I see JK Rowlings is getting a fair amount of publicity about her new ‘adult’ book. It’s one of the truisms about publishing that if you don’t need publicity, you’ll get it, and if you do, you won’t.
A well-known author who had just had the butter-boat emptied on him, tried to explain this as the the publishers being cash-rich and personnel-poor. The strategy was all about introducing him to new readers… So he went to patches of fandom. Made perfect sense, really.
Put in military terms publishers are like a country fighting a war on five fronts… four of the armies are so under-equipped they have to steal ammunition from their foes. They have no boots. They’re outnumbered two to one by their foes, and they need the resources and support of mother country just to survive, let alone win. And some of them are still making a fight of it. The fifth front is commanded by a wealthy, influential general and the motherland has given his men the very best equipment, and the largest army and large stocks of food and ammunition. His forces outnumbers the foes he faces. So the parliament of the country so at war, facing extinction… has a small stock of ammunition, boots, and a few thousand reserves. So they send all of it to the fifth front, where the general has attractive offers to change sides, and promises to match every bit of materiel and manpower he has been given. The embattled country is just bound to win with this strategy, isn’t it?
The reality of course is while publishers have historically had cash, and some of them have made a recent pile selling e-books off their backlist (some of which they may have the rights to… or not, as e-books did not exist or were not included when the contract was signed. A successful challenge will bankrupt them), they’re really not cash rich either- not for the vast costs of a Spanish Armada that the sort mass-tactics that they use on their ‘popular’ authors – not for everyone. They may be personnel-poor too, at least while they continue to do business in manner they always have (ie. lots of meetings, which – and your mileage may vary – can chew a vast amount of time for little added value). The truth is they’re -outside of Baen – also Brand-recognition poor (ie, no one buys a Tor book or a Del Rey book or a Simon & Schuster book because they love the publisher’s choices, and trust them to provide good reading. No, they trust author names.) They’re quality sales-data poor too, meaning they know nothing about their customers – and about the market and those who don’t buy their product, but could. They also seem contemporary marketing skill poor too, and this is a field that is changing fast and in which the old techniques of flooding bookstores are perhaps 1/3 as effective as they once were.
Now, logic says if you’re poor in all these fields you need to make best use of the few resources you have, and you need to leverage off them. The one way would be to gamble and hope that by investing heavily in one author you could make a huge profit (your fixed costs – editing, proof-reading etc, for a bestseller are not (at least in theory) very much bigger than for noob. Of course as you’re sales data poor too, this is a gamble, plain and simple. And as the importance of the traditional marketing channels (selling to brick-and-mortar chain bookstores) decline, so does their ability to cook the odds. The information available from Bookscan is such poor quality, that basing decisions on it is the equivalent of reading entrails for answers. Publishers know its a gamble… so they bet ‘safe’ – which means the authors they paid a lot for, and where reaching a new audience is hard… it’s safer, but unlikely to give more than a minor win. And a minor win… is not enough.
The one thing you don’t do is spend money ineffectually. Spend ideally has to get you maximum leverage for the lowest cost, and ideally has to improve all the areas you are resource poor in. Spending roughly half the advance (a typical measure, apparently) on promotion for say… Sir Terry Pratchett, is the equivalent of flushing money down the tube – firstly the chances of your reaching new readers to pay more than tiniest fraction of your costs are miniscule, and secondly, his fans do a much better job than you can. Rather like the powerful fifth army, the only way it pays real dividends is if you can use the popularity and success of that author to improve your other regions of poverty – So, if you send the resources to the strong but direct them to relieve the hard pressed, and make it worth their while. If you do spend on say David Weber – but you use that spend to build your Baen brand awareness (meaning you have something to offer to to authors), and to piggy back other authors – and to collect some sales data while you’re at it (sign up here for our new notification list, and we’ll tell you a fortnight early about the new e-ARC and you can get at a 20% discount -meaning more profit for us, actually, and a saving for you. And here is a free first book of Fred Funnyface’s new Space navy novel with every purchase. If you can’t leverage off that, then looking for authors who make ground despite your non-support and sending them help is common sense.
The most valuable asset authors have is their brand, and fans of that brand. Publishers need to leverage off that — and that realistically means paying for it. Authors invest heavily – mostly in man-hours and talent, but also in money, building that. It’s theirs, and they’re not going to use it to benefit other authors – or their publisher – without quid pro quo. Now there is an idea that would work, but also be unpopular with them.
Mad Genius Club 
14 responses to “Leverage”
Dave,
Well put as always.
and
Shh!! No logic!!
logic obviously hurts…
Back in the day of small, independent bookstores with staff members who read books, I learned of several new-to-me authors because the clerk said, “oh, you like [author]? You might try [author 2].” Alas that only Baen learned that trick. Amazon’s attempts are better than nothing (more for music than books IMHO). Some days I wonder exactly what major publishing companies do to earn money, since selling books and magazines does not seem to be their line of business.
Side story: a major US magazine was bought by GiantPublisher, gutted utterly beyond recognition, and overloaded with adverts for pharmaceuticals. Up sprang three new magazines, each catering to a slightly different part of the group that originally read the late, much lamented publication. All three newbies are still on the newsstand four years or so later, while Old Magazine is vanishing from the racks. Do you suppose anyone will learn the lesson, aside from the Baens and Naked Readers of the world?
The part that puzzles me is how they can not learn? How they keep repeating the same it worked occasionally once-upon-a-time recipe? Another author — one I like and respect but disagree with — basically said well, we don’t know what makes some books take off and others not, so it’s no use trying to predict it. Just keep writing. Which is right from the author’s POV but so wrong from the publisher’s POV. The author is writing an item. One. The publisher is dealing with probabilities of a group of items, and needs to deal with it in an entirely different manner. I suspect, however that a large part of this self-deception — I think they know if they collected the data, approached the subject analytically… they’re going to have to admit that often their tastes and choices are not what the public wants.
I suspect it’s the same problem that leads various friends to assure me that you really can win lots of money gambling. Understanding statistics and long-term probabilities seems to be limited to a small population. Those “gut” feelings are just more believable, doncha know?
I suspect you’re right. I find those who don’t think logically and to whom stats and numbers are a terrifying, hard to grasp thing to be feared… well can’t really imagine what it must be like living in their world. It must be like being blind.
Oh and yes, you are right that is what publisher need more desperately than anything else – a way to effectively link readers to books that they will like. It’s not hard IF you have electronic sales and the data from it – to work out the probabilities. Persons who bought author (or book type, or cover or…) X bought 53%Y. If they bought X and Y, they bought 70% Z, if they only bought X, only 7% bought Y, but 55% W. Those who bought W only buy 10% Z. — you build up a series of probability matrices, and where you have common ‘high points’ you can estimate quite accurately what is trending with which groups.
Dave,
Most trad publishers can’t even get a figure for how many ebooks one sold. Can’t or won’t. They’re reporting “canned” numbers across the board.
The numbers they need would have to come from selling off their own site – Amazon or B&N are not going to part with that data. And its won’t not can’t.
Actually, it doesn’t make sense for Amazon and B&N not to part with the data, if it would help Publishers make better decisions on how to boost sales, many of which would go through their sites.
There once was a time when some readers were loyal to fiction book editors. They knew that certain editors helped writers create great books. Today, it is obvious that many novels haven’t been past a copy editor (or even a spelling checker) much less a content editor.
Baen, as you noted, has good marketing. Unfortunately, Baen does not do so well on the editing, especially on books by its most popular writers (e.g.: Weber and Ringo). Sales of their new books are high, but I believe that good editing would pay off with greater sales (just look at all the one-star reader reviews of Weber’s latest Honor Harrington novel on Amazon.com). Then again, the hideous unedited Twilight books were bought by millions of readers, so I could be totally off-base.
The problem is that no one knows who edits most books these days. If it isn’t mentioned in the author notes, it is almost impossible to find out. I’ve said the same thing for years, there are editors who I as a reader would follow and buy most things they work on.
It is just like the producers in music. Some of them are huge names because they have big impact.
I suspect that a database of keywords about books (like fantasy, urban, guns, space opera etc…) cross-linked to titles and sales would give a pretty solid indicator of what’s trending for any given publisher’s stable. What it doesn’t do is tell them what they’re missing because they aren’t selling it – for that they’d need to trawl Amazon top X lists and attach keywords to those books to do a gap analysis.
Of course, this approach requires actual work of the number-crunching and data entry variety as well as good design of the database and algorithms to begin with. Since it’s rather painfully obvious that these are people who Don’t Do that icky math stuff, chances of it happening are somewhere south of zero.
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