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#PublisherFail: The ONE Thing Big Pub Must Change In Order To Survive, Pt. 2

(cont'd from Part 1)

Meanwhile, your industry is investing its time and money in practices, devices and technologies intended to keep control of, and broad accessibility to, your products out of the hands of your customers. You don’t release every book in print, audio and ebook formats. You release very few titles in audiobook form, yet fight against Text To Speech (TTS) technology even on books you have no intention of ever releasing in audiobook form. You don’t show strong support for cross-platform ebook standards, yet you fully support the proprietary file formats used on the Kindle and Sony Reader. Having learned nothing from PR debacles in the music and film industries, you are moving to criminalize your customers with stringent DRM.

You believe your products are special and your role as their producer grants you both rights and responsibilities over and above the mere needs of your customers. 

With respect to TTS and DRM, Big Pub hides behind a shield of ‘protecting the interests of the artist’, just as music and film producers have done in the past. But it didn’t take long for those producers to realize motivated pirates and hackers will always exist, and withholding purchase and use options from your entire customer base in order to discourage the criminal acts of a few is a bad business decision. They also realized customers are willing to pay for digital media, and in fact will buy digital media just as often as hard copy media, so long as it’s convenient, affordable, and meets their needs. Free from your curator complex, they’ve embraced digital media to the fullest extent and are reaping the benefits.

The software, videogame and film industries take cross-platform support for their customers a step further by providing simplified or downsampled versions of their products for use on mobile devices. No one playing Guitar Hero on a Nintendo DS expects the same gaming experience as playing the full-featured console game, no one using MS Office Mobile expects to find the same feature set as regular MS Office, and no one watching a movie on an iPod expects the same audience experience as seeing the film in a theater. Makers of these products understand that on a portable device the customer’s priority is—surprise!—portability. Content and functionality matter to customers too, but customers are willing to trade bells and whistles for convenience and cost savings.

When you start down the road to release a book in electronic, portable form, you begin with the assumption that you must preserve the “integrity of the page” and “integrity of print branding”. If you can’t exactly duplicate the frames and shading employed in sidebars, or get the tiny graphic of the geek with his finger in the air to display in the exact location and size as they appear in the print book, you don’t want to release an electronic version at all. Even when working with a minimally-formatted book like a novel, you strive to preserve original fonts, typesetting and layout details in the ebook version. You set up task forces, invest in development of new devices, software and technologies, and generally make things much harder and more expensive than they need to be.

You appear to be completely oblivious to the fact that one of the major draws of the ebook is the flexibility users have in controlling how the text is displayed. Most e-reading software and devices allow the user to change the font, font size, line spacing, orientation of the page, and sometimes even the font and page colors. All your efforts to preserve the “integrity of the page” are wasted.

Nevertheless, you pass the expense of these efforts on to the ebook buyer, and as a result your customers think you’re ripping them off on ebooks. You repeatedly defend your pricing on the grounds that your overhead in producing an ebook is comparable to producing a print book, but you leave out the part where you could provide a simplified version of the ebook at a much lower cost—a cost consumers would find much more reasonable and appealing. You ignore the customer’s priorities (portability, convenience and cost savings) in favor of your own, self-imposed priorities. Once again, it’s because you believe your products are special and you answer to a higher calling than serving your customer base.

Even your unsustainable policies concerning bookseller returns are the direct result of placing your flawed self-image and industry traditions above the needs of your customers. Chain bookstores are no longer the only game in town for bookselling and consumers already know the chains can’t compete with online vendors for selection or price, with ‘big box’ stores for convenience or price, nor with indie booksellers for service. None of your customers’ priorities are being served by chain booksellers (which is why they’re suffering a slow economic death), yet you continue to remain in voluntary bondage to the chains and even grant them preferential terms.

When chain record stores like Musicland and Tower Records began to falter, record labels didn’t engage in efforts to prop them up or prolong the inevitable. Instead, the labels followed their customers into new markets and new distribution models. If you didn’t feel beholden to the ‘old ways’ of bookselling, you would do the same.

If you want to take the high road and place artistic integrity and tradition above profit, that’s fine. Independent imprints do it all the time. The only problem is, preservation of artistic integrity and tradition often exists at cross-purposes to mass-market economic demands. You want all the big profits that come from serving the mass market, yet believe you are entitled to deny the wants of that market whenever you choose, with no impact on your bottom line. You feel justified in forcing your customers to subsidize the costs and suffer the inconveniences of your misguided efforts in curatorship.
 

Let libraries, museums, academics and critics decide which of your products are worthy of preservation, just as they do in art, film and music. Drop your curator complex, and suddenly all the ancillary challenges and crises that eat up most of your days and resources fall away. Of course you will always have the challenge of trying to forecast which products will be most popular to your customers, but so does every other business that produces consumer products.

Letting go of costly, needless business practices reduces your risk on each individual product, and enables you to open up new revenue streams that can help balance the overall profitability scales when an individual product fails. Focus on making your customers’ priorities your own, and the way forward becomes obvious.

And lest you think your industry can never fail completely, since people will always need sources of information, inspiration and entertainment…there’s an app for that. Lots of them, actually.
 

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April L. Hamilton is the author of The IndieAuthor Guide and the founder of Publetariat. Her latest book is From Concept to Community.

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Oh, I love that article

I have written - yes, let me call it a book! It is not a novel; novels seem to be the pinnacle of literature and even in self publishing the one thing everythig is measured against.
My book consists of stories, a collection of columns, which either might be able to pleasantly kill a bit of time for holiday travellers, or nicely illustrated in full colour and bound in hardcover might make a nice gift. Sort of a children's book for adults. It is not big art, was never intented to be, and I am not after writing art anyway. I'm not after royalties either,yet. It is my first pamphlet, I want to see it out there. I want to learn from it. I want to find out if I am overestimating my talent.
Now, I have an illustrator, and parts of my stuff is about fashion, hence colour makes a lot of sense. Full colour print is expensive, so I thought by myself: Do the full colour anyway, you can use it for promotion and a few people might like it. Do the B&W paperback and the e-book as well to spread your future fame world wide.
Ha! Even online publishers seem to have adopted a certain snobbism. If I want to have global distribution via the usual big suspects I have to stick with a rather huge format, and for the coloured hard cover I am lucky if I get it offered in one size which is so boring that I rather not do it. Most of them don't do hardcover + colour at all. What is the point of that? I have loads of books of the type I want on my book shelf, but I can't get mine printed the same way.
Without knowing a lot about this business I didn't really dare thingking all the things mentioned in the article, although pursuing fame I am still a modest gal, and now I stumbled over this wonderful article confirming all my hunches.
Thank you! Thank you!
I might never be successful, but you give me the confidence to at least try. I understand that traditional publishers are not interested in taking a risk with me, so I have decided for online publishing anyway. So it is my rear I will be falling onto, and I wish the readers to decide about that.

Why hardbacks come first

FYI--the reason hardbacks come out first is to take full advantage of the just-can't-wait market.  Many books are never released in hardback.  PBO (paperback only) is standard.

It's the potential big sellers which go through the full cycle of hardback/trade paperback/mass market paperback.  People buy the latest Twilight in hardback because they simply must have it as soon as humanly possible.  If the paperback were released simultaneously, at least some of them would buy the paperback instead, and less money would flow to bookstore and publisher and author.

J. Random Writer's debut book usually isn't published in hardcover at all, unless there's some special reason to think it'll be huge.

 

 

  • By Anonymous (not verified) at 10/08/2009 - 12:20
  • reply

Hardbacks vs. Soft Covers

Anonymous -

Given that publishers could just as easily (and less expensively) release a softcover for any book first, and the majority of hardcovers (like all books) fail to "earn out", I think my point still stands that publishers would significantly reduce their risk and increase their sales if they released everything in soft cover first---making allowances for special editions, textbooks, library bindings and the like, of course. Which is smarter: selling 5,000 copies of a $35 hardback, or 20,000 copies of a $15 soft cover? You might respond that it's smarter still to do both, exploiting the hardcover market first and then tapping the softcover market, but as you probably know, a hardcover that fails to earn out will not be re-released in soft cover by the same publisher.

Also, by the time the soft cover is available following a hardback release, in most cases on-the-fence consumers will have either borrowed it from a friend or library or forgotten about it. Monster hits like the Harry Potter and Dan Brown books are exceptional in this regard, but I'm speaking to the great majority of books, which are not blockbusters.

 

Great Post

I find it pretty comical that some folks on a writer forum elsewhere have gotten up in arms about this post, acting like you don't know what you're talking about.  You talk solid business sense and it's time the publishing industry came to understand they aren't magical.  They aren't above the laws of normal business practices.

(It's also time writers came to understand big publishers, and agents are not magical elves with superpowers too, but that's a whole other argument.)

With regards to the discussion of the movie industry and publishing industry...  I think it's the same, yet different.

With theater vs. DVD for example, you'e paying for a completely different experience.  When you buy a DVD you get to keep a product.  The theater you're paying for a physical and in a sense social experience that you can't take home with you later.

But with books, hardcover vs. paperback we're not talking about really two vastly different experiences and in both cases we're talking about a physical product that you get to hold in your hands and keep with you as long as you want it.  To "me" it would make sense either to do simultaneous release of all formats, or release the paperback first, and THEN if sales warrant it, the hardcover.  So hardcore fans who like to collect hardcovers of their favorite books can do so.

I get that for the library market, libraries prefer hardcovers, and that's fine.  But, most consumers do NOT prefer hardcovers.  And making them wait a year or go to the library to borrow it for free is so convoluted I don't know where to begin with it.  The library market and the mass market are two very different markets, and you cannibalize a lot of your library sales by putting those hardcovers into the chain bookstore system where you get returns.

Library sales are awesome because they are final sales, no returns.  The only way hardcover sales to chains make sense is if you get rid of returns. 

Call the hardcovers "collector's editions" and move on.  

At least with theatre releases there is no legal place consumers can see it for free.  Even with DVD rentals at libraries you can't get it until the DVD release.

Almost nothing the publishing industry does makes any sense IMO.  But I agree I don't want big publishing to "die," I just want them to do ANYTHING that I can respect from a business standpoint, and be halfway intelligent about it from a business perspective.  There is plenty of room both for big publishing and indie publishing.  We aren't even competing for the same brass ring.

You can't be snobby AND mass market.  It's contradictory.

Down with the DRMs!

Good post, but I think you're simplifying the content issue. I do agree pubs charge too much for ebooks, but I certainly believe preserving the 'integrity of the page' is very important. If pictures don't match their captions or page number, they become meaningless and confusing. Also, the recent complaints of crappy typeface on the Kindle 2 have people downgrading to Kindle 1.
Right now eBooks are in their infancy and it's going to take time to reach their full potential - someone's got to pay for the research. Prices will go down, quality will get better, chill out.
Drms are stupid. I wholeheartedly agree. But you know what? Down with big publishing! Let 'em burn!

RE: Integrity of the Page, R&D Expense

Nic -

Static page numbering is a concept that's inapplicable to ebooks, since the content re-flows and repaginates anytime the user resizes the font or line spacing, or changes the orientation of the page view. Ebook devices and software are set up to automatically regenerate new page numbers and a new table of contents on the fly each time the user makes a change that affects pagination.

Of course captions must stay with their respective images, and that's a fairly simple thing to accomplish even for self-publishers. Necessities like that are one thing, but big publishers are needlessly obsessed with  recreating every detail of the print book's design and layout in the ebook form---regardless of whether or not their customers want them to do so.

You seem to be saying that since the technology is still being perfected and developed, it's entirely reasonable for publishers to pass the costs of their R&D on to the consumer. I strongly disagree, because publishers are focusing their R&D efforts on things that don't matter to the typical consumer of ebooks. If plasma screen TV makers decided it was necessary to add a toaster oven to their product, would they be justified in passing their R&D costs for doing so on to their customers?

Finally - I don't want big publishers to "burn" at all. I'd like to see a future in which the book industry looks a lot like the movie industry, with big, mainstream publishers staking out the blockbuster/bestseller/zeitgeist territory, and indies serving smaller/niche markets. In the end, the goal is to make the widest possible variety of books available and accessible to the largest possible number of readers.

 

Libraries

$25-$30 for a hardcover is ridiculous.  That's what sends people to public libraries to borrow.
And $15-$20 (even $10, actually) for an eBook is what will drive people to piracy.
Why can't they wrap their heads around the *proven* formula of impulse pricing = more sales?  Must Henry Ford rise from his grave and haunt them to their doom?

publishers

April
Great insights and having seen the music world and the publishing world both a little too closely I think you've made some fantastic suggestions!
 
Nettie

Terrific Post

April, thanks for the terrific post and let's hope publishers are listening.  One minor point:  like JM, I have a quibble about your movie industry example.  At this point, I think studios tend to treat the theatrical release more as an announcement for subsequent DVD and other subsidiary sales than as a direct revenue generator in its own right, and in this sense you could analogize "theatrical release is to DVDs as hardback pub is to softback pub."  Whether either practice is sensible, and what the crucial industry differences might be, are of course separate subjects.
 
FWIW, I'm aware of one exception to the sequence of first theatrical, then DVD -- Steven Soderbergh's simultaneous release of Bubbles.  I don't think it went well and I don't think a simultaneous release has been attempted since.  Again, it doesn't follow that simultaneous release is a bad idea in publishing (or even in the movie biz); just a datapoint worth considering.
 
http://news.cnet.com/Soderbergh-does-a-DVD-theater-release-combo/2100-1025_3-6026218.html
 
Thanks again,
Barry

I agree, but . . .

I agree with the main thrust of this article, but I think you give too much credit to the music and movie industries, both of which have fought digital distribution tooth and nail. The way I see it, Big Pub (as you call it) has so far chosen to follow the other Big Content industries' "strategies." They either want to stick their heads in the sand and pretend nothing is happening, or they want to fight back with ineffective and self-destructive tactics like DRM or suing people. That image problem that you describe -- the arrogance of Big Pub -- is an arrogance shared by other Big Content industries. It's already brought music to its knees, and if Big Pub doesn't change its business models, they will be destroyed.