From online to print?

Since most of us are thinking and getting used to digital after being in the print world all our publishing lives, I found this article about an e-publisher experimenting with print interesting.

Book Publisher “Experiments” With Print: Christina M. Brashear, owner of e-book publisher Samhain, on her unconventional business model.

Macon, Ga.-based Samhain Publishing has found its niche in the world of book publishing, despite the fact that most of its titles aren’t resting on bookstore shelves. The e-book-minded publisher has only tread lightly in the world of traditional print publishing since it first opened up shop nearly three years ago.

While print versions of the company’s line of popular romance and erotica fiction are now more commonplace, Owner and Publisher Christina M. Brashear says these traditional books haven’t changed the main focus of providing electronic versions of Samhain’s titles. The publisher has achieved such success selling e-books to loyal readers, according to Brashear, that later this summer she will begin selling other publishers’ digital editions alongside Samhain’s titles on My Bookstore and More (www.MyBookstoreandMore.com), a retail Web site that Brashear also owns.

Brashear spoke with Book Business Extra on her approach to selling books.

Book Business Extra: Beginning primarily as an e-book publisher, what advantages did you see in also offering print versions of some of your titles?
Christina M. Brashear: You do get an idea of what is or isn’t going to do well in print by how well a book does in e-book form. I have found that booksellers who read e-books will write and ask when certain titles are going to go to print. I know those titles will do well and can plan an appropriate print run.

Extra: What challenges have you faced as you have started to delve into print?
Brashear: … I like being “green”—e-books don’t get returned and aren’t destroyed. [With print,] you have to plan carefully so your print runs are on target with the demand. Most of our titles stay in [print on demand (POD)], which can be a hardship because of the stigma attached to [POD]. … We gamble on certain titles and have print runs made based on what we project they will sell. We try to print enough to satisfy the first few months of orders, and then allow POD to fulfill on a continuing basis. If the book is very popular, we’ll go back to press and order additional print runs as demand necessitates.
The next toughest part would be learning to work with the industry schedule. In e-books, you can do things in a shorter time frame and make changes on the fly. With print, you’re planning January 2009’s schedule in February of 2008.

Extra: What did you learn from working with Amazon and Sony to offer your e-books in the formats that their e-readers—the Kindle and the Reader, respectively—use?
Brashear: … All the e-books are picked up by Amazon from Mobipocket, so there is no additional work on our part. I love that. Mobi and Amazon are the easiest of all the processes we have in place right now. We’re in the process of working with Sony to get the titles into the store. It’s not as smooth of a process as Amazon, but Amazon had the benefit [of a process] being already in place. Sony is new—a new device using a new file format. We hope to get everything worked out soon.

Extra: What challenges has the company’s rapid growth presented?
Brashear: … We’ve been on a hiring binge in the corporate offices—trying to address the problems of spreading the workload so the staff doesn’t burn out and collapse into a pile of quivering flesh on the floor. It’s a challenge to keep up with the old duties while incorporating the new, and not let anything slip through the cracks.
Leasing office space is the biggest change due to growth. It does not matter what your top or bottom line is, when someone in the business arena realizes you work from home, you are instantly discounted as not being a legitimate, real business. I miss working from home, but in all honesty, I couldn’t see hiring admin staff and having them in my home. We have a great location. We’re on the 15th floor of the tallest building in Macon, and we look out over this beautiful, quaint city.

Extra: What are the advantages of owning My Bookstore and More?
Brashear: With Samhain as a wholesale-only company, we don’t have to worry about frog-marching people back to the Samhain site to make the most money. I can list many various sites from which people can buy the e-books. We do this now for print, but we plan to [do this as well] with e-books in the next incarnation of the site.
My Bookstore and More was developed as a sister company to Samhain, so that Samhain could focus on the publishing of books and working with authors. Having [the site] as a totally separate entity from Samhain allows us to sell more than just the Samhain titles. We can sell any publisher’s titles by any author, though we have yet to really expand that side of things. That’s coming this summer, once we launch the new, more robust site. We manually add books [that our] authors tell us are available by them through other publishers. But we will be developing an interface with Ingram, so we can automatically update our available products with the latest books available.

The article also confirms what I've always thought: print isn't dead, it's just evolving into more of an "on demand" platform.

What do you think?

Quebecor World Creates New Publishing Services Group Integrating Magazine, Book and Directory Businesses

MONTREAL, CANADA--(Marketwire - June 17, 2008) - Quebecor World Inc. (TSX:IQW) today announced that it is integrating its Magazine, Book and Directory Divisions into a single operating structure. The new Publishing Services Group will streamline the Company's operations, improve services, and better serve existing and new publishing customers.

"This organizational change will unify the capabilities of Quebecor World's Magazine, Book and Directory Divisions under one operating platform. This customer focused platform will allow the Company to optimize its resources and cost structure to further improve service to our publishing customers," said Jacques Mallette, President and CEO Quebecor World Inc.

Kevin J. Clarke will lead this new Publishing Services Group. He has been President of Quebecor World's Book and Directory Publishing Services Group for the last 5 years. Mr. Mallette commented, "Kevin's extensive management experience in the printing industry and his customer focused approach make him uniquely qualified to lead the new integrated Publishing Services Group."

"The integrated Publishing Services Group is part of our ongoing efforts to meet and exceed the requirements of magazine, book and directory publishers and to ensure we are in a position to provide innovative market leading services" said Kevin J. Clarke, President of Publishing Services Group. "This consolidation is a logical streamlining of our core functions and will speed decision making to benefit both our customers and our employees."

Today's announcement follows the earlier integration of Quebecor World's U.S. Retail Insert, Catalog, Sunday Magazine and Direct Divisions into the Marketing Solutions Group and the integration of the Logistics and Premedia divisions under one operating structure. This enhanced U.S. operating structure, comprising three divisions instead of six, will result in greater synergies, shared resources and faster decision making with a focus on delivering complete value-added solutions to two principle customer bases, multi-channel marketers and publishers.

Kevin J. Clarke has 26 years of management experience in the printing industry. His career with the company began in 1982. He has held positions of increasing responsibility in the Magazine, Book and Directory divisions at Quebecor World, including Vice President of Sales, Vice President/General Manager, and Senior Vice President of Operations.

This is a trend that I've seen throughout the industry of late: operations are being streamlined to save money. This is not a bad thing per se, but short-term usually involves layoffs. Long-term this means that redundancies are removed and that similar processes are centralized and or standardized.

Do you think there's a better way for companies to save money in this economy? If so, please share.

Flexible E-Paper?

We all know that Amazon's Kindle, as popular as it is, is only the start of both e-readers and e-paper. Computer World reported on some of the other options out there, and they are pretty amazing, although not quite ready and/or cheap enough for mass consumption.

Do you plan on purchasing an e-reader? If so, why or why not? If not, what would it take to get you to reconsider?

Content on Demand

What do POD and digital have in common? Content on demand. What I mean by this, is that the modern consumer wants their content, and wants it now in whatever format they prefer.

As was repeated several times at the Book Business Expo hosted a few month's back, "content is king." How does this translate to the publisher trying to stay on top of the ever-evolving new media trends? How does this translate to the overwhelmed production professional trying to make all this work? It's very simple: let the consumer choose.

Develop good content, tag it with XML or whatever other format works for your CMS, and make the content available in all formats--simultaneously. Let the consumer choose whether they want to buy the book as a traditional print product; a pdf to be read on their laptop; or for their Kindle or Sony Reader (or whatever the next generation e-reader will be). Price these products appropriately, make it easy for the consumer to choose, and they will and will probably keep coming back.

It's obviously not that easy to get to that point, and this may vary from publishing sector to sector, but the more I read about what works and what doesn't, the more I believe it's really about "content on demand" and allowing the reader to choose.

Another example of this is in the educational market. Instead of professors having to create student reading packs to be copied and bound by the university copy center, they can now choose "custom" textbooks. Although only Wiley offers this now, I'm sure that others will soon too, since this is the "content on demand" trend at its best.

So for your given sector of the industry, what are the choices your reader is looking for and how will you make these more readily available to them?

New Web Authoring Tool

Since the web is here to stay, and publishing veterans can't necessarily learn all the new technology fast enough to help their companies compete, where does that leave them?

Aptara has come up with a solution, as Marketwire announced today: PowerXEditor, a user-friendly Google Doc-like web authoring tool that any publishing professional can use and that can be easily integrated into the company's current of future CMS.

Although being familiar with web basics is still necessary and helpful, user-friendly web authoring tools will help bridge the gap for those less tech savvy and will therefore keep publishing moving in the right direction.

How to Save the Publishing Industry, as per Henry Blodget

Despite Harry Potter selling 8.3 million copies in 24 hours, book publishers only sold 0.9% more books in 2007 than 2006--less than the country's rate of population growth.

How can publishers fix their business? Not by killing more trees. By radically retooling the business model.

Hardcover books should cost $25. And publishers should keep printing them--for people who want to buy them. Meanwhile, for everyone else, publishers should publish cheap electronic copies for 20% (or less) of the hardcover price.

$4.99 for a first run bestseller, downloadable to your Kindle, PC, or iPod--or simply readable on the Internet. The retailer keeps $1 or so, the author gets $1 or so, and the publisher takes home about $3. Some of that goes to marketing and some to overhead. And then you're left with the typical publisher profit of less than $1 (no returns, manufacturing, or distribution costs).

But here's what happens: book sales suddenly go through the roof.

Why?

Because you've made buying a book almost a no-never-mind. At $4.99, buying a book is like buying a couple of magazines: you can buy them on a whim and feel free to skim them. At $25, meanwhile, buying a book is like buying a two-pound guilt trip: Until you slog your way through it, you don't deserve to buy another one.

With a similar margin per book sold, cannibalization wouldn't matter. If publishers really wanted to get aggressive, however, they could cut book prices to, say, $1.99, compress all the revenue splits, and watch sales truly explode. Especially when they made available the out-of-print catalogs.

All that matters is the bottom line, and going digital could quickly resurrect the profit growth of the publishing industry. Unfortunately, right now, the publishing industry is obsessed with maintaining the status quo--which means print units and revenue.

Get over it folks. Time to get your butts out to Cupertino (Apple / AAPL) and Seattle (Amazon / AMZN), cut some real deals, and save your dying industry (and some trees, while you're at it).

I remember my finance professor at NYU explaining how, with the current return and advance policy, that everyone from publisher to bookseller had to mark up their prices to ensure they made their necessary gross margin. And although I don't necessarily agree with Mr. Blodget that sales will skyrocket as soon as prices go down with digitalization of all books, I do think that this is a growing market and a necessary direction for publishers to take.

To make the most profit of this change, publishers need to first fine-tune how to publish content on cross-platforms without further cost in translation, which is where XML and CMS comes in, and they need to figure out how to market to this new market.

And given how far some publishers have come, I don't think the industry is dead: it's just having a slow rebirth, which is only natural (ask any mother).

Publishing Trends

If you've signed up for PW Daily, or go to the Publishers Weekly website, these are some of the headlines you'll have seen in the last few days:

• Penguin Sees Major E-Book Sales Spike
• On Demand Titles Drive Jump in Book Output
• B&N Launches Mobile Friendly Retail Site

What's their common denominator? Non-traditional publishing platforms and operations. So while traditional publishing continues to be shaky, non-traditional publishing is ever-evolving and growing.

Publishing companies, as the above headlines indicate and as the recent BISG seminar indicated, are making appropriate adjustments. But professionals, especially print production ones, need to adjust as well. Personally, I've been taking web design and coding classes, signed up for alerts and blogs, and am just trying to keep abreast of all the changes and trends.

What adjustments have you made and which ones do you feel have or can be the most useful to keep your career on track?