We conclude Vanity Week with a blog that futurist Mike Shatzkin recently posted, publicly asking Thomas Nelson, the Christian book publishing giant, to explain its new self-publishing program, WestBow Press. WestBow is partnering with Author Solutions, the biggest player in author-subsidized publishing and a partner with Harlequin in its controversial self-publishing venture.

Here are the questions posed by Shatzkin. We are not aware that they have been answered:

1. How many such titles will they do per season or per year?

2. How will access to Nelson’s (always limited, as is any publisher’s) sales and marketing bandwidth be allocated to this imprint?

3. Will the books be vetted as suitable for Nelson’s Christian mission? And, if so, how and by whom?

4. Will the books be vetted at all for quality? Or will an author just choose the WestBow option and, if that’s the case, how much extra will be they paying and what will they be told they’re getting for their money?

5. The story says that Nelson editors won’t touch the books but will “monitor sales to identify potential big sellers.” What’s the pre-monitoring launch plan? What’s the plan if Nelson editors actually identify a “potential big” book?

Hyatt discusses the initiative on his blog and says he sees real revenue in it. But he doesn’t answer any of the questions above.

I am not alone in anticipating that publishers may change things around in the future with big authors, sharing more risk (less or no advance in this case, not cash for services) for more reward. But it is a more radical step than I would have imagined for a publisher with an industry brand for quality to allow authors to buy their way onto the list. Their must be some controls here, one would think. But we certainly don’t know what they are yet.

Read The new Thomas Nelson self-publishing initiative; more questions than answers.

RC

When you admire a guru, you have to take the bad prophecies with the good. Mike Shatzkin, who is giving a significant presentation at the commencement of Book Expo America, is certainly our favorite guru. But damn!, his gloomy prognostication about the future of the convention is hard to live with, even though deep down we suspect it’s true.

There are two classes of people in publishing: those who remember the American Booksellers Association (ABA) convention – BEA’s predecessor – and those who don’t. The latter roughly parallel those who don’t remember typewriters, black and white televisions, or automobiles with clutches. If these artifacts of 20th century civilization draw a blank stare, it will be equally hard to imagine what publishing must have been like when booksellers were important.

Before getting to his doomsday prognostication, Shatzkin takes us down memory lane to recall what BEA used to be. This is not merely idle reminiscence but, rather, Shatzkin setting us up to understand what the the convention has become and why it may no longer be a viable destination for a publishing industry that is exploding like a fragmentation grenade.

When I was a pup, the ABA was definitely an order-writing show. The number of independent bookstores who bought a big chunk of any trade list properly presented to them was in the thousands. (Now: what would you say? the dozens? wouldn’t hundreds be an exaggeration?) Only a few of the biggest publishers had sales forces large enough and disciplined enough to really cover them all, so most exhibitors encountered retailers who would do immediate business. Everybody had some sort of show “special” to encourage ordering. I think for many years it was “blue badges” that signified booksellers: you kept an eagle-eye out for them as the traffic streamed by and you knew exactly what and how you were going to pitch them.

Each night at the main convention hotels, several publishers — and all the mass-market publishers — ran “hospitality suites” offering liquid refreshment and munchies very deep into the evening. You’d make the rounds of those after you had gone to whatever events, dinners, and parties had taken place in other locations. I always found the time in the hospitality suites to be a highlight of the convention.

The halcyon days of the 1970s and 80s gave way to a more corporate environment when Reed Exhibitions, which bills itself as the world’s leading organizer of trade and consumer events, acquired a controlling share of the show, changing its name to Book Expo America. “Reed Exhibitions excels in creating high profile, highly targeted business and consumer exhibitions and events to establish and maintain business relations, and generate new business,” says the organization’s website.

Interestingly, Reed’s takeover paralleled the rash of trade book publisher mergers and acquisitions that, like a collapsing star, imploded the industry from hundreds of vibrant companies to fewer than a dozen behemoths in the space of a decade. 1996, the very year Reed acquired controlling interest in ABA, was the same one in which the mass market paperback business underwent a convulsive contraction that transformed the format into the Fifteen Top Blockbuster airport model that characterizes mass paper today. (I’ve written about this at length in a two part article, “The Rise and Fall of the Mass Market Paperback”: Part 1, Part 2.)

Thus, while Big Publishing seemed to be soaring in the late 90s it was actually peaking, and the shift made itself manifest in the book fair. “The long expansion of the US book trade, which had continued pretty much unabated from World War II until the mid-1990s, stopped and started to reverse in the Internet age,” writes Shatzkin. “Even worse for the industry trade show, consolidation of both big publishers and retailers accelerated. That meant fewer publisher customers to buy the booth space, and fewer retailers walking the aisles to make the booth space valuable.”

And now, a little over a decade later, the collapsing star of Big Publishing generates more heat ($24 billion annually) than light, and that’s reflected in the dimming of the celebration called Book Expo America. “The BEA of today isn’t the ABA of old,” laments Shatzkin. “The booksellers are just about gone. The late-night hospitality suites don’t exist anymore. And hardly any publisher goes to the show expecting to write orders. It is time to organize a betting pool where the question is: how many more BEAs before, like its Canadian counterpart [Book Expo Canada shuttered permanently early this year] it simply ceases? Three? Four? Hard to see more than that.”

Also shpracht Shatzkin. You can read it all in his blog, How many more times for BEA?

But wait – there’s a PS. BEA’s show director Lance Fensterman reports that the convention’s attendance is down 14% over the last one held in New York City, 2007, and exhibitor personnel registrations are down 10% to 15%. Overall exhibition square footage is down 21%. It looks like the Guru of Gloom is right again, dammit.

Richard Curtis

Evan Schnittman observed it as a smear of light on the fringe of our galaxy, but it took media guru Mike Shatzkin to fully articulate its significance. And significant it is, a possible game-changer in the internecine struggle among authors, publishers, and Google. It has to do with a little-known provision of the US Copyright Act of 1978.

Schnittman, a Vice President of Business Development and Rights for Oxford University Press, mentioned it almost as an afterthought at the end of “There Will Be Disintermediation”, the final installment of a brilliant three part analysis in his Black Plastic Glasses website. “Mark your calendars, folks,” he declares, “the disintermediation begins on January 1, 2013. What happens on January 1, 2013? See for yourself in the US Copyright Act of 1978, section 203. {…Termination of the grant may be effected at any time during a period of five years beginning at the end of thirty-five years from the date of execution of the grant…}” [bold print is Schnittman's.]

“What if this change,” asks Schnittman, “was so significant that it could possibly even spawn an industry wide reset of the way we do things?” He leaves us panting for an answer, and Shatzkin provides it:

“It turns out there is a clause in the 1978 copyright law that allows any author to reclaim any copyright despite any contract with a publisher, simply by serving notice. The copyright can be reclaimed no less than 35 years and no more than 40 years from the book’s original publication. So books published in 1978 can be reclaimed by their authors from 2013-2018.”.

“One wonders” Shatzkin ruminates, “how many agents are aware of this law and are preparing for it.”

Actually many agents have been aware of it for years, and a number have invoked it. It’s commonly referred to as the “Widows and Orphans Provision,” because it entitles immediate family members to recover from publishers or certain derivative licensees (like movie companies) the copyrights to works published by a deceased author. (Don’t worry, men, widowers are included!) What some agents may not be aware of is that an author doesn’t have to be dead for the reclamation to take place; he or she simply has to live long enough to take advantage of the provision. For books licensed to publishers after January 1, 1978, the law is effective “thirty-five years from the date of publication of the work under the grant or at the end of forty years from the date of execution of the grant, whichever term ends earlier.”

What surprises Shatzkin is that Article 203 has not come up in discussions about the Google Settlement, and we owe him and Schnittman a debt of gratitude for placing it on the table.

Until recently we’d have said that (except for a small number of evergreen backlist books) most titles coming up for reclamation under the Act are worth little or nothing. But with Google’s push to monetize old books, even moribund ones may have value either to their authors, their publishers, or Google. As Shatzkin puts it, for some old books “it looks like a new payday has been set up.”

For the full text of Article 203 of the 1978 Copyright Act, click here.

Richard Curtis

Hard on the heels of author Orson Scott Card’s fulmination against Amazon.com’s “obscene” share of revenues generated by the Kindle comes a proposal by Mike Shatzkin to blast etailer discounts, currently averaging 50%, back into the Dark Ages. How far back? “I suspect that number is about 20%,” he says in a recent Shatzkin Files blog.

I’ve described Shatzkin as a guru, but some reading his radical position may call him Jacobin. After you read it, however, you’ll wonder why it took so long for someone to question why e-book retailers charge the same discount that retailers of traditional books do, when the two modes have scarcely a thing in common. “This is daft,” he declares. “There is no comparison between the retailers’ costs and risks associated with physical books and those associated with ebooks. There is no economic justification to providing the same level of discounts.”

“Now,” says Shatzkin, “is the time to change this.”

How does he propose to do this? Here’s where things move from Jacobin to Red Brigade. “The publishers need to jointly fund and substantially own a virtual retailer whose mission would be to deliver all conceivable ebook formats…To stay on the right side of the law, publishers would sell to the new entity on the same terms they sold to everybody else. But the objective here is to limit the ability of retailers to force higher discounts through boycotting publishers or titles with impunity.”

Is Shatzkin suggesting publishers fight boycott with boycott?

The terms “boycott” and “right side of the law” don’t mingle very comfortably, but it’s clear that Shatzkin is pretty convinced that no tactic short of ganging up on etailers will work. Unfortunately, experience does not encourage optimism about publishers’ courage to join together to restore the balance of trade. Had they found the collective cojones to force bookstore chains to roll back the returnability of print books, the industry would not find itself in its current position, namely, over a barrel with its legs spread.

While he’s tossing sabots into our complacency, Shatzkin dismisses publishers’ initiative to sell their books directly to consumers rather than through retailers.

“The current effort by several general trade publishers to drive traffic to their own house-branded web sites is misguided and doomed. But Amazon (and Shelfari, GoodReads, LibraryThing, and our new entrant, Filedby.com) have demonstrated that sites with information across the trade book spectrum have real consumer appeal. With the support of the big publishers from the earliest possible moment to make the high-profile general trade books visible, at least a large portion of the discovery traffic could be liberated from being captive to Amazon, Google, or anybody else.”

I’m not sure I agree. In a posting on the subject we wrote, “If the only source of profit (to say nothing of independence and dignity) left to publishers is consumer retailing, they will step up their activities in this area until in time they are in a position to challenge the Barnes & Nobles and Amazons. Though the only weapon they have is their content, that may be more than enough to vanquish these Goliaths.”

If enough publishers pick up on Shatzkin’s proposition to realign e-book retailer discounts, it may be the beginning of the end of the digital equivalent of the Ancien Régime. It’s certainly time to air the issue, and Shatzkin has earned our gratitude for speaking up.

Richard Curtis

In his blog The Shatzkin Files our favorite publishing guru has turned his attention to returnability, the quicksand that has been sucking the publishing industry inexorably into the Slough of Despond. It’s a stubbornly nasty issue that has defeated some of the best business minds that have addressed it, but because the survival of our livelihoods depends on solving it, any new light shed on it is welcome. A recent posting of his on returns and the related topic of remaindering attracted the attention of Michael Cader, founder of Publishers Marketplace and Publishers Lunch, the trade book industry’s online newsletter. Like the rest of us, Cader, who once said that the publishing industry “is in a mathematical death spiral,” is vitally interested in seeing the business pull up before it’s too late.

If you enjoy eavesdropping on shop talk, put your ear against the wall and listen to this fascinating dialogue between two brilliant professionals. It may not solve returns but you’ll come away with an appreciation of how nuanced the issues are. Or maybe you’ll just conclude that if Shatzkin and Cader can’t solve them, maybe the death spiral is not such a bad idea after all.

RC

As regular readers of these pages know, we’re big fans of Mike Shatzkin, a publishing consultant speaker and commentator whose oracular pronouncements about the future of media qualify him for the title of guru.

He recently launched a blog called “The Shatzkin Files” and has kindly agreed to let us run some of his articles from time to time. Here is one, as rich and idea-filled as your grandma’s cinnamon raisin babka.

RC

A few months ago we profiled publishing futurist Mike Shatzkin, and the title pretty much said it all: If You Think 21st Century Publishing Is Scary, Wait ’til the 22nd!

Shatzkin has come roaring back with a new set of prognostications about the publishing industry, this time encompassing a shorter term – ten years. Not surprisingly, his conclusions are provocative to say the least. Here are some bullet-point summaries.

* “Someday, all data and applications will be ‘in the cloud’ – that is, existing independently from, but accessible by, digital devices. All the devices most used every day will then need almost no memory.”

* Media consumption will take place by people choosing from a wide variety of devices. “You’ll pick up one kind of screen/device to read a memo you’re working on, another one to look at the work of your favorite photographer, and pull a rolled-up one out of your back pocket to read a book or newspaper on the subway or at the beach. And those don’t include the ones on your walls for a movie, or for a piece of art.”

* “Over time, Wikipedia, Facebook and Google will morph into looking like each other in many ways (that is: search, community and information will all come from the same sources) and the new, meaningful sorting of sources will be vertical: by communities.”

* “We’ll all be joining lots of communities online, chosen by our interests and values, and by referrals from our friends. And these will ultimately become the hubs of marketing. And of publishing.”

* “Ten years from now, there will still be more books sold that were printed centrally and warehoused for sale than all other ways combined, but the end of that era will be in sight.”

* “Barnes & Noble will be the only full-line brick-and-mortar bookstore. It will sell used books as well as new ones, and we’ll be far along the road to it becoming one of only five organizations that really distribute consumer books nationally.”

* “Almost every book that goes ‘national’ will have been incubated through the niche-publishing farm system first. Agents and packagers constantly will survey the niche-publishing landscape, looking for projects that might warrant much more expensive marketing and distribution through one of the big distributors.”

* “The robust e-book market – more than 50 percent of the sales of many titles (also a bit more than 10 years off) – will have been fueled by features built into e-books that can’t be replicated in print versions. For example, e-books will frequently use moving images as illustrations, rather than stills. And, of course, e-books all will have links…”

God willing, we’ll be around to see how Shatzkin’s prognostications turn out, but they sound right to me. The wise will take them to heart and plan accordingly. Others will put their thumb in their mouth and hope the future will go away. Here’s a prognostication of my own: it won’t.

For more of Shatzkin’s dazzling projections into the future of the media, click here. And while you’re clicking, visit the website for his new venture, Filed by Author. It will be a comprehensive directory of authors and their works. Every author in the United States and Canada with an active ISBN will have an easily updated free web page with photos, videos, and website links which can be accessed by readers, publishers, reviewers, potential rights buyers and fellow authors. The site is currently in “private beta”, Shatzkin tells me, but authors can register and claim their pages now. If his crystal ball is as accurate about his own project as it has been about everybody else’s, ten years from now Filed by Author will be the indispensable database it’s designed to be.

RC