Storms brewing beyond Sandy

First and foremost I am incredibly fortunate that my family and home got through Sandy with little more than being inconvenienced for few days.  Far too many people were dealt incredibibly difficult circumstances from Sandy with serious damage to their homes, loss of precious possessions and having their lives turned upside down by this storm.  Trying to get back to the way things were will be months and years for some communities. 

So while has Sandy managed to push the fever pitch of the Presidential election out of the news, news in publishing is just as seismic with the announcement of the pending merger between Random House and Penguin.  Markus Dohle issued a thoughtfull and reassuring letter to booksellers, agents and authors.  I took the copy from PW along with the posted comments from Robert Gotlieb at Trident & Peter Riva who is also a well known agent who have a clear contrast of opinion - it is interesting to read them together, speculating who is correct will play out for everyone in the next couple of years.. 

Regardless if this is good or bad for the industry, it is the reality and probably not only domino in-line as consildation in any industry comes in bunches.  If anything is clear, publishing is no where near done changing.  It has undergone more transition in the last 3-4 years than it has in a half century and it is probably just getting started.  I know I am here to talk about BEA, but it feels too self serving if I do that now, especially in light of watching people struggle to get some normalcy back in their life after Sandy.  Still it is important to know that change brings opportunity.  Where Sandy brought change that is having maps re-drawn from Connecticut down to the bottom of the Jersey Shore, change is opportunity to rebuild in a way that makes sense and will survive for the new reality.   The same is opportunity is here for publishing.  I feel BEA is ahead of the curve for the industry with the changes we have implemented and will continue as BEA intends to remain the most important event in North America for the publishing industry.

Dohle Addresses Booksellers, Authors and Agents About Merger

Oct 29, 2012
CEO of Random House, Markus Dohle, has sent three letters--to booksellers, authors and agents--addressing the momentous news about his publishing company merging with Penguin. The letters, intended to offer elaboration on the merger, the possibility of which sent shock waves through the industry last week, are also intended to calm three of the house's publishing partners, who are no doubt concerned about what the future will now hold.

In his letter to booksellers, Dohle said the new company will be better equipped to "deliver amazing books, innovative sales and marketing creativity, and the best-in-class supply chain support, all of which will combine to help you to continue to connect our authors with your readers." The CEO did not, however, offer specifics on these things, noting instead that new company will not actually come into being for some time. Dohle said that, for now, "Random House and Penguin remain competitors" and, until the merger is approved by the government, which he suspects will happen in "the second half of 2013," it is impossible to "discuss post-closing plans."

Addressing authors, Dohle said one aspect of the merger he is "most excited about" is the creation of a company that is "author-publisher-and editor-centered--just like Random House." He added that authors will "benefit from an extraordinary breadth of publishing choices and editorial talents and experience," when the two biggest members of the Big Six merge. He also assured writers that the new company will remain "endowed withcreative autonomy, and financial resources, to decide which books to publish, and how to publish them." Dohle also noted that Penguin Random House will "supply more services for physical retailers, while expanding our opportunities in the digital space."

To agents, who have been particularly worried about the effect the merger will have on advances, Dohle promised many of the same things as he did to authors. He also assured agents that backlist will remain "a priority." Again, though, the theme returned to the "breadth of publishing choices" this new company will offer. The CEO closed by saying the goal is to "publish the content you entrust us with for everyone, everywhere, in every format, and on every platform."

Read the full version of each letter below.
Dohle's letter to booksellers.  Dohle's letter to agents.  Dohle's letter to authors.

·         Robert Gottlieb · Top Commenter

Trident does a great deal of business with both companies. Recently S&S virtually shut down The Free Press. Bantam Books is a shell of what it once was as Ballantine has emerged as the major player in the Bertelsmann group. I don't see how this merger will increase the "breadth of publishing choices"? I believe it will be just the opposite. Mr. Dohle who I have a great deal of respect for and has done a magnificent job at Random House says agents only have their eye on what size advances will be. Trident is first and foremost interested in our author's careers. We believe money follows success in the market place. The consolidation of publishing divisions will occur in this merger. Will the Viking Children's group remain an fully functioning operation or will their sales force and the children's book division at Random House be merged? If not how will they compete along side one another? Those are the kinds of serious concerns authors and agents should have in part in connection with this size merger. I am not only thinking of the above but about Berkley books and Ballantine books as an example. When those sales forces are combined and there are only a handful of slots for major authors open as lead titles what authors will benefit and which one's will end up taking a second or third place position on the list? Random House and Penguin really don't care about the unintended consequences of this act but the publishing industry does. When there is a book auction who will be favored in the new publishing giant. Will it be baby Random or Putnam's when it comes to one on one completive submission? Right now we are already told that if there are only two imprints inside Bertelsmann bidding that one will drop out in favor of the other. They simply won't seriously bid against each other. In countries like the Netherlands publishers have understandings amongst each other that they won't bid on each other's authors so competition is highly reduced. In Germany I have personally seen executives at Bertelsmann call competitors and ask them not to make offers on authors they are publishing when an agent is thinking of moving the author. The other published agreed because of their fear of the size and strength of Bertelsmann in Germany. None of us should be lulled into a transe over the company line that is being told to us as one firm intends to dominate the publishing market place.

Robert Gottlieb
Chairman
Trident Media Group, LLC.
www.tridentmediagroup.com

·         Peter Riva · Top Commenter

I have many fears here, not all of which are within Markus's control, I fear. In Random's statement (parsed down by me): "With our backlist always a priority, Random House expects the new company to offer an even deeper catalogue, alongside our newly," but damn fewer, "published titles....as we continue to transition in the digital space." And there it is. How to tame the digital space? Become bigger seems to be the answer. I fear like the car companies of old (UK's British Leyland and US's GM and Chrysler and France's Renault), bigger will mean less financially stable, less fluid, less competitive. Which leads me to his next comment, which I doubt going forward especially for debut authors, "And we will be even better positioned to support our authors’ intellectual property and copyrights." This is NOT about advances for us agents, this is about marginalizing debut authors and non-branded authors in favor of MBA type supermarket sales and marketing efforts. Good for the investor, bad for the literary world, I fear.And in the end bad for business. The car company example is effective, I believe. Looks good on paper, becomes too big to fail for investors, terrible for the consumer.

 

Stealing a post and Summarizing the BISG Annual Member Meeting

I attended the BISG Annual Membership Meeting last week and expected a chance to catch up with some industry people and colleagues sandwiched by a couple of dry presentations.  That is not a knock on BISG, that is the nature of these type of events.  I was pleasantly surprised with a really interesting morning that concluded with a terrific panel discussion (wonderful job of moderating by Len Vlahos). There were great write-ups by many but I particularly enjoyed Michael Shatzkin's wrap and opinions (pasted below).  The bulk of Mr. Shatzkin's post focused on the closing panel, which was the highlight of the meeting.  

I have used the BookStats data and the presentation by Tara Catogge of Readerlink was the most eye opening to see how powerful that data can be when used and applied.  My take on things - the future is full of opportunity and risks. Ken Michaels had the best quote of the day (I am paraphrasing) it is critical to make investments and bets on new opportunities and but to succeed, you have to know when to walk away!   I did leave that meeting feeling energized and inspired.  Most notably - Direct to Consumer is going to be a critical cog in the wheel that is the future of publishing.

The Shatzkin Files

Three words of wisdom: standards, rights, & data

Posted by Mike Shatzkin on October 1, 2012 at 8:02 am · Under Conferences, General Trade Publishing, Industry Events, Licensing and Rights, Supply-Chain

The Book Industry Study Group’s annual membership meeting on Friday concluded with a panel discussion among four industry executives who have leadership roles in the group. They are also four of the sharpest minds in publishing and they all had provocative things to say. Recollection of detail is not my strongest suit and I didn’t take any notes, but all of them said things that stuck with me and which struck me as ideas that deserve more attention than they get.

Dominique Raccah, the founder and CEO of Sourcebooks, made the now-obvious (but new to me that morning) point that we are going to have to streamline generating metadata in multiple languages to take advantage of emerging global markets.

Maureen McMahon, the CEO of Kaplan, which serves a very targeted audience, recalled that five years ago she was able to track her very discrete list of competitors and closely calculate her market share. But as an information-provider, she now finds competitors can pop up from anywhere.

Ken Michaels, just appointed President of Hachette Book Group USA, reminded us that 70% of the sales are still print. He said that we need to stop talking about digital as if digital is all there is; that just as media and consumer habits are converging so must the approach publishers take to running their business. He stressed building workflows around content, not product, so you can curate and compose once for all formats, and incorporating digital as a way of life, even in publicity and marketing, rather than having any stand-alone digital workflows. In other words, it is time to integrate digital, not treat it as a thing apart.

All great insights, but what I really took to heart was some simple wisdom from Tom Turvey of Google. Turvey is spending a lot of time outside the US these days, as Google Play opens in markets across the globe. He reminds us that we are way ahead of everybody else in digital change. That means that potential markets abroad are only in their earliest stages of development. He sees that the publishers in those markets –and we as well — need to concentrate on three things: standards, rights, and data.

Standards, rights, and data. These are the three elements which can restrain digital growth, or propel it. They’d also serve as a good short summary of BISG’s agenda. Turvey took the opportunity to say that every country needs a BISG, but not every country has one.

Standards, of course, are a community endeavor. It is not for any one publishing player to create standards on their own for everybody else. If you’re powerful enough, like Amazon, it might be in your best interest not to throw yourself wholeheartedly into participation in standards that make it easier for others to compete with you. But, as publishers well know, insufficient standards can cost a lot of money, rendering content for different screens or even subtly different applications of epub or Adobe.

The challenges with rights are, first, having them, and second, making sure a file’s metadata spells them out clearly. One of the the first rules I learned when I came into publishing decades ago was “acquire rights broadly, license rights narrowly”. That is practice which was unambiguously the wisest commercial course until our current and developing age of digital delivery. Now agents (or publishers) having licensed rights “narrowly” can cause books not to be available to customers who would be happy to buy them when they easily could be doing so.

Data is a combination of an industry problem and an individual publisher challenge. The digital age is presenting us all with new metrics if we can gather and use them: from websites and Twitter and Facebook, as well as from publishers’ sales. We are beginning to learn what marketing and social activities move the sales needle and we’re finding it isn’t necessarily the same for different kinds of books. BISG and AAP have joined forces to deliver BookStats, the most rational and accurate book industry sales data we’ve ever had in the US and perhaps the most accurate industry data in the world. Tara Catogge of Readerlink Distribution Services did an eye-opening presentation of what that database can do earlier in the show, but we’re still at the earliest stages of learning how best to use it and we’re as blind as we’ve ever been everywhere else.

Standards, rights, and data. Publishers could benefit by reviewing their practices and progress in all three areas at a senior level on a regular basis. My hunch is that some, including the ones who joined Turvey on that stage, already do.

Two of those BISG panelists, Raccah and Michaels, are among the “innvoators” presenting at our Publishers Launch Conference next Monday, 10:30-6:30, at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Dominique will be talking about two new initiatives from Sourcebooks and Ken will be explaining the value of SaaS — software as a service — to modern publishing IT departments, including some tools his team at Hachette has developed and are making available to the industry. Pub Launch Frankfurt will also feature a presentation from Noah Genner, who runs Book Net Canada — their version of BISG — about a survey of Canadian book consumers they’ve just done: more about data.

BEA Bloggers Conference News

I am jumping the gun a little as we are still waiting on a couple of confirmations from a few book bloggers that have been invited to be on the BEA Book Bloggers Advisory Committee.  However, I had promised we would announce by mid-September so I thought it would be better to announce the bulk of those that committed than wait too long.  I am also pleased to announce that Maggie Donovan, who had been the conference coordinator on BEA and another Reed event (Global Gaming Expo or G2E) was promoted to Conference Manager.  Makenzie Lynch joined the BEA team filling Maggie's previous role as the Conference Coordinator.  There are a lot of helping hands at BEA, but I am particularly happy as Maggie worked a lot on the BEA Bloggers Conference (BBC) last year.  Maggie got to meet and talk with many bloggers this past June and genuinely understands the interests of the blogging community at BEA.    

Below are the book bloggers that have accepted our invitation to participate on the BBC Conference Advisory Board.  Their primary responsibility will be to develop the conference program that we produce for the 2013 event as well as to advise BEA on issues related to the BBC with a perspective that advocates for book bloggers and their needs. The expectation is they will know the most important issues to present at the BBC and the best people in the community and publishing industry that can represent a given topic or program.  

Our G2E event is in 2 weeks, so Maggie and Makenzie are swamped until then, after that it is full steam ahead for BEA and the BBC.  You can send  conference  suggestions to Maggie at mdonovan@reedexpo.com.   Starting in November, there be a 'call for papers' to solicit conference submissions on the BBC page on the BEA site as well as a list of the complete advisory committee after we can confirm everyone's participation. 

• Danielle Smith -http://www.theresabook.com/ - Children's
• Pam van Hylckama bookalicio.us/ - Book news and reviews the latest and greatest
• Jane Litte - http://dearauthor.com - Romance 
• Mandy Boles - WellReadWife.com - General  - Everything from YA to Literary Fiction
• Marybeth Whalen - www.shereads.org  Debut novelists and those writers who are not receiving the attention they deserve