"Put quality first; don’t get greedy."
The world of books seems to be having a bit of an identity crisis right now. Isn't it great?
The publishing industry may be on the precipice of doom - we just don't know where our livelihood and our passion is going.
But whatever your own personal take might be on where publishing and bookselling is going in the future, the one great aspect to this whole wave of nervous self-regard is that everybody's got an opinion, and everybody's got someplace to let their voice be heard. There are a lot of pundits out there, prognosticating about our future.
When I wake up in the morning, and make my way to the desk with coffee in hand, it's easy for me to think that I work on the side of the angels. I represent a whole raft of independent publishers, university presses, poorly paid but insanely creative authors, etc. I sell their books to (almost exclusively) independent bookstores. When I'm not selling to indie bookstores, I'm calling on a few larger companies based in my territory, and I'm working to convince those big guys to give the up-and-coming publishers and authors a shot. Once I'm done patting myself on the back, though, the cold reality of bookselling right now can be a bit scary.
But here are a few thoughts that help keep me centered as I work with my booksellers and talk to my publishers:
- I know that words certainly aren't going anywhere. If anything, there're going to be more words than ever before. Words are what we do. It's not bound packs of paper or shiny discs or packets of bits. The question is, which collections of words are going to be free and which ones will be worth paying money for?
- You'd have to be pretty clueless to witness the rise of online self-publishing, blogging, citizen journalism and the whole social media whirl and continue thinking that everything is going to continue on the way it did 50 years ago or even 25 years ago. Some people's profit margins are going to be clipped but good.
- It's a truism in bookselling that you keep an ear on what your customers are asking for and special ordering. That's how you know where your store's holes are. Likewise, how can you not pay attention to the sections that aren't selling because of fundamental changes in the business? That's the fin in the water - you get out of the water on that beach and find a safer beach.
- I know I'm not the only one with this perspective, but I think everybody's excessively freaked out about e-books right now. Instead of trying to hash out the one perfect solution and the one industry standard before we all move forward in lockstep, I say let a million flowers bloom. I want a chaotic blur of different options, e-readers, file formats and marketing strategies. Let the market speak and we'll see what works best.
So where do indie publishers fit in this scary new world? And my beloved indie bookstores? This is the great part. There will always be niches where scrappy publishers with new ideas can thrive. And I believe that there will continue to be a portion of the publishing world that continues to need retail space to reach their customers - no matter what format those stores are selling.
And I'm not the only one thinking like this. I read a few articles and blog posts tonight that got me reviewing my own place in this business, and wanting to try to express my own thoughts on this.
I came across this post at the New Yorker's Book Bench: Rise of the Indie Publisher. That's where I got the quote that headlines this post - "put quality first, don't get greedy."
Forgive me if I hear an echo of Michael Pollan's foodie manifesto from the New York Times in 2007: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Maybe we need our own crystalizing manifesto for reinventing publishing?
The NYer blog post links to indie publisher Two Dollar Radio's Eric Obenauf and his column in the Brooklyn Rail, called The Revenge of Print, that circulated widely earlier this week on Twitter. One of his main points is that big conglomerates are going to be in trouble, but "there is space for print not only to exist in modern society, but to thrive, if undertaken on a realistic scale."
Eric discusses a number of indie publishers who are currently operating in the shadow of the major conglomerates, yet are actually achieving "the mission for book publishers and print media at large should be to create a product that is irreplaceable and indispensible."
From Eric's column, here's a list of some indie publishers who are operating on what he calls a "responsible scale": Europa Editions, Seven Stories Press, Bellevue Literary Press, Akashic Books, Soft Skull Press, Melville House, and City Lights.
I would add more names to the list of exemplars: Arsenal Pulp Press, Feminist Press at CUNY, Coffee House Press, Graywolf Press, Small Beer Press, Copper Canyon Press, Dzanc Books, Soho Press, McSweeney's Books, Milkweed Editions, Exact Change, Tin House Books, Unbridled Books and upstart little guys Busted Flush Press and Exterminating Angel Press.
Other voices that are helping me to make sense of the future: Richard Nash. Booksquare's Kassia Krozser (especially this piece). Kat Meyer & Charlotte Abbott (Follow The Reader). I like to read Bethanne Patrick at The Book Maven. Check out Quartet Press from Kat & Kassia & Kirk Biglione. Pablo Defendini, web producer for Tor.com, is doing really creative online publishing and marketing for Macmillan.
What else? You know I'm all about the rich connections that social media is helping us build. Richard Nash notoriously epigrammatized himself at BEA when he said that "Twitter will not save publishing" but if you want to be inspired by its potential to help publishing, take a look at what Unbridled is doing with their own Twitter account, with their staff, and their authors (Masha Hamilton, Jason Quinn Malott, Elise Blackwell, Colin Dickey, Edward Falco, Emily St. John Mandel, Eric Barnes, etc.) I don't think there's another publisher with a greater proportion of their authors taking part in the great Twitter conversation with booksellers and readers.
We're all trying to find our way through this muddle - and with books coming from great indie publishers like those mentioned above, and social networking tools like Twitter to help us find our way together - I'm feeling pretty OK about the future of publishing and bookselling.
July 17, 2009
Reader Comments (10)
Magnificent post, out of which I can't help but want to highlight one item—you'll note that Eric's otherwise wise article conflates indie with print, and corporate with digital. This is a potentially devastating error. The entire independent press phenomenon has depended on technology from the get-go, its ability to lower barriers to entry and undermine the oligopolistic status quo ante. To turn our back on technology right now would be to betray our writers and readers. Your post, John, makes it clear you embrace the usefulness of technology, and I hope your vision of its usefulness can help illuminate things for independents who falsely conflate it with corporate vacuity...
Richard:
But I believe in this post that the examples that John uses are in reference to social networking, which I'm not turning my back on at all. It's quite the opposite, actually. I definitely understand the value of technology in inspiring a conversation. We recently learned that our website is a Web100 site, which I say only to illustrate how seriously we at Two Dollar Radio take the internet and technology.
I had hoped that the underlying message in my Rail piece was that the media was over-hyping e-books and "the death of print," and that corporate houses are staking too much on the future of e-books. Which I'm actually fine with and wish them well. As I said -- and as consumers are beginning to realize -- they're going to need to expand on their technology to truly make it worthwhile, developing e-books that are more interactive and gimmicky (more like videogames, less like "books"). I just think that the media needs to spend more time and attention examining the other aspects of the argument.
The corporate publishers aren't staking anything on the death of print. In fact, they have far more to lose by a migration of reading habits from print to digital than independent publishers do—one of their biggest advantages over independents is the economies of scale—marginal costs are far tougher for independents to deal with than corporate publishers, everywhere from printing costs to distribution to retail co-op, notwithstanding the efforts of distributors like PGW, CBSD, IPG, etc. Digital reproduction advantages independents economically far more than corporate publishers. Corporate publishers are staking the future on a notion of digital radically different from what is in fact happening in the real world. In fact, their biggest mistake is they they think they can graft online marketing and social media marketing atop an otherwise completely unevolved business model.
It's clear from what has happened in every other form of art, news, and entertainment that digital has provided the smaller players with more power relative to the big ones, provided they stay true to a passionate networks of creators and fans, be it in news, music, film or video. Fewer people are watching TV, and more people reading, than ever before, and the substance of the reading has more to do with what people want than what advertising, or media oligopolies forced down our throats up until a few years ago.
Ultimately, you can't base any strategy on a theory about corporate publishing. You have to base it on what your readers want. Listen to them, not what you think corporate publishers are saying. If you choose not to do digital downloads of your books, OK, you know your stuff is good enough that some folks will find it whether it's digital or not, but I beg you at least to not think you're somehow sticking it to the man by eschewing it. Corporate publishers are terrified of digital, not vice versa.
One last comment: digital is in fact being driven by readers, initially in the romance and SF genres, but you and I both know so-called literary fiction is also a genre, and one that is most effective when bastardized with other genres. The real world of digital download reading is far more indie and personal than it is corporate and impersonal...
I'm definitely pro-technology - both in terms of social networking, new approaches to marketing and buzz-building and other yet-to-be invented methods of talking about books, and also in terms of e-books.
I have yet to see an approach that enables indie STORES to easily pursue selling e-books in their physical stores. That may come. I do have faith that there will soon be developments that will permit indie stores to sell e-books via their web sites, whether they be IndieBound or some other model. This is why I express interest in the original post about a million flowers blooming. Let's see all kinds of crazy ideas dip their toes into the marketplace.
From the aspect of indie PUBLISHERS, or really from the perspective of ANY publishers, I firmly believe that e-book is just another format. It's neither inherently evil nor inherently the savior of publishing. It's here now, though, and you'd be crazy to ignore it.
And I do think that indie publishers -- as we saw with indie music labels -- are freer and more able to sooner ditch that awful pelican called DRM. It comes down to what we may as well call O'Reilly's Axiom - "Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy." (Though widely quoted by Cory Doctorow, see http://tim.oreilly.com/pub/a/p2p/2002/12/11/piracy.html)
Who publishes the incredibly tiny slice of the authorial cheese wheel that doesn't have to worry about obscurity? Yep, the big guys.
The corporate publishers have too much invested with their oversized advances and all their lawyers and the layers upon layers of employees to turn a blind eye when an incremental loss to digital piracy starts to add up and begin looking like real money.
But, consistent with Eric's points in the Rail, indie publishers operate on a more modest scale, a more human scale, and that's where the other side of that coin begins to look attractive: it's actually the incremental addition of digital sales via e-books that starts to look like real money.
But a publisher our size does not have the same technological opportunities available as the corporate houses.
The reality is that based on our sales through Amazon, an indie press our size isn't permitted to set up a direct account to make our books available on the Kindle. We could go through Perseus’ Constellation program (which I don’t think I can say too much about because they made us sign a confidentiality agreement), but I don’t believe that you need a distributor to sell digital books.
I’m not opposed to ebooks, and I’m not deliberately taking a stand against them: the fact is that right now, I don’t believe that we would be making as much money as we should be by selling them through any ebook retail outlet. Believe it or not, it’s a financial decision, not a philosophical one.
Even if the real world of digital download reading is far more indie and personal than it is corporate and impersonal it still dramatically favors the corporate houses, based on percentage profit and accessibility. Right now, the software isn’t available that would level that playing field.
I believe that if we were really adventurous and courageous as indie publishers, rather than spending our time and energy diving into the ebook ocean, we should be developing an indie site to rival Amazon. In Germany, they have a retail site called Tubuk (http://tubuk.com/), which does exactly that. Unlike ebooks, the technology to do so is already available.
Aha, OK. This puts everything onto a more practical basis then, grand. Without breaching any confidentiality, I can say that the deal that Perseus would get from Amazon would be very similar to what Random House or S&S would get. What fee Perseus would take for the distribution service is unknown, but it is safe to assume that it is not more than the average take of a distributor of print books, which would be 12.5% of net. Given that the marginal cost of reproduction on print is more than zero, and that a corporate publisher is going to get a better deal than an independent publisher from their printer, then your marginal profit on a digital sale compared to a print sale is always going to be better relative to a corporate publisher's marginal profit on a digital sale relative to a print sale. Always.
I'm not saying that independents shouldn't be figuring out ways to level the playing field still more. Just saying that independents have a less unlevel playing field vis-a-vis corporate publishers on digital than they do on print. That's the actual economics.
So diving into the ebook ocean is an economically smart thing for an independent publisher to do, even if one were to assume a universe where e cannibalizes print on a 1-to-1 basis, whereas most data so far indicates that Kindle and Sony readers are not in fact substitutive sales but additative.
As regards a competitor to Amazon. The Book Depository is moving to the US, plus we have Powells and IndieBound, I'm not sure it would be a godo move to compete not only with Amazon, but with all those folks too?
. . .just wanted to add little hawthorne books of portland to the list of indie presses operating responsibly-- last i checked they were on their 5th or 6th printing of monica drake's clown girls . . .
John, I'm so glad to know that you've got your eye on Two Dollar Radio and Exterminating Angel. For a 2003-born house that's constantly compared against the e-book (and "wins," if such a victory is possible), check out Chin Music Press out of Seattle, WA.
I'd also recommend Tara Books, a publishing collective out of south India (but Consortium-distributed) who have been making books entirely by hand for 15 years. Print runs are typically between 2000-5000 copies, and the detailed screenprints are phenomenal.
(Full Disclosure: I work as a freelance publicity/marketing rep for indie presses, including these two listed above. However, I do so only because I was a long-time fan, and wrote both presses long, passionate love letters asking to help further their cause and find them new readers!)
> Jonathan - thanks for the reminder about Hawthorne Books. I sold them for a year or so when I worked at PGW, their distributor. Such lovely books, and such terrific taste in finding authors to champion.
> Jennifer - you mentioned two terrific publishers of beautiful books. I suppose I should have been a bit more clear in my original post about which of the publishersI listed that I'm actually selling now. It might have felt to me a bit like bragging - my colleagues and I are selling a lot of them, including those distributed by Consortium.
I don't believe that independents have a less unlevel playing field vis-a-vis corporate publishers on digital than they do on print.
Even if the profit margin b/t indies and corporate presses were the same on digital sales it wouldn't matter because now, and well into the foreseeable future, there exist fewer avenues for indies to sell their ebooks. And those places that do sell ebooks (Amazon) charge for promotions - if you like X, try Y, etc. - that indie or university presses can't realistically partake in.
I became acquainted with Calamari Press by finding a copy of The Singing Fish by Peter Markus on a table at Three Lives & Co. It stopped me in my tracks with its beautiful design and the illustrations sprinkled throughout. I sincerely doubt that a Calamari Press book would stand out from the stack on Amazon or somewhere else the way that their physical books do in stores. I would have to know the title ahead of time and do a search for it. If I forgot the title or misspelled the author name, I wouldn't be able to find it.
Independent bookstores are one of our greatest resources as independent book publishers. While others percentages might be different, I can say for us, that Amazon accounts for 3% of our total sales, while indie stores comprise well over 10 times that many (tip of the cap to John). In an indie bookstore, our books can be staff picks, recommended by staff, placed on a front table or window without our having to bribe them to do so, whereas every Barnes & Noble and Amazon you pay for placement. Until indie bookstores begin selling ebooks on the web, or an entirely new breed of online retail venue crops up that values equal placement over paid placement (which isn't likely, now or ever), then indie presses will always lag behind in ebooks.
And, I believe that your equation accounted for those under Perseus' umbrella, but what of the countless indies that don't have significant distribution? They would fall under Amazon's Self-Publisher criteria.
As to competing with Amazon: Indiebound services independent bookstores. It is far from easy to find books on their website, and those titles that are spotlighted are their "bestsellers" list, where I struggle to find a single title published by an independent or university press. The Book Despoitory will be good to have here as direct competition for Amazon, but will serve our actual community very little. I think that we need an online retail outlet that follows the Tubuk formula and functions as the Melville House Store in Brooklyn: only independently published books; no paid placement. Powell's could be the closest thing, but in their current capacity they service everybody.
I could see where in the future, as things get messier (as John hopes), all of these issues will be figured out, but that time is far from soon.