A Baker's Dozen

Michael Jensen | 10/07/2009 | Numérisation

Over the next five to six months I’ll be posting some musings on the nature and status of the digital and print marketplace, down here in the States—as well as some musings on the changing nature of the publishing marketplace overall, as we move into a chaotic second decade of the 21st century.

It was just five years ago that Google Book Search (then Google Print) terrified publishers. Four years ago, blogs moved into the mainstream, cell phones became cheap devices, and YouTube arrived on the scene.

In just the last three years, we’ve seen the rise of Twitter, the massive expansion of Facebook, and the establishment of open standards for epubs.

In just the last *two years,* we’ve watched the arrival of the Kindle, the Sony e-book reader, and other reading devices, with excitement and with trepidation.

Trepidation because we’ve also watched the downward spiral of newspapers, the transformation of the music industry’s business models, the decline of the independent bookstore, and a radical disruption in what we believed to be fundamentals of our economy.

What’s a publisher to do?

I don’t have “The Answer,” because we’re moving into a richly complex world of publishing biodiversity, of microniches, vertical markets, specialty collections, micromarketing to micromarkets, and much more.

What works for a publisher like mine won’t necessarily work for a publisher like yours; the marketing for this book won’t necessarily work for that book.

That was always true, when you get right down to it—but after 20+ years in publishing, I can honestly say that the signs of a “new marketplace” have never been so clear.

So what I’ll be doing in the following months is posting a series of meditations on how societal, economic, and environmental pressures are changing the publishing marketplace. I’ll explore how the changing habits of US consumers may indicate new opportunities, and investigate some specific examples. I’ll postulate some possible near-future scenarios. I’ll frame some discussions regarding the US marketplace for Canadian products.

I’ll be looking for engagement and comment from the thoughtful among you (that means *you*).

Since nobody has “The Answer,” I’m hopeful that with the AECB’s new website and blog, this community can grow into a conversation around these topics—because the more we can help each other understand the problems and the possibilities, the better we’ll all do, in the new information economy.

As a New Canadian (I became a permanent resident two years ago), I’ve got a dog in this fight—that is, I want to be sure that Canadian publishers prosper in the digital information economy, because I’ll be part of it.

We’ve got a rocky and complex road ahead of us in the next five to ten years—as new habits, new technologies, new environmental threats, new borderlessness, and new presumptions about the world unfold. I hope that the work we do now, in discussions amongst ourselves, can help devise sensible strategies to prepare for it.

I’ll not call for online discussion yet—that will begin with the next post—but please prepare yourself: I hope in the months ahead to have robust discussions about our visions of the future of Canadian publishing, the future of publishing in general, and the future that we will call “the present” in the years ahead.

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Quid Pro Quo and the online experience

Michael Jensen | 04/06/2009 | Numérisation

“Why should I link to you?”

It’s one of the questions I ask my “Electronic Publishing: Theory & Practice” graduate students, at George Washington University. In this course, each student develops what I term a “deep niche” site—some sub-sub-specialty site that interests them—promotes it in a variety of venues and through a variety of methods, and attends closely to traffic and user patterns, as they make changes over eight weeks.

A few of the take-aways my students get from this half-semester course: a) it’s hard to get traffic; b) it’s hard to keep a site fresh; c) it’s hard to promote, even via Google Adwords; d) it’s really hard to get people to come *back* to your site; e) it’s *especially* hard to get people to *link* to your site.

The last two items are what this post is about. At the heart of user loyalty is the quid pro quo.

A user/customer must get something, to keep coming back. That something can be intellectual stimulation, novelty, humor, insight, wisdom, or a fun-fact-to-know-‘n’-tell. It can be a style that appeals, or a surprise that keeps on giving. It can be a document to be read later, or a great bargain. It can be a fashion tip, or a koan.

For publishers like us, it requires more than a dry description of a book, or a pretty picture of the cover. If we expect a user to be more than a one-time visitor—to be a deep reader.

As I wrote in the earlier “Real Readers Reading,” we want to attract the kind of reader who will be engaged in our kind of content, want to buy the highest quality version, and come back to buy again. These readers can (and should) be anywhere: Edmonton and Winnepeg, Amsterdam and London, Lagos and Pretoria. What distinguishes them is their appreciation of the long form work, and their interest in ideas. And, of course, their facility with English and French.

These are readers who will be unimpressed with promotional copy: they want to browse the book to see if they care about it. They will have no interest in bothering their friends with a Twitter tweet saying “come look at this advertisement.” But they may link to a sample passage and tweet “just bought this book because of this prose.” They are very considerate consumers.

To attract repeat visitors, you have to *keep on quid pro-ing that quo.* Meaning, you have to provide them with continuing value. They want to know that you publish other stuff they might care about (as a *reader*). But if you’re only self-promoting (“you can buy this other stuff”), you may not get them to return. Instead, “Sample these other books” is likely to be the appropriate message for the “deep reader.”

To do a little math: if you’re a publisher site able to attract 5,000 visitors a day, you’re doing pretty well. The Web’s growth has been attenuating and diluting the pool. (Note: Many sites I know have been seeing decreasing raw visitors, and increasing proportions of “conversions” of visitor-to-purchaser. That indicates that the right people are finding these sites increasingly effectively.) With 5000 visitors a day, a reasonable goal might be to get 10% to come back, 1% to give you their email address, and 0.3% to purchase: that would be 500 to return, 50 to give you their email address, and 15 to purchase.

This doesn’t seem like a lot, but these are *deep readers,* exactly the audience every publisher wants. They’re the most likely group to buy more of your stuff. How do we get and keep them?

By providing them with that quid pro quo I’ve been talking about: content, value, humor, quips, quotes, reviews, more content. Something they can sink their teeth into. Something they can *read.*

They’re *readers* after all. Give them what they want, and they might come back. Who knows, they might even buy something.

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Retaining Relevance as a Publisher

Michael Jensen | 04/02/2009 | Numérisation

Let’s presume that writers want three things:

a) to be read,
b) to be respected, and
c) to at least enhance their income, by writing.

If that’s the case, then the equation of old—that a), b), and c) required a publisher—is no longer the case.

This has, I’m sorry to say, profound consequences for publishers. For the next two years, it may not matter dramatically. But two to five years out, it will matter significantly.

I’m worried about the value-adding intermediaries (aka publishers). Consequently I’m worried about *dis*intermediators. These are the web-based, print-on-demand, metadata-providing, ISBN-providing, insert-into-Amazon-servicing, epub-on-demand-selling, publisher-free and development-free publishers. 

Today, it’s easy to dismiss the options authors have—Lulu.com, or Wowio.com, or even Amazon and Lightningsource—as also-rans, or as niche, nearly-vanity publishing.

But that’s not unlike the newspaper industry thinking of Craigslist as “a classified ad web site,” or Yahoo thinking of Google as “just a search engine.”

In part because of Craiglist and Google, newspapers are failing, even closing. Because revenue has declined, investigative journalism is threatened.

It didn’t take a big loss of newspapers’ income stream to endanger their existence. Were publishers—a thin-margin enterprise—to lose 20-30% of their income, they’d lose a great deal of their financial resilience.

I think of it as a big-player problem, or as (yet another variant of) the 80/20 Pareto Principle (the long tail). 80% of income tends to come from 20% of our books. We wear 20% of our clothes 80% of the time.

This is just generally true in publishing—and if your publishing outfit has a different ratio, I’d like to hear it.

Given this general trend, it’s a signal weakness: the top 20% of authors, the top 20% of our publications, top 20% of our quality, is exactly what could most easily do without us.

The products could, even 80% (even 20%) of the time, sell themselves *enough*—reach enough of an audience, sell enough directly (without a majority of the income going to the publisher), and make enough of an “authority splash” in terms of publicity and blog noise, to make the publisher (perhaps 80% of the time) unnecessary.

This leaves us only with the 80% of the published content that produces 20% of the revenue.

Our challenge as publishers is to find ways to add substantive value: better promotion, better metadata, better Web presence, better integration into aggregators, better quality reading experience, better composition, better indexing, better blurbing, better print distribution, better insertion into aggregations, better long-tail promotion, better authority, better library adoption, better classroom adoption…. the list goes on, of course.

But the key point here is that if we are not attentive to the things we do best—and attentive to the new things we *could* do— we will not distinguish ourselves from the “raw intermediators” who could easily skim the cream from the top.

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