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Today a publisher brought to my attention an oddity on the Amazon.com website. It seems that you cannot purchase more than three copies of many bestsellers. On the evening of January 28, 2010 I viewed the top ten books on the Amazon.com bestseller list. In every case I was prohibited from putting more than three copies into my shopping cart. To make certain this was not a fluke, I sampled the first 50 titles on the list but did not find any exceptions to the three-to-a-customer rule.
You can see this for yourself by clicking on the following links for the top five titles, then going to the "Quantity" drop-down box over the "Add to Shopping Cart" button. (As listings change, future visitors to this posting may not find the same condition.)
It was not until I clicked on #53 - What Would Google Do? (list price $17.91, Amazon price $9.18) - that the Quantity drop-down box indicated I could buy as many as 30 copies. I did not try to buy multiple copies by buying three and three and three etc. - I don't really need one copy of Food Rules let alone six or nine or thirty - but I'm sure a clever shopper could find a way around the rule. It occurred to me however that if I did order three copies ten times, the freight and handling charges would be substantially higher than if I purchased 30 in one shot.
But that's just incidental to the bigger question of why one must buy no more than three copies in one transaction.
I can understand this restrictive practice in the case of a high ticket item, where one $10,000 fur coat or $50,000 diamond ring per customer is enough. Pictured here is a Prada Ostrich Leather Tote listing on Saks Fifth Avenue's website for $5,850.00. On the bag's web page is this notice: DUE TO POPULAR DEMAND, A CUSTOMER MAY ORDER NO MORE THAN THREE UNITS OF THIS ITEM EVERY THIRTY DAYS.
But books are not luxury purchases. Why would Amazon prevent us from buying as many copies of a book as we want? After all, the more we buy the more money Amazon makes, yes?
In listing the books here I included their list price versus their Amazon.com price. I wonder if therein lies a clue to the restrictive policy. Assuming a 50% publisher discount, Amazon's profit margin on these books is slim to none. For instance, on A People's History of the United States (list price $18.95, Amazon price $10.00) Amazon nets about $.50 profit. Food Rules retailing for $11.00? The wholesale price would be $5.50. Amazon is selling it for $5.00, a $.50 loss. For The Help (list price $24.95, Amazon price $9.50), Amazon is losing $3.00 a copy.
Nothing unusual here: retailers in every business work on a slim margin, and loss leaders are a common competitive practice. However...
Suppose I opened a bookshop and stocked it with bestsellers purchased from Amazon. I could buy 100 copies of The Help for $9.50 each and sell them in my store for, say, $15.00. Even folding in the cost of freight from Amazon to my shop, I would make two or three dollars profit and still sell the books far beneath the publisher's list price.
I anticipate your question: why would people buy from my shop when they could get the same book cheaper from Amazon? The answer is, some will but some won't. That's why we have independent bookstores (barely, but we still do have them).
If this reasoning is correct, then the Amazon's three-to-a-customer rule makes sense: Amazon doesn't want resellers stocking their stores with Amazon books. Why not? Because Amazon doesn't make any money on those resales.
Authors will recognize an irony here. When their books are resold via Amazon, Amazon gets a piece of the resale of those used books but the authors get nothing. Could it be that Amazon is worried that it is not benefiting from resales that do not use Amazon as agent?
This theory could be all wet. But if it is, I invite smarter business heads than me to speculate on just what's behind the three-book cap on Amazon's bestseller shopping cart. Meanwhile, publishers and authors may be hurt by the curtailment of large book orders on the Amazon.com retail site.
Howdy Brownsville, New York Calling, Have We Got a Great Bio of Spinoza for Y'all!
If you're a sales rep for a publishing company, you can be replaced by a telemarketer. At least that seems to be the message communicated by Simon & Schuster.
Michael Cader reports in Publishers Lunch that S&S has cut nine field representatives, leaving but seven to service the book buying needs of a nation. An adjunct to this action is the establishment of a telemarketing group that will presumably service the needs of far-flung independent bookstores around the country.
S&S justifies its decision on "the changing nature of the market place." That phrase should be nominated for the Understatement of the Year Award. The marketplace served by publisher field reps twenty or even ten years ago is all but unrecognizable, and what's left of it is melting away like an ice cube in a teapot.
Up until the mid-1990s rural bookshops and paperback outlets like drugstores were serviced by traveling sales reps or independent distributors. These people not only understood the reading tastes of the communities on their routes but knew many of the readers personally. They knew that this bookshop catered to lovers of western fiction and that one to historical romance.
The system worked wonderfully well, but it suffered a major hammer blow in 1996 when several influential paperback distribution agencies let go of most of the independent driver/rack jobbers that covered all those rural bookstores. The reason was that the growing power of computers enabled these agencies to stock stores by remote control instead of employing human beings driving vans and station wagons. It wasn't long before stores in Tuscaloosa or Paducah were being stocked from agencies in Chicago or Toronto who knew little if anything about what they liked to read. And actually it didn't matter, because Chicago and Toronto simply shipped those stores the top fifteen or twenty New York Times bestselling titles anyway. (I've detailed this crucial moment in publishing history in The Rise and Fall of the Mass Market Paperback, Part 1 and Part 2.)
So much for mass market paperbacks. But there were still hardcover books being sold in mall bookstores, right? Wrong. As the 1990s progressed, closing of mall stores reached epidemic proportions as the major chains, especially Barnes & Noble, realized that store traffic simply didn't justify keeping them open. At the same time the rise of Amazon shifted book buying patterns from the car to the armchair. Why drive into town when you could handle the transaction at home?
Given the withering of the rural bookstore market, why should we be surprised to hear S&S declare that "new field sales team will focus on the geographic regions where our sales are strongest--urban areas with a large base of key independent retail, wholesale, and educational accounts"?
The fact that it makes perfect economic sense doesn't palliate the pain that independent bookshop owners and their customers feel to have one more tie to the publishing community severed. One store owner said it all in a tweet: "SO pissed to see my rep go. My one link to you is now someone who has NO idea about my store."
In fairness to Simon & Schuster, this erosion of bookstore culture outside of the big cities is reflected in strategies pursued by every trade publisher. But that will not mitigate the sense among our country cousins that they're having a lot of undesirable and inappropriate books shoved down their throats by (to use Dave Barry's phrase) a bunch of "godless unpatriotic pierced-nose Volvo-driving France-loving left-wing communist latte-sucking tofu-chomping holistic-wacko neurotic vegan weenie perverts."
Incentives? Or Shmears? A Window Into Bookselling's Heart of Darkness
Adam Pennenberg, writing for Fast Company, has discovered that books don't find their way to the front of bookstores by themselves. Someone puts them there, and that's because money has crossed hands. "The practice is known as Co-op," Pennenberg writes in Bookstore Baksheesh: The Real Estate Deals That Sell Books,"and each book on each table costs publishers anywhere from $3,000 to $30,000, and even up to $50,000 depending on placement. The closer a table is to the front of the store, the more expensive the real estate."
Pennenberg's depiction of the seamy side of bookselling will come as a revelation to newcomers to the book industry, and some of you will feel the same poignant disillusionment as the discovery that it was mommy and daddy who slipped the dollar under your pillow to compensate you for that tooth that fell out.
For older timers, however, Pennenberg's article is just an update of an age-old practice that reveals the ugly underbelly of our glamorous book business. More than ten years ago I wrote about it in a piece called Incentives? Or Shmears? For those of you who understand a shmear to be helping of cream cheese spread on a bagel, it also has a second connotation in the Yiddish lexicon, namely, a bribe or payoff. "It is somewhat disconcerting," I said, "to learn that such elegant phrases as 'sales incentives,' 'slotting allowances,' 'co-op contributions,' and 'display fees' may be euphemisms for something more akin to what was done in the garment business than to the way ladies and gentlemen conduct business upstairs in Editorial.
"Bismarck said that it is unwise to look too closely into the way we make our laws or our sausages. You may be able think of some other things that don't bear up too well under intense scrutiny. High on my list is what publishers, particularly mass-market paperback publishers, have to do these days to get their merchandise displayed in and promoted by bookstores. It might be described as publishing's dirty little secret, except that it's not so little. In fact, it's become so pervasive that it touches everybody in publishing."
If you'd like to descend into the sewer system that runs beneath your local chain bookstore, click here.
After the introduction last year of the Espresso print on demand press we wondered about that. As we wrote at the time (see I'll Have Four Sesames, Four Poppy-Seeds, and One Copy of War and Peace), "If you think outside the bookstore box, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that, as POD printing technology improves and miniaturizes, tabletop presses could be installed in a Wal-Mart, Macy's or 7-Eleven. You just go to any neighborhood kiosk and browse Amazon or Barnes & Noble or another book retail website, make your selection, enter your credit card and order the book. Finish shopping or get a cup of coffee, then come back and pick up your bound volume, still warm like a fresh bagel. Hey, you can put POD presses in bagel shops too! Just don't shmear lox spread on your newly minted paperback."
Installation of kiosks to support any product is still an expensive proposition when you think about all the technical challenges and support they require. Think for instance about what's involved just to place an ATM - a kiosk that dispenses cash - in a newspaper shop. So, not only must the operation be impeccably smooth over countless uses, it must sell a product in a volume that justifies the use of the real estate it sits on. DVDs are one such product. We wonder if e-books and print books are another.
These reflections were triggered by the recent announcement of installation of DVD kiosks in 200 pharmacies in the Duane Reade chain, a drugstore outfit that has become as ubiquitous in New York City as yellow cabs.The kiosks will be sponsored by Blockbuster, the movie rental giant that is trying to reinvent itself after a media revolution that left it holding a bag full of videotapes. "Now Duane Reade pharmacy customers can get a movie with their next prescription pickup," writes Alex Palmer in brandweek.com. (We're not sure where the kiosk pictured here is installed.)
The rental is $1.00 per day. That's pretty cheap, so cheap that it only plays up how profitable the volume projections must be if two corporations splitting the revenue believe they can make out well. Some other high-traffic chains like grocery leviathan Publix have opted in.“'These are places that consumers are going by every day,'” the Brandweek article quoted an executive for NCR, the company operating the kiosks under the Blockbuster name. “'You’ve got a kid who’s home sick, you can run to the drug store and pick up their medicine and grab a movie, so as they’re sitting on the couch they can enjoy the rest of their day.'"
Okay, now read Blockbuster Kiosks Debut at Duane Reade and switch "book" for "movie" and you will grasp that, as Espresso technology is refined and the machines are miniaturized, a Duane Read or Publix book nook on every corner is entirely within the realm of imagination.
Ticked Off about Delayed Release of E-Book Reprint? Enhancements Will Make It Worth Waiting For
In July of 2008, about nine months after the first season of Mad Men ended, Lionsgate, the hit television show's producer, released the DVD. It not only carried all 13 episodes but a number of special features as well. Among them were audio commentaries on each episode; a "featurette" exploring the world of Mad Men; a documentary called The Desire of the American Dream, described as "featuring the 1960's creative revolution in media"; "Pictures of Elegance" a photo gallery with commentaries from the costume, hair and production designers; another featurette called "Scoring Mad Men"; and a Mad Men Music Sampler.
Some leading publishing executives must have watched that or some other DVD and had an "Aha!" moment. Why couldn't you enhance e-book reprints the same way that film and television studios enhance the DVD rereleases of theatrical movies or television series?
That idea seems to be taking hold. Jack McKeown, a founder of book publisher and distributor Perseus Group, recently discussed this idea, citing remarks by HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray: "Publishers would do well to seize the high ground here by offering enhanced e-book editions, accompanied by robust internet-focused marketing campaigns to further distinguish their e-book launches."
And Jeffrey Trachtenberg of the Wall Street Journal reports that Macmillan will be releasing special e-book editions of key hardcover books, but with an interesting twist: they will actually be sold for a higher price than the hardcovers! "The special editions, which will include author interviews and other material, such as reading guides, will carry a list price slightly higher than the hardcover edition. (Hardcover books typically list for at least $25, while e-book versions of best sellers can go for as little as $9.99.) The new e-books will go on sale on the same day as the hardcover. After 90 days, the special edition will be replaced by a standard e-book."
It should come as no surprise that the idea for enhanced e-books was introduced, or at least articulated, last March by Mike Shatzkin, the closest thing our business has to a Nostradumus. In a two part posting he laid out everything a publisher needs to know and do to maximize its e-book resources.
One of the key benefits of the medium is economy. Enhanced e-books "present the opportunity to deliver additional content and features to consumers with no additional run-on production cost," Shatzkin explains. "Traditional printed books cost something additional for every extra page we put into them; e-books don’t.
"An enhanced ebook," he points out, "can be an infinite number of things, and probably will become dozens, if not hundreds, of different things over time...The tools include internal linking, external linking, embedded video and audio, additional text-and-illustration content, and even software utilities." You can read details in Part 1 and Part 2 of Shatzkin's oracular posts.
By glamorizing their e-book reprints with author interviews, special prefaces by guests or by the authors themselves, audios and videos, previews of the author's new book, etc., publishers will go far to pacify complaints by fans irritated about having to wait. (See Agent Nat Sobel Challenges Publishers to Hold Back E-Reprints.)
Richard Curtis
Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the Wall Street Journal.
Agent Nat Sobel Challenges Publishers to Hold Back E-Reprints
Literary agent Nat Sobel, one of the most respected figures in his field, has issued an appeal to book industry leaders urging them to resist the temptation to release e-book reprints of hardcover books too early. Noting with alarm that movie exhibitors had recently pulled a film after learning that an early release of the DVD had been scheduled, Sobel drew the analogy with booksellers whose hardcover sales are cannibalized by early release of e-book editions.
The issues Sobel raises reared their head last summer when Dominique Raccah, publisher of Sourcebooks, put the brakes on simultaneous e-print of a hardcover YA thriller, Bran Hambric: The Farfield Curse by Kaleb Nation. When pundits questioned the wisdom of waiting to release the e-edition, Raccah wrote a lively defense of her decision in a posting for E-Reads called Are E-Books the New Cheap Paperback Reprint Edition?
Now Sobel is advancing Raccah's argument with a plea for publishers to hold back e-prints to give hardcovers their moment in the sun without fear of being undercut by a cheap digital edition. "I suggest that the electronic versions not be made available for six months after initial publication, eventually being released when the paperback hits the market," Sobel writes. "I’d like to believe that electronic book sales can and should be the mass market of the future."
His reasoning is by no means theoretical. He recently demonstrated its correctness by asking Tor Books to hold back the e-edition of a series by the late bestselling fantasy author Robert Jordan. "Now," he writes, "four weeks after its release in hardcover, The Gathering Storm has sold 24% more copies than the previous volume, even though the work was completed by another writer."
Sobel told us that only one of the sixteen publishing executives he'd contacted had answered him. Because he feels that "the future of hardcover publishing is at stake" we believe it is incumbent on those executives to respond and make their views known. We are inviting them to comment on Sobel's letter, which we reproduce in its entirety below, and we will publish their remarks on this website. Needless to say, we invite all writers, agents, editors, booksellers and book lovers to post their comments here as well.
Richard Curtis
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Subject: Before It's Too Late
Dear Friends,
This week’s Variety has a story of the fight going on between the studios and the exhibitors about the too-early release of films electronically. The exhibitors pulled the film Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs on news that the studio planned a special quick release of the film prior to the DVDs hitting the market. The independent booksellers, even some of the chains, do not have this option, when it comes to instant releases of hard cover bestsellers
Why did that movie news remind me of what book publishers are doing to the lives of the hardcovers they publish, by making their top books instantly available electronically? We’ve lived for a year or two with the Kindle, but must now reckon with how the dissemination of books through some of the 140 million cell phones available, is going to change hardcover publishing?
In just a few years we have seen electronic sales of bestsellers go from 2% to 12 to15% of total sales. Next year, they may constitute 20%. Who knows where this will end, once bestsellers are on cell phones, blackberries and the like?
As someone who got his first job in publishing 40 years ago, working for a mass market paperback house, I have seen that area of sales rise and then nearly disappear. My first job was to open accounts and get a 64-pocket wire rack of Dell paperbacks into every imaginable outlet – variety stores, cigar stores – wherever there was foot traffic. At one point, there were more than 100,000 outlets for mass market paperbacks in the US. Those millions of customers didn’t disappear, but the racks and the distributers did.
I’d like to believe that electronic book sales can and should be the mass market of the future. For this reason, I requested that the bestselling Robert Jordan fantasy series not be available electronically until the paperback is released. Now, four weeks after its release in hardcover, The Gathering Storm has sold 24% more copies than the previous volume, even though the work was completed by another writer.
I have nothing to gain, personally, by urging all of you to consider postponing the release of the electronic version of your next bestsellers. As a first step, I suggest that the electronic versions not be made available for six months after initial publication, eventually being released when the paperback hits the market. There’s a clear line between the success of the mass market paperback and its electronic cousin – convenience and price.
The future of hardcover publishing is at stake. You don’t have a lot of time left to save it.
Publisher Sics Leakseeking Dick in Teddy Bio Embargo Imbroglio
This story appeared in the New York Times on September 3, 2009, eleven days before publication of True Compass by the late Senator Ted Kennedy: "Despite the press embargo of Ted Kennedy's upcoming memoir, the NY Times has published an article looking at a leaked copy of the highly-anticipated autobiography."
Did you know there was an embargo on Kennedy's book? Do you know why its publisher, Twelve, a division of Hachette, required it? How it was supposed to be enforced? Who leaked it and why? Was the Times in breach of, um, embargo? And is that a crime, like rum-running?
As to the latter question, Hachette thinks the transgression was flagrant enough to merit hiring a private detective to learn how the Times got its hands on copies of the book, which enabled the paper not only to extract the marrow for its readers but to run a review as well - a review of a book that nobody (except Times reporters, apparently) would be able to purchase for another eleven days. (Today is the officially publication day and here is the link to the Times's review.)
A Breach of Manners or a Crime?
We know what an embargo is when we talk about sanctions against rogue nations. But...books?
The term is used in a number of publishing industry contexts, and they all revolve around a date before which release of information, excerpts or copies of a book could be harmful to a publisher's interests. For instance, there are embargos on serialization of book texts in newspapers and magazines, on early reviews, and on sale of copies before the official release date.
In some instances the constraint is simply moral: "Please don't spoil the book's plot by reviewing it two weeks before publication date." A book's sales may be negatively impacted by a trigger-happy reviewer but not so badly damaged as to warrant legal action. There's little a publisher can do about it except yell at the reviewer and his newspaper. The breach is one of manners.
In other cases the transgression is legal, the flouting of a contractual covenant. The New York Times figured incidentally in such a case when an online bookseller and a distributor placed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on sale days before the embargo was to end. Several papers including the New York Times ran reviews jumping the official gun. According to Emily Shurr of cnet News Blog, the book's publisher, Scholastic, brought a lawsuit against the companies claiming that "This breach led The New York Times and Baltimore Sun to lawfully claim that copies of the book could be obtained at a public retail outlet before publishing their book reviews, which included details considered spoilers."
The Biggest Embargo of All
The issues raised by these incidents are about to become incandescent as we count down the hours until publication on September 15th of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol, which has been cloaked in paranoiac secretiveness. Motoko Rich, who covers the New York Times's book beat, writes that "Nobody at Special Ops Media," the outfit hired to design the book's Web marketing campaign, "has been allowed to read the book..."
Even the most powerful figure in book retailing jumped into the embargo game, Rich reports:
Last week Amazon’s chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, posted a breathless memo to customers on the Amazon.com home page, informing them that the company was taking 'one of the most anticipated publishing events of all time' very seriously. 'We’ve agreed to keep our stockpile under 24-hour guard in its own chain-link enclosure, with two locks requiring two separate people for entry,' Mr. Bezos wrote.
Who Dunnit?
Friction between publishers and review media over early release of a book's contents has been an age-old issue for as long as anyone can remember. On several occasions a publisher would license first (pre-publication) serial rights, only to discover the information in a tabloid well in advance of serialization. It seems that the publisher had also sent review copies to those tabloids which, under the pretext of "reviewing" the book, revealed everything, rendering those first serial rights worthless. Needless to say, the magazine that had bought those rights fair and square demanded its money back.
When you realize how many people see a book before publication, it's a small miracle that information blackouts ever work. Agents, editors, publishing executives, copy editors, proofreaders, sales representatives, marketing department managers, publicity people, cover designers, ad copywriters, even clerks feeding manuscripts into the copy machine, all have an opportunity to squeal and even to smuggle, and that doesn't even include bookstore buyers who need to read something in order to know how many copies to order, or reviewers who always appreciate having something to review on publication day. Though I never was able to confirm it, back in the '80s it was said that an employee of a photocopy shop used by a big literary agency could be paid off to make an extra copy of a hot new novel for movie studios hoping to get an early look.
It is about as easy to impose an embargo in the book business as it is to keep a secret in a beauty parlor. If the contents of a book get prematurely out of the bag we have no one to blame but the porous system known as book publishing. If The Lost Symbol remains under wraps until the embargo is removed, it will be the best kept secret since Operation Overlord, the invasion of Europe in World War II.
Me? I've got my money on the spoilers.
Richard Curtis
Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times and the New York Observer.
Michael Cairns, whose Personanondata blog covers the book industry, has declared that "The ISBN Is Dead".
Do you care?
It will come as no surprise to hear you say you don't. Is that because you're not sure you understand what ISBNs are? Would it make a difference if we told you your book's life and your writing career depended on them? If so, tarry a moment to consider them.
The acronym ISBN - commonly pronounced "IS-bin" in publishingese - stands for International Standard Book Number. Like a Social Security number, it a unique identifier not just for a book but for each edition of a book. Publishing companies purchase a block of ISBNs and, after assigning them to each edition of your book, register them with R.R. Bowker. "Bowker is the U.S. ISBN Agency in the United States," we are told by the ISBN official website, "responsible for assigning ISBNs as well as providing information and advice on the uses of the ISBN system to publishers and the publishing industry in general."
Once your publisher has assigned ISBN numbers to books, it produces bar codes that facilitate handling, shipping, stocking, selling, returning and every other business transaction pertaining to various editions of each book. The hardcover will have one number, the trade paperback another, the mass market paperback another, and the audio edition yet another.
This Linnean-type taxonomy was introduced in the UK and US in the late 1960s and accepted as an International Standard in 1970. It has proven a godsend to publishers, booksellers, authors, and even to readers, though the latter may not be aware of how much easier their lives have been made by the puzzling string of numbers printed in the front matter of books they purchase or by the bar codes on the cover.
The ISBN is 10 digits long, or rather has been up to recently,when the publishing industry adopted a changeover to 13 digits to tie in with bar code standards ("EAN") used to identify a all sorts of products.
Abebooks points out that there are four components of the 10 digits on your book's bar code:
Group - identifies a country, area or language area. Some publishers form language areas or regional units.
Publisher – pinpoints the specific publisher within a group. It usually designates the exact identification of the publishing house and its address.
Title - designates a particular edition of a publication of a specific publisher.
Check Digit - relies on a mathematical calculation with a modulus 11. If the check digit is "10", an "X" is used instead. The check digit helps verify the validity of an ISBN.
A 13-digit ISBN includes the same numbers as in a 10-digit ISBN with the addition of a 3 digit EAN prefix of either "978" or "979". For example: 978-1-873671-00-9.
Now that you're an expert on ISBNs, you may wish to delve into the ISBN Users Manual or the website of the US ISBN Agency and soak up all those delicious details.
Whether you do or not, perhaps you're beginning to feel a glimmer of affection for ISBNs and anxiety about Michael Cairns's assertion that they're dead. What's he getting at?
For one thing, he says, "The ISBN in its current form may not be sufficient to support the migration to a digital world." The past decade has witnessed a profusion of e-book formats from the Rocket Book and its cousin the SoftBook to Palm Pilot, Microsoft Reader, Mobipocket, Sony eReader, cell phones and others. Each format requires its own ISBN, requiring publishers to register as many as seven or eight of them plus additional ones for print and audio editions. It's a huge clerical and bookkeeping headache for publishers and no inconsequential expense, either, for ISBNs don't grow on trees.
Note that I didn't list the Kindle among the multiplicity of e-book formats, and that leads to another issue for Cairns. Some suppliers, he observes, "don't see the ISBN as relevant." Key among them is Amazon, which disdains ISBNs in favor of its own identifier, the "ASIN". He is bluntly critical of Amazon's actions, saying "they have polluted the supply chain with these numbers." Other newcomers to the publishing business have gotten on the no-ISBN bandwagon, too, creating the potential for chaos akin to pre-EU Europe with its multiplicity of languages, currencies, tolls, taxes and customs restrictions.
Cairns feels it's urgent to round up all these wild horses and get them back into the ISBN corral. "If we shrug our collective shoulders to these issues, this non-action will set a precedent from which we as a publishing industry will be unable to recover."
The ISBN standard united the industry from author royalty statement to store shelf and, while I emphasize the ISBN is far from dead, there are sufficient warning signs to suggest that the ISBN may be unable to thrive in the 21st century as it has over the past 40 yrs. As a community, we need to recognize that the ISBN may not be meeting its intended market need and that the future may make this deficiency even more stark. From an international perspective, ISO could help by reconvening a partial (or full) revision of the standard; it seems incompatible with the speed at which all industry changes that we can continue to live with a 10 year revision cycle. In my view, ISBN could benefit from an accelerated revision cycle while the result of non-action could be increasing irrelevance.
Read The ISBN Is Dead in its entirety. Then open to the front matter of the book you're reading, fix your eyes on the ISBN and think, "This is somebody's child."
Leaver Leaves Frankfurt, And Having Left, Moves On
They say that your name is your destiny. So, if you're going to be named Leaver, you owe it to the gods to leave something, and Marcus Leaver, President of Sterling Publishing, is leaving something: the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Der Frankfurter Buchmesse is the international publishing community's biggest annual trade show and a major station on the industry's Via Voluptuosa. Thus, for a significant publisher to pull out - Sterling is a wholly owned subsidiary of Barnes & Noble - is momentous. "I'm not going to Frankfurt," Leaver declared flatly. He'll send a "very reduced team" - call it a skeleton crew? - to the Octoberfest, but as far as he's concerned, "The trade show is over."
Leaver's ukase, uttered at the recent and appropriately named Making Information Pay conference, heralded a reallocation of the company's capital. As reported byBelievers Pressand by Jim Milliott of Publishers Weekly, Sterling has "taken about $1 million out of our trade show, exhibition and sales conference budget" and "increased our title-by-title marketing spend 33% in a year."
Sterling wasn't the only publisher to announce withdrawal from trade shows. Dominique Raccah, the innovative CEO of Chicago-based Sourcebooks, announced at the same conference that she was cutting her trade show budget by a quarter of a million dollars, pushing her company in the direction of "a complete xml workflow."
Another precinct heard from was Simon & Schuster. The firm's CEO, Caroline Reidy, discussing S&S's latest earnings performance, stated that "we have definitely looked at our participation in trade shows" and are "cutting back dramatically our booth and participation at Frankfurt." She also hinted that the London Book Fair might be a target of cost-cutting: "participation there is being scrutinized as well," she said.
Another capital-intensive practice on the chopping block for a number of publishers is paper catalogues, and though we're all trying to enter the digital age unflinchingly, the disappearance of catalogues will be more wrenching than many other uprootings. Catalogues have long been the most familiar tool for introducing the bookstore trade to publishers' front- and backlists. They are not merely informational and often beautiful but they are a publisher's face to the world, its very identity. Even the spelling of "catalogue", despite Microsoft spellcheck's insistence on dropping the "ue", bespeaks a stubborn and beloved tradition. Be that as it may, Sterling's Leaver has lost his emotional attachment for paper catalogues, saying " "it just wasn't efficient so we've stopped doing that and it feels good." Like a number of other publishers, notably Hachette, Sterling will ditch paper catalogues for digital ones.
The digital book catalogue is a relatively untested medium and the vote to embrace it is by no means unanimous among trade publishers. A recent initiative on the subject spearheaded by Hachette's David Young was met with many polite nods but few are falling all over themselves to switch out of paper, however costly catalogues may be to produce and mail.
As long as Leaver is leaving things, he's casting an eye on author tours. Virtual tours and "webinars" are now the way to send authors out without having to leave the comforts of home (or spend a lot of money on travel bookings). "We're reaching a large market this way," he said. Raccah echoed his sentiment. "Raccah is also hugely energized by emerging digital landscape," reports Publishers Lunch.
"'In the big picture, we're creating new approaches to content,' she said. They are creating 23 iPhone apps, three of which have already been released and should be in the black before the end of the year. She spoke about 'unbundling our services' and becoming 'custom' everything' noting that 'the customer will tell you how they want to buy something.' She underscored that there is a 'tremendous opportunity for partnerships everywhere--the world just got a whole lot bigger.'"
In the cascading collapse of cherished traditions created by digital disintermediation, tangible goods like books and catalogues aren't the only victims; time and space are being reconfigured as well. For those who have not yet shifted their heads and hearts to the virtual dimension, this is a time of intense discomfort and even fear. The oft-cited analogy to the social disruption caused by the introduction of automobiles to a horse-and-buggy world is apt, but it's no comfort to know that after a painful period of adjustment the world finally got used to it. Richard Curtis
We recently reported that the Borders bookstore chain had agreed to retail a publisher's (HarperStudio) books on a nonreturnable basis. This plan flies in the face of a century of bookselling tradition. That it is a lousy tradition and a leading cause of the current calamitous state of the publishing and bookselling industries is more than sufficient reason to celebrate the HarperStudio/Border initiative and wish the parties success.
Whether they will achieve it depends on how effective is the publisher's strategy of according a higher discount to the chain - ranging from 58% to 63% - than the current publishing industry average of 50-56%. As enthusiastically as we are rooting for it to work, however, previous attempts do not give cause for optimism. Over the last few decades, publishers have talked endlessly about selling books on a nonreturnable basis and a few have tried to break the hammerlock of tradition. Some of the bolder experiments, such as one attempted in 1980 by what was then known as Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, failed. That endeavor was by no means a debacle, but it was enough to sound a retreat that that has pretty much prevailed to this day.
Since high discounts stimulate sales in so many other kinds of business, it is perfectly logical for publishers to reason that if they can raise their discounts substantially, bookstores will feel less resistant to accepting merchandise now considered marginal, such as first novels, midlist books, experimental fiction, and slower-moving backlist books - literature that is progressively being frozen out of the marketplace by the blockbuster mentality. Unfortunately, past efforts failed for lack of cooperation among all the sectors of the publishing community.
Specifically they failed, first, because bookstores do not want to get stuck with unsalable merchandise; second, because it was thought the discounts weren't high enough to induce booksellers to create effective "remainder in place" programs in their stores; and third, because high discounts cut too deeply into publishers' profit margins.
As circumstances today are no different than those of the past (and it would not be out of line to argue they are a lot worse), how can publishers possibly consider raising their discounts higher than they already are without cutting even further into slim profit margins? With printing and paper, salaries and rents, production and warehousing and freight and other costs at all-time highs, there doesn't seem to be anything left to trim. Or has something been overlooked?
As a matter of fact, something has. It happens to be the way royalties are calculated. There may be a different way to do it. It means radically reconfiguring the way publishers compensate authors. Years ago I floated such a proposal. Actually, "float" is a misnomer, since it sank like a cast-iron anchor. But I have hauled it up from the depths of oblivion in the hope that it might stay afloat, buoyed by the current financial crisis besetting the publishing industry. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
By way of background, a story:
In the 1960s, the management of a major paperback company, Fawcett, offered an unconventional proposition to authors. They could elect to continue receiving royalties based on copies sold. Or, they could instead choose to receive a lower royalty based on copies distributed. In those days royalties on the average started at 6% on copies sold. Fawcett offered to pay 4% on copies distributed. Returns were not counted in the compensation.
For authors it was a classic bird-in-the-hand-vs.-two-in-the-bush challenge. On the surface the answer seemed logical enough: 6% was higher than 4%. But when returns were folded into the calculations, they reduced the net paid to authors to 4% anyway. When authors analyzed Fawcett's either/or, they realized that there was no difference between the royalty on books soldafter returns and one on books distributedbefore returns.
Fawcett paid advances like everyone else and recouped them out of royalties like everyone else, too. But once the advance was recouped, authors did not have to wait for years for full settlement, or puzzle out how much their publisher had withheld in reserves: they had already been paid in full. Within thirty days of each new distribution authors would receive an accounting of the number of copies shipped multiplied by the royalty per copy, and a check accompanied the statement. Anyone wishing to verify the distribution figures could do so easily enough by requesting printing and distribution affidavits. Payments were prompt and dependable, the bookkeeping elementary and transparent.
Everyone made out well under the Fawcett scheme, and generally speaking, authors loved it. This publisher understood something very important about them: most would rather get $1,000 now, without hassle, than gamble on the hope of collecting $1,500 over four or five years with a lot of hassle.
It was a good arrangement for Fawcett, too. Royalty bookkeeping was elementary, requiring a few bookkeepers armed with pencils, paper, and adding machines. I don't know what Fawcett did with the percentage points saved, but it makes sense that they might have used the savings to offer higher discounts to induce stores not to return books.
Unfortunately, Fawcett eventually discontinued this arrangement, probably under the pressure of rising returns, which escalated from a manageable level in the 1960s to the 50-75% dumpfest of the current era.
As creative as the Fawcett scheme was, it was not adopted by the entire publishing industry. But... what if it were? Putting it in terms of today's publishing economics, here's a hypothetical example. Suppose your publisher distributes 100,000 copies of your $8 mass market paperback and your contract calls for an 10% royalty based on the list price - $.80 a copy. Under the conventional accounting system the total royalty would be $80,000 if the book sold out. But it won't sell out: 50% of the 100,000 copies shipped will be returned. You will end up receiving $40,000. And you'll end up receiving it over a period of three, four, five years or more.
Suppose instead your contract were structured so that your publisher paid you a 4% royalty instead of 8%, but paid you on the day the 100,000 copies were shipped to bookstores. You would get the same $40,000. But - you'd get it right away.
For author, publisher, bookseller and consumer here is much to recommend serious consideration of this plan:
From the author's viewpoint:
* Authors receive the same royalties that they do now, but much earlier * Dependable royalty accounting enables authors to budget income more reliably * Transparent royalty accounting reduces author distrust of publishers
From the publisher's viewpoint:
* Print runs are more realistic * Distribution of books more efficient * Royalty accounting simplified substantially, creating savings in bookkeeping personnel and supporting overhead * Money saved on reduced returns and accounting costs raises profitability * Savings can be applied toward increased discounts to booksellers, encouraging nonreturnability * Antagonism between publishers and authors would be reduced greatly
From the bookseller's viewpoint:
* Because of higher discounts, cost of stock reduced * Wasteful overordering or overshipping reduced * More cash liberated for purchasing new stock * Freight, labor and bookkeeping expenses connected with returning books eliminated * Slow-moving books remain in`stores and remaindered in place * Hostility between booksellers and publishers reduced
From the consumer's viewpoint:
* More books available at discounted prices, and more at remainder prices as well * Good backlist books remain in stores for longer periods * Access to heavily marked-down books gives lower-income consumers access to them, helping to raise literacy levels.
From an environmental viewpoint:
As things are structured today, the only way to sell a thousand copies of a book is to print two thousand. The unsold stock goes back to publishers' warehouses and/or is pulped. Given the destruction of our forests to feed the crazy system of overprinting that governs the publishing industry today, elimination of this horrible waste will contribute to a greener book industry.
The publishing industry must shift to a nonreturnable standard, and this royalty model offers one way to facilitate the shift without harming any member of the publishing ecosystem. I hope it will float a little longer this time than it did the last.
Hand-Wringing Over Used Books While New-Book Industry Teeters Over the Brink
The New York Times's David Streitfeld recently beat his breast so hard, the thumping reverberated throughout the book publishing's trade journals and blogs. In an article called Bargain Hunting for Books, and Feeling Sheepish About It, he expressed guilt feelings about buying used books.
...it’s all the fault of people like myself, who increasingly use the Internet both to buy books and later, after their value to us is gone, sell them. This is not about Amazon peddling new books at discounted prices, which has been a factor in the book business for a decade, but about the rise of a worldwide network of amateurs who sell books from their homes or, if they’re lazy like me, in partnership with an Internet dealer who does all the work for a chunk of the proceeds.
Since Amazon's used-book feature has been in place for years, and indeed six years ago Streitfeld himself wrote about it (Authors, Publishers Protest Amazon’s New Strategy for Selling Used Books), it's a little too late for Mea Culpas. But Streitfeld does raise some important issues when he asks, "...where do I want that money to go? To my local community via a bookstore? To the publisher? To the author?"
The first thing we need to get clear is that money for used books has never gone to authors. There are some enlightened lands where royalties are paid to authors when their books are checked out of a library. Otherwise, authors are not exempted from the cruel fact that the secondary market for artistic product leaves the original creators out in the cold. Authors may take what comfort they can from knowing that someone out there thought enough of their books to buy them used. But unless they're saints, that comfort will be more than offset by the realization that their books were resold for as little as one penny, a fraction of what the bookseller, Amazon and UPS made on freight and handling charges.
Nor do publishers participate in the proceeds of used-book sales. Streitfeld's 2000 article acknowledged the bellows of anguish from publishers about being cut out of the loop.
Local community bookstores? They don't realize much by way of profit from used books, either. Major booksellers like Olsson's, Robin's, and Powell's have either gone out of business or are contemplating it. Wonder Book and Video, a major firm in the field, is fighting to stay competitive. And, though described as one of the great used-book stores in the country, New York City's Strand closed its Annex in the Financial District in September of 2008. Is anybody making money in used books? Think about this: a month before Strand shut its Annex, Amazon announced it had bought Abebooks, a major used-book purveyor.
As I say, it's a little late to lament the ceding of the used-book business to Amazon. The game is pretty much over. Jeff Bezos, the company's founder, beams with pride about the centralization of a process that, for all its serendipitous delights, was chaotic, labor- and real estate-intensive, and frequently just plain crazy. To hear him tell it, Amazon is rescuing a dying business and bringing service and professionalism to it, to say nothing of increasing literacy. Reading Bezos'sdefense of the practice - written six years ago - is a little like listening to Mephistopheles praising the virtues of immortality. But you have to pay the Devil his due, and I think we should.
Feeling sheepish about helping to fatten Amazon's bank account? Time to get over it. Big as the used-book issue is, we have far greater fish to fry, like how our poor dear broken old publishing industry is going to go on producing new books.
If you substitute "books" for "CDs" in Ben Sisario's New York Times article Music Sales Fell in 2008, but Climbed on the Web, you'll see parallels both encouraging and disheartening, depending whether you're in the print books business (which I am) or the e-book business (which I am).
Though total sales of CD's in the year gone by were high - 361 million - they were down almost 20 percent from 2007. Adding full-album downloads to the charts raises the total to 428 million, but that too represents a 14% decline over the previous year. No matter how you cut it, the arrow pointed down in the year gone by. You can mark some of it down to the economic recession, but when you look at the arrow for sales of digital music, you know it's not "the economy, Stupid." Proof is that for the last eight years, when the economy was relatively strong until recently, album sales have been dropping. Between 2000 and 2008, they plummeted by 45%.
On the other hand, in 2008 more than one billion songs were downloaded, a 27 percent increase from 2007, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Five years ago, that figure was 19 million.
If you look at the bar graphs for the e-book business, you see the same dramatic growth. Though stats for all of 2008 aren't in yet, as of the end of the third quarter e-book revenue was up 57.7% over the same period the year before. Whether it's books or music, the plain truth is that retailers don't feel they can generate the same level of sales per square foot of store space (which is how most businesses calculate the profitability of any given product).
But now let's shift from plain truth to one that is emerging from dust at the crossroads where the hard-copy and digital businesses intersect, and that is the profitability of content purchased on web sites.
One reason that the traditional book and record companies cling to their hard-copy model, in the face of all the evidence that consumers are going in another direction, is that the digital model has not proven it can generate revenue on the same scale as the Old Way. Online advertising, secondary exploitation of content, and other revenue-producers have yet to step up to replace the same functions in world of tangible goods. One of the big causes is the Informaton Wants to Be Free mindset among online consumers, a gaping hole at the ship's water line that has not yet been sealed. To executives watching the stupdendous paradigm shift in the media, Free Downloader is just one four-letter word away from Freeloader.
According to the Times's Sisario, however, there is hope. Some record companies, he reports. "...say they are finally beginning to wring significant profits from music on Web sites like YouTube and MySpace." “As the digital side grows," he quotes a market research analyst, "you get a different business model, with more revenue streams.” Sisario cites videos and ring tones as kinds of revenues flowing into those streams. “We don’t focus anymore on total album sales or the sale of any one particular product as the metric of revenue or success,” says an executive VP for Universal Music Group's digital division. “We look at the total consolidated revenue from dozens of revenue lines behind a given artist or project, which include digital sales, the physical business, mobile sales and licensing income.”
Is there a concommitant revenue stream to be exploited by book, newspaper and magazine publishers looking for a bridge to the New World of Digital? I don't know what the book equivalents of ring tones and videos are, but it's imperative that publishers find them and find them fast. RC
Borders To Try Nonreturnable - Possibility World Will Not End
A combination of fresh thinking by a publisher and hardship at a book chain have produced a breach in the facade of a tradition that at least one observer asserts is at the heart of trade publishing's woes. According to the Wall Street Journal, Borders has agreed to buy books from the Harper Studio imprint, recently founded by Robert Miller, at a deep discount of 58 percent to 63 percent off, on a nonreturnable basis. A typical hardcover discount runs 50% to 56% depending on quantity purchased.
When Miller launched HarperStudio he expressed determination to find a way to break the vicious cycle by which bookstores may return unsold inventory for full credit, a practice that has proven ruinous for many a publisher. Skeptics, familiar with previous efforts including deep discounting, ironically wished him "Lots of luck". But desperate times call for desperate measures. Rob Gruen, a Borders executive, stated, "The idea of taking inventory and then shipping it back isn't a good idea for anybody. We're open to all publishers to discuss alternatives to the traditional return model."
We wish Miller and Borders lots of luck too, but without a trace of smirk on our faces.
What Happens at Your Publisher's Sales Conference and Why it Matters Desperately to You
Twice every year, around mid-May and mid-December, a curious lull befalls the frenzied lives of literary agents, like those abrupt silences that occasionally muffle a party when everybody, inexplicably, stops talking at exactly the same time. I've experienced enough of these semiannual brownouts that I ought to expect them by now. Yet they always take me by surprise, and I can predictably be heard at these times barking to my staff, "Is there something wrong with our phones? Is this a mail holiday or what?" At length it occurs to me: it's sales conference season. I then take advantage of this hiatus to catch up on paperwork.
Sales conference is the time when a publisher's list of forthcoming books is introduced to the company's staff and in particular to the its commissioned sales representatives, who then go forth to the stores in their territories and line up orders. Since this is the point where the editorial process interfaces with marketing and distribution processes, it may literally be said that the fate of your book, and possibly your career, is cast at sales conference.
For the people who work at publishing houses, these convocations are red-letter days, major events in their corporate lives. For the past six months they have been sweating, suffering, beating their breasts and rending their garments over the books they have acquired. Now they are going to pitch them to the folks who actually get them into the stores. This is a time of intense anxiety, for the presentation of the list is by no means a matter of handing the sales reps a set of proofs and saying, "Read it, it's terrific." Indeed, it's uncommon for the reps to read any but the most important books on their publishers' lists. Nor is it necessary.
If they don't need the book itself, however, they do need information about it, and in the weeks leading up to the conference editors scurry frantically about the halls of their companies, rounding up cover proofs, advertising copy, promotional notes, author-tour itineraries, and anything else that will make their books look and sound irresistibly tempting to sales people, store buyers and distributors, and ultimately to consumers.
The conferences are held in different locations around the country. Many companies hold their winter conferences in Florida, Puerto Rico, and other tropical climes, giving participants a chance to relax in the sun after work sessions and making the event in part a paid vacation. Other publishers hold conferences closer to home, in resort hotels within easy driving radius of New York City. Some publishers conduct them in the city itself. The more distant the conference, the fewer employees may be permitted to attend due to the costs of airfare and accommodations, and therefore the privilege of attendance is one of the ways an editor's status at a publishing company is determined. Conferences held in New York City enable all staff members to participate. From the viewpoint of sales reps these may be great fun, entitling them to a week in the Big Apple with a publisher picking up the tab. But for the publishers themselves, New York City-held conferences are harder work, as there is little letup from the grueling labors of conferring and ingratiating themselves with the sales representatives.
Each publisher has its own style, format and strategy for sales conferences, but typically the days are divided into morning and afternoon sessions. At these, the editors sponsoring the books, or perhaps the heads of editorial divisions, present each title with a brief description of the contents and salient sales features. What successes have the author's previous books enjoyed? Is the book tied into some trend or fad, some event such as an election, opening of the baseball season, a disaster, a war, a trial, a scandal? Is there a movie or television adaptation in the works? Are author appearances planned? Is the author engaging, promotable, famous?
The editor's spiel is fortified by a variety of supplementary material: cover proofs, bound proofs of the book itself or excerpts or condensed portions, inside illustrations, an agenda of the author's tour, posters or mock-ups of advertising copy, plugs by famous authors or other celebrities, trailers from movie or television tie-ins, slide shows, video and audio and Web presentations, and all manner of gimmicks such as buttons, pens and bookmarks. Sometimes the publisher will stage a real dog-and-pony show, with professional entertainment, elaborate skits written and performed by the publishing staff, and even cameo appearances by star authors.
If the publisher's list is a big and multifarious one, the work sessions may be broken down into specialized seminars in which the sales reps, distributors, or chain store buyers may educate themselves as to the nature of such categories as science fiction, travel, cook books, or romances, or focus on strategies for one or two blockbuster lead titles.
All of this activity is designed to impress and enlighten the sales reps, help them to understand the publisher's aims and problems, give them an opportunity to offer feedback garnered from experiences in their territories, and inspire them to get behind the publisher's list with every fiber of their being.
What makes these sessions so critical to the success or failure of your book is that they bear directly on the number of copies that will be printed and distributed and on the energy that will be expended on the marketing. Thus, sales conference is the week of reckoning for the list, during which time it is inscribed which books shall fly and which shall bomb, which shall be raised up to the bestseller list and which cast down to the remainder bins, which shall be stacked near the cash registers in pyramids of pharaohnic dimension, and which secreted spine-out in quantities of two or three in the wrong department of a bookstore.
Broadly speaking, there are two ways in which printings are determined by the activities at a sales conference. At the one extreme are those books for which printings and sales goals are somewhat nebulous in the publisher's mind. These books are presented as vigorously as possible in the hopes the sales reps will get turned on and bring in a surprisingly large number of orders. At the other end of the spectrum are those titles for which the publisher has set specific sales goals and the sales reps are expected to fill their quotas.
Most of the books on any given list fall somewhere between these two approaches, and not all the books get fair shrift. This is particularly true of first novels, midlist books, experimental works, and books that are part of a series. There is only so much you can say about a first novel, or about the latest Regency romance, or a book about costumes of Colonial Virginia, and there's no sense in trying to tell these highly sophisticated sales people that such books are going to leap off the shelves by the score. On the other hand, as there is a steady market for such books, it can be expected that a minimum number of copies will sell without undue effort on the publisher's part. Still, it's easy to see how the bestseller mentality can affect your book in a sales conference situation as it does in the editorial boardroom, the review media, and in the bookstores.
Armed with all this information, with press kits, cover proofs, promotional gimmicks, and inspiring editorial pep talks, the sales reps go forth to the stores and sell, sell, sell. Although the publisher may have outlined a sales strategy for the list, the handling of sales is largely left to the discretion of the reps. Conditions in each territory vary widely: Consumers may buy westerns by the truckload in the southwestern region, but the same books will lie in great untouched stacks like dead fish in the bookstores of the Northeast. They may adore Patterson in Cleveland and ignore him in Topeka. A book on the hottest new rock group may march out of California stores in regiment strength, but in Bible Belt bookstores will molder in unopened cartons.
The sales reps servicing these territories understand the tastes of the readers there, and know how to "play" the books in their sales kits like so many cards in a rummy game. Like authors, agents, and publishers, the salesman or woman makes the most profit on bestsellers, and so these titles may be expected to muscle out the rest of the list. The salesperson may make all sorts of bargains to induce store buyers to take that quota of the big book: special discounts, relaxation of strict return policies, a little coaxing here, a little coercing there, and some trading off of little books for big ones elsewhere. Among the little ones may be your book. Or maybe it's the other way around, and you're the lucky author whose big book will push the little ones off the boards. This is, you must realize, a jungle, however civilized the product being sold. Someone once said that the wise man never looks too closely at what goes into his laws or his sausages; perhaps bestselling books should be added to that list.
Although business is not conducted around the clock at sales conference, it is never far away at breakfast, lunch, or dinner, at cocktail time, out on the beach or the golf links, or in the evening at the theater or floor show. Sales conference is a time for everybody to get to know everybody else a little better, creating a sense of teamwork and harmony. Many editors tell me they come away from these occasions with an enhanced sense of "family" about the people they work and deal with. You may know next to nothing about someone in an office down the hall from you, but in the relaxed informality of a resort setting, that person may tell you something about himself or reveal aspects of his character that have been held in tight check by the requirements of office decorum and the hurly-burly of the business day.
Sales conference is the place where an editor can bestow a personal touch on a sales campaign, and that can make the difference to a book's success. "I know books like this don't ordinarily work in your region," an editor might say to a sales rep he or she has buttonholed at the bar, "but this particular novel has some aspects that will appeal to the stores you service." It works the other way around, too. Sales reps, knowing their particular market a lot better than the publishers do, will pull an editor or sales manager aside and say, "My customers can't keep science fiction in their stores; are you going to increase the number you publish?" Or, "Everybody in my territory wants to know when the next book in the Hieronymus Bosch detective series is coming out." Or, "St. Martins and Berkley are doing really well with a certain kind of romance, so how about our starting a similar line?" In short, sales conference is the time and place for important dialogues among staff members of publishing houses, among sales people, and between publishers and sales reps, distributors, or bookstore and chain store personnel.
Is there any place for authors at sales conference? Except for the very biggest names, authors are seldom invited to the ones held outside New York City, and because of the expense of bringing authors to New York, any that are invited to the conferences held in the city are usually people who live in or near the city to begin with. Invitations are not automatic, however, as few authors are dynamic, attractive, and promotable enough to make a strong positive impression on the sales reps. There is still much you can do, though, to cooperate with your editor in furnishing him or her with information and sales features about your book, anything and everything that will enable your editor to highlight your book when the presentation is made.
Maybe, then, you too should become aware of the onset of sales conference season, and instead of writing it off as a period of downtime in your calendar, get yourself involved in the preparations. It need not cost you a lot of money. One of my clients, the author of a tragic romance novel, bought a small carton of tissue packets for her editor and urged her to hand them to the sales reps with the other material in the promo kit for her book. "Tell them to have a good cry," the author said. It proved quite effective.
Perhaps you can think of something equally creative. After all, why on earth would you want to go to a tropical resort, all expenses paid by your publisher, anyway?
Today a publisher brought to my attention an oddity on the Amazon.com website. It seems that you cannot purchase more than three copies of many bestsellers. On the evening of January 28, 2010 I viewed the top ten books on the Amazon.com bestseller list. In every case I was prohibited from putting more than three copies into my shopping cart. To make certain this was not a fluke, I sampled the first 50 titles on the list but did not find any exceptions to the three-to-a-customer rule.
