Speaking of change

I've set up shop on the Tools of Change for Publishing site. My dedicated readers (both of you) can find my latest post here.

What matters and what sells

Last month on Good Experience, Bit Literacy author Mark Hurst wrote about the sometimes-painful lessons he’d learned working with mainstream book publishers. “Drop any illusions about spending time with book lovers,” writes Hurst, “this is business.”
“Publishers and bookstores want a book that sells,” he warns. “[I]f your book will sell, it doesn't matter what you're writing about.” Publishers have one-track minds, but so does Hurst. Why doesn’t he flip that argument around? If what you’re writing about matters, it will sell, whether it’s a book or not.
If you read Hurst’s essay as I did, without having read his book or its title, you would have no clue what his book is about: A novel, a weight-loss regimen, a Western Civ. textbook, the results of his research on porphyrins? It doesn't matter what you write about, he seems to say, as long as it ends up being made of paper and ink and prominently displayed in a bookstore.
Why doesn’t this acclaimed Web innovator counsel aspiring authors to say, Here are my ideas. What channel(s) will they sell best in? Traditional book, e-book, web site, TV show, movie, etc.?
Don’t blame the book publisher for putting you through the old-school publishing wringer. That’s what book publishers do. But they’re not an author's only choice anymore.

Paper or plastic

Economists and environmentalists alike shake their heads at our thirst for bottled water. America has the world's safest water on tap, but we spend almost $12 billion a year buying the stuff in bottles.
Most Americans are connected to a grid that pumps fresh, clean water right into our homes, schools, and workplaces. We can use as much as we want, for a fee that's a tiny fraction of the price of bottled water.
So why, whenever we want a drink of water, do we pay for a new container, when we can have the contents piped into our homes 24/7? It's inconceivable! We wouldn't dream of buying anything else that way.
Okay, we buy newspapers that way, but nothing else, just water and newspapers. And magazines. And books.
Hmm, maybe the publishers should call up the bottled-water people and ask them what the trick is.

An accidental tourist bids farewell to Lehigh Press

Graphic Arts Online reports that Visant Corporation will close its Lehigh Press plant in Pennsauken, New Jersey. American print shops close at the rate of about three a day, but every one was a place where real people did real work, and every one has stories to tell. Here's one about Lehigh Press.

When I was head of a textbook design team at D.C. Heath, a favorite part of my job was to go on press OKs. I loved the noise and smell of the presses (I still do), and the urgency and finality of knowing that, after months of planning and revising, in a few days I'd hold a real live book in my hand.
Lehigh Press's specialty was book covers and jackets. They catered to publishers' demand for bells and whistles: Glossy and matte coatings (or both together), embossing, foil stamping, even holographic effects. The man who represented them to D.C. Heath, Bruce Kissell, wasn't a traditional salesman, he was a consultant. He spent as much time with the designers as he did with the print buyers, collaborating on innovative visual effects.
For press OKs at Lehigh, I used to catch an early flight from Boston to Philadelphia, and return the same day. They would send a driver to pick me up at the airport, always the same guy: An old man in a high-mileage stretched-out Lincoln. I would sit in the cavernous passenger area, surrounded by the empty champagne glasses, dried-out corsages, and cigarette butts left by his last night's fare. I'd roll down the glass partition that separated me from the driver's seat, and he'd tell me his troubles, mostly about his family: This one's in jail, that one's husband left her, another one's an alcoholic.
I took that ride one morning in February 1996, and I had my own troubles to tell the limo guy. D.C. Heath had been sold, and about half of us were getting laid off. I had not quite two weeks left.
By the time we got to Pennsauken, it was starting to snow. As usual, the Lehigh folks didn't take long to get the color right where I wanted it, and I called for the limo, hoping I wouldn't miss my return flight. Drivers in the Mid-Atlantic turn helpless with fear when it snows, so even minor storms can cause gridlock. But I underestimated the storm. It wasn't a gridlock-causing storm, it was an airport-closing storm. After a couple of hours on the runway, they took us back to the terminal, no flights 'til tomorrow morning.
I had come down for the day, didn't even have a toothbrush, and all the hotels near the airport were sold out already. Pre-Internet, pre-cell-phone, I was screwed. Grasping at straws, I called a Boston colleague who took frequent business trips to Philly, and he recommended a downtown B&B. I found a shuttle van from the airport, and hoped for the best.
I got more than I hoped for. Despite being a Society Hill landmark dating to 1769, the Thomas Bond House was much cheaper than the airport hotels. I got there in time for the free wine and cheese they serve every evening, and as I prepared to drown my sorrows, another guest offered me her ticket for that night's concert at the Academy of Music, a dozen blocks away. The seat was in a remote balcony, but the snow had kept most of the audience home, so at the first break in the program I parked myself in a cushy orchestra seat to enjoy the rest of the show.
Next morning, the sun came out and I flew home, a happy accidental tourist. Goodbye, Lehigh Press, and thank you for luring me into that bit of serendipity.

Grits at the Ritz

Audio geeks of yore used to build their custom stereo systems from expensive German-made components, and the finishing touch was a placard that said something along the lines of:

ACHTUNG!
Das Machinenwerken ist nicht fur Gefingerpoken
und Mittengrabben by das Dumkopfen.
Ist easy Snappenspringen und Blowenfusen
mit Poppencorken und Spitzensparken.
Das Rubbernecken Touristen keepen
das Hands in das Pockets und watch
der Blinkenlights.

People thought this was incontinence-provokingly funny. Not the Hogan's Heroes German, but the fact that it was printed! And not just printed, but printed in a Fraktur-like typeface that looked like a real WWII German poster.
I call it grits-at-the-Ritz humor: An expensive, elaborate delivery system makes you think you're going to get something important and valuable, and then--wham! You get a plate of grits. Or a stupid fake-German sign.
In the vinyl-record era, when people saw anything set in type, they assumed it was important, because typography and printing required machines that cost a small fortune and took years to learn how to use. The folks who made novelty-shop tchotchkes knew they could get a laugh by contrasting the important-looking printing process with the dumb gefingerpoken gag.
You don't see the gefingerpoken sign on audio systems anymore, and not just because it's too big to hang on an iPod. Anyone can set type and print a sign now, using machines that cost a few hundred dollars and require virtually no training. In the 21st Century, setting a joke in type doesn't make it funny.
But grits at the Ritz is the idea behind a whole new class of entertainment, from The Real World to EBaumsWorld. We're so accustomed to the broadcast media bringing us "professional" entertainment, we can't help but laugh when we see somebody being a total dork on television!
But YouTube and its ilk are changing all that. Amateur-grade video is becoming the default, and when that happens, the media will lose their ability to bestow importance on the message (or make it funnier). We won't be able to leverage the Ritz-iness of media to make audiences pay attention to our grits, so we'll have to make better messages.
The most powerful example of a medium conferring importance on its content is books. It's at the core of how I define publishing mojo: "For centuries books have been the vehicle for the best that human culture has to offer. . . . publishing mojo [is] the conviction that what we are making is valuable, and deserves all the care and creativity we can muster." Every 21st-Century publisher's mission statement should include learning to create value in a world where value is no longer derived from the laborious book manufacturing process.

Go ahead, show 'em your a__

At the 2007 conference of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO), Anne Valentine, the president of SmartCatalog, gave some suggestions on how to reduce the cost of printing course catalogs. Most were just common sense (cut your page count, use lighter paper, get competitive bids), but one was practically heresy to many of the admissions staffers in the audience. Don't just spend less, she told them, sell advertising and make your catalog pull its own weight.
Anne had uttered the unmentionable A-word. To accept advertising is to wear the scarlet letter of intellectual prostitution.
I was reminded of Anne's session by an article in the May 29 Rolling Stone, "Rock's New Economy: Making Money When CDs Don't Sell." For the baby boomers who launched Rolling Stone, the rock music brand was defined by flipping off the corporate suits. When John Sebastian sang a McDonald's commercial, millions wailed, John, you were at Woodstock! How could you sell out like that?
That was then. Now, writes RS reporter Fred Goodman, "Album sales are down 25% since 2000 . . . but smart artists and managers are finding new ways to reach fans and make money." Goodman cites a six-figure deal that "paired Robert Plant and Alison Krauss' 'Killing the Blues' with the TV ad for American Living, Ralph Lauren's new clothing line for JC Penney." The dude from Led Zep is pimpin' for JC Penney? Total bummer!
That self-righteousness is starting to erode. Some of the players in the emerging media matrix (PublishingMojo, May 17) have traditionally been paid by advances and royalties (books, movies, and music), while others (magazines, newspapers, television, and radio) have sold advertising to let audiences get the content free, or at least cheap. As long as book, movie, and music consumers had to shoulder the entire cost of the delivery module (book, DVD, CD), the publishers and studios could claim that the absence of advertising was proof of artistic integrity.
But free-or-cheap content is now the norm, and like college admissions officers, the royalty-driven media have to question the reasons they still resist advertising:

• They have an overdeveloped sense of fairness: If I say yes to Pete's Pizza, how can I say no to Sadie's Strip Joint and Gus's Gun Shop? It's easier than you think. The First Amendment doesn't guarantee anyone the right to use your vehicle for their ad.
• They fear conflict of interest, real or apparent: What if Acme Auto Service threatens to pull their ad unless we give them the maintenance contract on our fleet of vehicles? Do what any other businessperson would do: Either call their bluff or give them the contract.

And the publishers and studios may not have to sacrifice as much integrity as they think. After all, the gold standard of journalistic objectivity in the US is The New York Times, and they print all the advertising that fits.

Demotivational speaker

Harris DeWese stepped up to the lectern and took off his sport coat. He pointed to his gaudy suspenders and grinned, "You can see I'm in investment banking."
The scene was the Colonnade Hotel in Boston, the annual meeting of Bookbuilders of Boston (on whose Board of Directors I serve). We had finished the evening's business, and were settling back with our dessert and coffee to enjoy DeWese's presentation. He writes an irreverent column called "DeWese on Sales" that has appeared monthly in Printing Impressions magazine for over 20 years, and which he has anthologized in a popular book called Now Get Out There and Sell Something! Printers have often hired him as a sales coach and trainer.
I hadn't read his column or books, so I was prepared for anything, except what we got. DeWese's shtick is that he's the Mañana Man, the sales guy who beats his quota before lunch and spends the afternoon at the track. He shuns PowerPoint polish and bullet points, and instead digresses about baseball, cooking, and parallel parking before he gets down to business.
When he got down to business, it was a splash of cold water. He doesn't sell printing anymore, he sells printing companies, and as his suspenders attest, business is booming. As Chairman and CEO of Compass Capital Partners, he's put 135 of them on the block. "Printing companies rarely emerge from Chapter 11 or Chapter 7," he observed.
The folks in the room who work for small-to-medium companies made mental notes to check Monster.com first thing in the morning. But I wasn't worried, I work for an $11 billion company. We buy other printers, they don't buy us.
Then DeWese sharpened his focus from printing in general to his audience's specialty, book manufacturing. He displayed his knowledge of the turf by mentioning the "Michigan Mafia," the cluster of book printers in the Ann Arbor area. He talked about selling to specific segments of the book market (long-run, short-run, etc.), and then, almost as an afterthought, he delivered the showstopper: "If print buyers are directed by their managers to buy only on price, there's not much the salesperson can do."
Doesn't he know that most book manufacturing buyers haven't looked at anything but price for the last decade? In the US, technology has pretty much leveled the playing field as far as quality and turn times, so publishers see price as the only variable. And overseas competition has so skewed the price variable that publishers often concede quality and turn time just to drive down unit cost.
It's no better for commercial printers. Their work has become a commodity because supply dwarfs demand as many printed documents, such as catalogs and annual reports, migrate to the Internet.
According to DeWese, in a reverse auction the salesperson gets screwed. That's not a radical idea, but it's a mighty demotivating thing to say to people whose customers believe devoutly in reverse auctions. Unless you're trying to motivate them to sell their businesses.

The three faces of publishing

When civilians talk about publishing, they almost always mean the world of book signings and movie rights. I'm a stranger in that world, although I've spent much of my career in publishing. As I told Jim McCormack's graduate class at Emerson College last year, publishing isn't one business, it's at least 3 very different businesses:

• The entertainment business, where you find Harry Potter and Henry Miller. Highly vulnerable to recession and to competition from other entertainment options (Internet, television, movies, etc.)
• The information business, where you find textbooks, academic journals, reference books, and the like. Spending is less discretionary (you can read a Harry Potter book, watch a Harry Potter movie, or do neither. But you can't pass Calculus without your Calculus text, whether you get it in print or on your laptop.)
• The inspiration business, where you find religion and the softer varieties of self-help. (If you think inspiration is too trivial to deserve its own category, consider that in 2006, religious publishing revenues grew 5.6%, versus 3.2% growth for US book publishing as a whole.)

If you look at publishing this way, some segments are more viable than others, but all of them are defined by ideas and audiences, not delivery systems. This is probably what Time and Warner (and Harcourt and General Cinema) had in mind when they merged, but they couldn't make it work, because their principal revenue streams were tied to delivery systems, not content.

Souvenirs and southern cooking

I couldn't make it to the Tools of Change conference, but last week I had the pleasure of hearing one of the speakers, Phil Zuckerman, give a guest lecture to a graduate class in publishing at Emerson College. Phil is the founder and president of Applewood Books. Applewood has been around since the 70s, and at first glance, they seem positively Luddite. Their web site says they're "fully Y1K compliant" and offer "an old-fashioned personal experience . . . serving up wisdom and entertainment from America's Living Past." You imagine a wood stove, a manual typewriter, a rotary phone. But Phil's a savvy businessman, and owes his much of his success to ignoring the traditional rules of the publishing game.

• Applewood revives titles that are long out of copyright (everything from Thomas Jefferson to Tom Swift), avoiding royalties and typesetting costs.
• They aggressively target markets that mainstream publishers dismiss as marginal, such as gift shops, museums, and sales to schools and corporations. The retail book trade is a relatively small segment of Applewood's business, so they enjoy a very low rate of returns.
• A large share of their sales comes from their backlist, so they manage their portfolio like the best university presses. Perennial best-sellers are printed by traditional offset for lowest unit cost. Slower-selling titles are printed digitally so little capital is tied up in inventory.

Another speaker at the 2008 TOC, marketing visionary Seth Godin, expressed the opinion that people don't want books for information or entertainment any more, because they can get those things faster and cheaper on a computer or iPhone. People still want books, Godin says, but only as souvenirs to remind them of the experience. That may be a devil-take-the-hindmost view of publishing's future, but it's surprisingly compatible with Phil's publishing mission. After all, what is "wisdom and entertainment from America's Living Past" but another name for souvenirs?
The traditional content supply chain is a one-way sequence from author to publisher to bookstore to reader. Phil broke that chain long ago when he killed his authors. (Okay, he didn't kill them, they were already dead.) Then he made the traditional bookseller an option rather than a necessity. And on a new web site, he's turned himself into a retailer for other publishers' books (excuse me, souvenirs).
One of Applewood's evergreen titles is What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Southern Cooking, an 1881 collection of recipes from the American south, and it has become the flagship of a list of over 100 titles ranging from Camp Cookery to Manufacture of Liquors, Wines & Cordials. As an offshoot of this list, Phil launched Foodsville.com, where you can buy books about food and cooking from Applewood and other publishers, but where you can also read Applewood's cookbooks for free, post your own comments or recipes, and share them with other Foodsville users. It's not revolutionary, but it completes the deconstruction of the old-school publishing model: The publisher is a bookseller, the reader is an author.

What is publishing mojo?

In a 2007 interview Marissa Mayer, the vice-president in charge of the Google Books project, told The New Yorker magazine, "If we provide access to books we are going to get much higher-quality and much more reliable information. We are moving up the food chain." Google's co-founder Sergey Brin echoed this view: "Comprehensiveness [is] about having the really high-quality information. You have thousands of years of human knowledge, and probably the highest-quality knowledge is captured in books."
Why does the search-engine giant Google look to books for the highest-quality knowledge? It's publishing mojo. Publishers created a model that still can't be improved on:

• To search and select the best ideas from around the world
• To present them in a clear and attractive design
• To deliver them in a convenient and affordable format
• To preserve them for the future.

For centuries books have been the vehicle for the best that human culture has to offer. Now we have other vehicles, but we still need publishing mojo: the conviction that what we are making is valuable, and deserves all the care and creativity we can muster.