects for clients, finding printers with the appropriate technology to meet their specific needs. "We act as a sales and customer service office for printing facilities across the country," Landry says. That means Print Savvy can find printers with the latest technology, without having to bear the cost of investing in that technology itself, Landry says. It's a model that has worked well as clients' needs become more sophisticated, "If you have a sales tool kit with multiple components, there may be no one printer that could handle every piece," Landry says.

Printers say they are leaning on good old-fashioned customer service to compete - listening to what customers want and need, and helping them navigate through all the options available today - something that many of the online sites can't do. "A lot of times we get those clients who used an Internet site back - the card was wrong, there was no customer service, or they waited three weeks for a card and didn't get it," says Boyarsky. "I try to work with clients, understand their business and be able to provide a solution that fits with them. And it's hard to do that over the Internet."

The Rochester Institute of Technology report is cautionary about the future. "Print's long and illustrious history tells us that printing will remain. However, the form in which it will remain, the size of the industry and the types of output that will be produced are all things that no one can precisely predict." Boyarsky, however, is resolute. "I think that the business has definitely shaken out, but there am clients who still need printing," he says. "There's still a good future for print. A lot of it is that you have to be up on your technology to survive. You can't just muddle along with old equipment and old ways of doing things."

5 Better Inventory-Management Tips for Book Publishers

Mike Shatzkin, founder and CEO of New York-based The Idea Logical Company, offered book publishers a number of tips on making more intelligent inventory-management decisions at the 2008 Publishing Business Conference in New York. A better approach starts with regularly collecting and analyzing data that is available to each and every publisher, he said.

“Most of the major accounts to which publishers sell will provide you with data that will enable you to know what’s going on between your warehouse door and the end consumer, if you choose to know,” Shatzkin said. “And that information can be very, very useful both to increase your sales and to reduce your inventory exposure.”

In the hour-long session, Shatzkin offered a wealth of advice to the room of book publishers. Here are just five of his tips from the presentation.

1. It is not the unit cost of what you print that matters, it is the unit cost of what you sell.
This advice, said Shatzkin, came from his late father. The point? If you print books that you don’t sell, you’re not saving any money -- an important thing to keep in mind.

2. Get weekly feeds from your major accounts.
Collecting this data once a month is not often enough, Shatzkin says. Be sure you’re getting the information on a weekly basis. Possessing this data from Barnes & Noble, Borders, Baker & Taylor, Ingram and Amazon can give you a sense of “a substantial percentage of the inventory that’s in the supply chain -- well north of 50 percent, because independent stores aren’t holding that much inventory anymore,” Shatzkin said.

3. Once this data is being collected and organized, analyze it.
First, examine by account what their sell-through is by title. Then, on a quarterly basis by account, look at stock turn and inventory by section for your retailers. Also, track both sales and stock on a weekly basis.

4. Identify spikes.
Identify books that are selling beyond expectations. Keep an eye out for those “fast movers,” said Shatzkin.

5. Identify future returns.
These are the books with high stock and low sell-through. Look at your top 25 books in inventory at Barnes & Noble and Borders. If you see, for example, 1-percent sell-through on a title, “you can be sure that that’s a future problem,” Shatzkin said. “You might want to start to address it early, and you certainly want to address it if your own warehouse is short of [that title] and you might be reprinting. So it’s a very important thing to watch both your highs and your lows.”

Perseus Announces New “One-Stop” Digital Publishing Service

The Perseus Books Group, publisher and provider of sales, marketing and distribution services to independent publishers, announced this week the launch of a new digital publishing service called Constellation, which will enable independent publishers to offer their content in a variety of digital formats—including e-books, online content sampling services and digital files for print-on-demand—through a number of vendors. The service will be available to all independent publishers associated with The Perseus Books Group, including those owned by the group and joint-venture partners as well as those served by Consortium, Perseus Distribution and PGW.

The service already has partnership agreements in place with a number of technology companies, including Amazon (for the Kindle and “Search Inside the Book”), BookSurge, Sony, Google, OverDrive, Ebrary, BarnesandNoble.com (for “See Inside”), Lightning Source and Edwards Brothers (for digital printing). According to Perseus, additional partner announcements are anticipated.

Publishers can select which services, as well as which vendors, they want to use. Constellation negotiates agreements with these vendors on behalf of the publisher. Publishers then load print-ready PDFs to Constellation’s Web interface or provide them via a portable file transfer. (Constellation will also help with the digitization of files for publishers who don’t have them available.)

The Perseus Web site (http://www.perseusdigital.com/constellation/home.php) offers a detailed explanation of how Constellation works and what is required of publishers.

“Up until now, the full range of digital opportunities has been mostly confined to large corporate publishers owned by multinational corporations, and many independent publishers have been shut out,” says David Steinberger, Perseus president and CEO. “Constellation will level the playing field for independent publishers and make it possible to generate new revenues from ‘long tail’ content.”

“The Perseus Books Group is in a position to bring together independent publishers and create opportunities for us that would be much more difficult if we were on our own,” says Munro Magruder, associate publisher of New World Library, a PGW client.

Perseus COO Joe Mangan states in a letter posted on Perseus’ Web site: “This powerful technology- and vendor-agnostic service creates one, central repository and service organization that can help you manage your titles through their life cycle, leveraging—where appropriate—online marketing and sampling, e-book distribution and sales, short print run (short print runs to stock), and true print-on-demand (print only to order).”

North Plains is providing the digital asset management software to support Constellation. “As a company whose mission is to enable independent publishers to reach their potential, The Perseus Books Group is in a unique position to empower ‘long tail’ content owners to generate new revenues from the digital world,” says Hassan Kotob, president & CEO of North Plains.

Creative Cost-Cutting Strategies

I was reading the August issues of Book Business this weekend, and I found James Sturdivant's article on "creative cost-cutting strategies" very interesting and timely. Here is a summary of the methods he suggests:

1. Think beyond the printed page: as paper prices keep increasing, think multimedia to keep page count down. Also, maximize efficiency with templates and paperless workflows.
   
2. Bringing printing in-house: several publishers, Harlequin included, have invested in technology to handle some of their own printing. If this is not an option, investigate "gang printing" and consolidated trim sizes to cut costs.
   
3. Jobs returning to North America: given the increasing cost of fuel, printing overseas isn't always the cost-saving measure it used to be. In addition, look into using lighter paper and better monitoring of inventory for further cost-savings.

The full article is definitely worth reading and can be found on their website (see link above).

How many ISBNs for e-books?

PersonaNonData blogged about the reasons for e-books to have a unique ISBN per format.

According to ISBN official standards, each format of an e-book should be given its own ISBN. This means if a book is sold in mobi-pocket and Adobe formats each would be given a separate (unique) number by the publisher even if the content is exactly the same. During the revision process for the current standard, this point received intense discussion mostly focused on the burden that applying what could amount to several hundred ISBNs to a single work would have on publishers' processes. We resolved this issue for the standard with judicious use of words such as 'shall' and 'should' but the issue was raised again recently when the ISBN board released a 'policy statement' reaffirming the need for separate ISBN's on each format of an eb0ok.

The reasons for this action is simple. Downstream supply chain business such as wholesalers, distributors and retailers require a unique reference to all products that pass through their operations. If one doesn't exist these businesses tend to apply their own numbers. In actuality, the practice of downstream partners applying their own numbers has been going on since the establishment of ISBN and isn't unique to e-books, but the issue is coalescing now around the obligations of a publisher to 'correctly apply' the ISBN standard to e-books.

At a meeting this week at AAP NYC a number of publishers expressed doubts about the need for this requirement. As a participant in the revision of the standard my view was simple. A publisher should want to manage and control the meta-data associated with all their products and enabling - by omission - the need for someone else to apply their own information never seemed prudent to me. Secondly, the veracity of the ISBN system is brought into question if more than one entity applies separate numbers to the same content. This occurs if B&N and Amazon sell the same e-book in the same format but in the absence of a publisher number they apply their own identifier.

At least one major publisher at the AAP meeting is not following the standard and after several years of distributing e-books and applying one ISBN irrespective of format (.epub for example) they are seeing no issues with confusion or misuse of their meta data. This is a powerful argument and comes from a publisher that is highly protective of their bibliographic information. If reflective of a general consensus the ISBN board should reconsider the wording of there directive. For example, simply changing the wording by inserting the words 'publishers may apply ISBNs to separate formats' would give enough latitude to those publishers that see a need to apply separate ISBNs and those that do not.

There are several qualifications (and others may raise more). Firstly, the issue of downstream partners which need identifiers for their internal process requirements must be governed. For example, in those cases where a publisher expects detailed sell-thru data they may provide ISBN's. If a downstream partner can only use a 13 digit identifier in their systems the publisher may require the partner to use an ISBN provided by the publisher. If the partner can use a non-ISBN (but NOT a dummy ISBN/13 digit id) such as letters and numbers the publisher may see no need to apply ISBN's. Secondly, the danger that rogue ISBNs that are intended to operate only within the operating systems of specific partners (wholesalers, vendors, etc.) escape into the supply chain causing confusion and much remediation is a real one and should be recognised. Currently, there aren't that many e-books and there aren't that many publishers working outside the recommendations of the standard. As e-books explode in distribution, data integrity problems that are virtually non-existent today may become very relevant issues very quickly.

Lastly, in a supply chain world where suppliers and retailers are racing (admittedly not a sprint more a marathon) to apply unique identifiers on individual items via RFID, this discussion runs counter to the logic other more sophisticated industries are following. Quite rightly, with volumes as small as they are, it may not be interesting to know which e-book versions seem to perform better, or get less customer service/help desk calls, or which package of products seem to show up on what platform or which segment of buyers seems to have what behavioral characteristics, or which partner seems to sell what types of products or formats, or which formats tend to be pirated more or less, and on and on and on. As the chain becomes flatter - as it is - publishers are going to want to know this stuff and tying a user to a format may be critical to all aspects of what they do.

What do you think? Should publishers be mandated to provide unique ISBNs for every format or should another identifying system be created for the "downstreamers"?