A great review in The Irish Times for A Little Circle Of Kindred Minds: Joyce In Paris by Conor Fennell, our first print title. It was written by Luca Crispi:

A Little Circle of Kindred Minds: Joyce in Paris is a commendable introduction to the cultural scene and, most importantly, to the now virtually mythical stories that have been told about these modernist artists. Although not always exact as literary history, the stories are told with a contagious passion.

A Dubliner and former editor with RTÉ, Fennell has an enthusiasm for Joyce and other Irish writers in Paris that is apparent on every page. The anecdotal sketches are a pleasure to see recounted again and should encourage readers to pursue the memoirs and biographies that form the foundation of Fennell’s book. One could quibble with some of the facts, as well as with the generalisations and summary statements, but that would be to miss the point of the book, which is a broad exploration of some of the characters that helped make Paris “the centre of English-language Modernism”.

via Defining Dublin in the City of Light – The Irish Times – Sat, Jul 16, 2011.

I’ve a new post over on my Personal Blog:

The tidy chain discussed at the start begins to look, and will be in real life, a whole lot more complicated.  Instead of a publishing value CHAIN, we have something more akin to a value WEB. Different actors can work together on different projects depending on their needs at a given time. And that means title-by-title projects, agents taking on roles more akin to producers (or publishers or retailers or maybe all of them doing so but not on every title).

It’s about the publishing value chain, see what you think,
Eoin

Most small and medium-sized publishers who haven’t  YET decided to act on digital publishing wonder where to start. They are especially cautious if they have been in business for some time and have a backlist they are worried about converting. That’s a significant up-front cost for small publishers if they only have PDF copies of their titles.

In their minds backlists look like a cost sink rather than a potential digital profit centre. That’s because depending on who you talk to a backlist conversion from PDF to epub or .mobi will cost about €150-€250 and what’s more, it’ll be even more for a high-design title.

If you’ve been publishing say a modest 10 titles a year for ten years, then you’ve a back list of 100 titles and even at the most reasonable quote that might cost you €15,000 to convert. For a small company that’s a chunk of change equivalent to publishing a few new titles a year in cost terms.

Well to my mind, the first thing ANY publisher needs to do, even if they don’t have immediate plans for digital publishing, is stop making that backlist issue bigger and I’ve a pretty sensible strategy for how they can do that AND start preparing for digital publishing.

1) Stop only holding PDF files
Simple enough really, but if you are using in-house design programmes like Indesign or Quark, make sure you hold onto the Quark or Indesign files of your titles AS WELL as holding on to the PDF. If you are using out of company contractors, make it a condition that designers supply original files to you when they deliver the final files. Doing this means that you have files that are easier to convert then PDFs and will thus cost considerably less money when you decide to explore digital publishing and ebooks.
Cost to you: Nothing

2) Convert all new titles yourself
Many of the best in-house design systems offer conversion tools that publishers  can use to create epub and .mobi files themselves. There are other programs that allow you to create them from word files too, so this isn’t as difficult as it might sound. What’s more it future proofs your business going forward against the conversion fees I highlighted above. If you use an external contractor, make them convert the files at source and deliver the resulting files, this should not take them TOO long and for a modest cost at the time of origination you will be ready to sell ebooks.
Cost to you: Nothing to very modest

3) Audit your backlist
So you’ve stopped making the problem bigger and you’ve created files that can easily be converted to ebook formats of your choice. It is time to see just how big the problem is on the backlist. Go through your titles and find out what files you actually have for them. PDF, Indesign, Quark or Word. From an ebook creation perspective Word files and original design files are actually fairly easy to convert (with a little knowledge) so if you have those file types AS WELL as PDF files for your title, you are in a good place. Sort titles into two groups, those with ONLY PDF files and those with Word or Indesign/Quark files.
Cost to you: Time and frustration

4) Convert the easy titles
As I mentioned in 2 (above) in-house design suites will generally have plug-ins that enable you to convert your Indesign/Quark files and there are cheap commercial products that will convert word files. You can make headway in creating a digitzed backlist by converting the files in those formats before worrying about the PDF files. Likewise, external designers will charge MUCH less for converting those files then a PDF, if they don’t, they are probably over-charging you.
Cost to you: Nothing to modest

5) Start selling them
Of course this section requires some thought and strategic planning* before you forge ahead, but once you’ve done that and chosen the right path for your company, you actually have files in formats that can be uploaded to major ebook retail sites. Create accounts, add metadata and start selling them, or sign up with an ebook distributor who will do that work for you. Once the converted titles start to pay back some cash, use that to convert the tricky or PDF-bound titles.
Cost to you: Nothing to modest depending on the sales channel you chose

And there, in five easy steps, is a simple strategy for small and medium-sized publisher looking for somewhere to start on the digital publishing market but worried about their backlist problem.

*Which Green Lamp Media will be happy to help you with. We can provide strategic advice and planning, operations support or we can provide digital publishing services, depending on your needs.

Image Credits
Some rights reserved by RachelH_

People sometimes forget the practical, less flashy tips when it comes to publishing start ups, this post does a good job of boosting them and changing that balance!

2. Spend a lot of time on the creative vision of the company and all design matters.

As mainstream publishers are forced to churn out more and more titles and ape the covers of successful books, design suffers. There is a lot of opportunity in this to stand out and define yourself in an overcrowded market. Also pay a lot of attention to the typesetting of your books – it will make a huge difference to how readers respond to your work.

3. Listen to people.

This process will change your life, and certainly affect your relationships with all those close to you. In the time spent researching and preparing your venture, talk to as many people as possible to get feedback. You’ll certainly find out who your friends are, but you will also get valuable advice, possibly saving you time and money when you take the plunge.

Top Ten Tips for New Publishers | theyearofpublishingdangerously.co.uk.

Mike Shatzkin talks about the impressive/scary growth of ebooks in the US market:

Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch reported you have to subscribe to use the links that BookScan numbers show a drop in unit sales of printed books of 4.4 % from 2009 to 2010.

But don’t take that number to any bank. It is already out of date. Cader did a further analysis of more recent BookScan data shortly thereafter showing that print book sales have dropped by over 15% compared to the prior year over the first six weeks of 2011! And the share of print sold online keeps rising, so that almost certainly means that print sales in stores has fallen even faster. Could print sales in stores have dropped 20% or 25% from a year ago? They certainly could!

Sales of iPads, Kindles, and Nooks exceeded most expectations for Christmas 2010. Dominique Raccah, the head of independent publisher Sourcebook, a company with a diverse trade list, reported on her blog that dollar sales at her company in January were 35% digital!

via From some perspectives, we are tipping right now and publishers’ metrics will show it – The Shatzkin Files.

As if Irish newspapers hadn’t had a tough enough fortnight, the Independent’s i paper has decided to enter the Irish market. Will it work here? What will they price it at? I just don’t know, but it will certainly make for an interesting experiment.

One thing IS clear even if they price it at 30 cent, it will be very price competitive and you’d expect SOME kind of reaction.

While he was at it, Darren also managed to secure distribution across the Irish Sea, so from Monday, too, i will be on sale in Ireland – north and south – for the first time. Cead mile failte roimh i, as they say in Dublin!

via Letter from the editor: Were going overseas – editor, i – The Independent.

The recent decision by Apple to reject Sony’s eReader app seems to have opened up a much larger and far more wide-ranging debate about in-App and non-iTunes purchases.

Amazon’s Kindle App sends readers to their buying system in Safari to avoid paying Apple’s toll (30%) but recent suggestions are that Apple are intent on stopping that and enforcing either full in-app purchases or at the very least offering in-app purchase as an option.

It brings to mind for me the need for publishers to have their own web strategy and not to become reliant on the platforms of others whose goals and plans are in no way aligned with theirs:

Apple has indicated the sales outside of iTunes can continue, as long as sales through its store are provided as an option. “Rest assured that we want our customers to be able to get their publications easily both from our App Store and obviously from websites or other ways they get them,” Mr. Cue said.V

Apple is tightening enforcement of a rule governing how some apps for the iPad must handle sales, a shift that affects online books as well as other electronic publications. Above, a customer looks at the Angry Birds game on an Apple Inc. iPad tablet computer at the Simply Mac store Salt Lake City, Utah.Apple hasnt disclosed details of terms it is offering publishers, but generally takes a 30% cut on such iTunes transactions. News Corp, which also publishes The Wall Street Journal, appears to be getting a similar deal for The Daily, which Apple helped develop. Rupert Murdoch, its chairman, said in an interview Wednesday on the Fox Business Network that his company is getting 70 cents of every dollar for the first year, with Apple getting 30 cents. He said the terms after that were subject to negotiation.

via Apple to Tighten Control of How Magazines, Content Are Sold for iPad – WSJ.com.

Fascinating way to make money, hard to argue with it as a service too, why shouldn’t the owner of a book scan it for their own convenience?

Consumers such as Yusuke Ohki, who has 2,000 books in his Tokyo apartment, are scanning them and accessing them through their iPads.

Ohki has since started up his own 120-person firm that does the same thing for customers. There are as many as 60 companies offering such a service, according to Bloomberg.

via BroadbandBreakfast.com: Japanese Book Publishers Up Against Wall As IPad Spurs Cottage Industry of Book Scanning.

There’s an issue I’ve been exploring on this blog and elsewhere for some time. It’s about digital change and what it does to large and small markets, especially when the rates of change in these markets differ. I’ve called it the differential rates of digital change problem and I think it is time I put a solid definition on it.

So here it goes. The Differential Rates Of Digital Change Problem occurs:

When a large publishing market undergoes a more rapid shift towards digital delivery and consumption of books than a smaller publishing market.

This change has many significant implications but the three I want to focus on here are:

• Rights pressure on small market publishers
• Sales pressure on small market publishers
• Growing disparity between ACTUAL digital change in small markets and OBSERVABLE digital change

Let’s look at these one by one.

Rights Pressure
I’ve highlighted how larger market publishers increasingly have an incentive to acquire global digital rights in works, whereas, as of yet, smaller market publishers have little incentive to hold on to those rights, though they know that in the future they will need them. I’ve pointed to one possible way to meet both needs here.

Sales Pressure
This is almost a bigger deal for small markets. And it has a few forms.

1. Digital sales of titles not necessarily available in the smaller market to customers in the smaller market recorded as sales in larger markets (eg Kindle Sales to Irish customers via Amazon.com or .co.uk)
2. Digital sales of titles available in smaller markets physically AND digitally but made through sites that record those sales in the larger market (eg titles published by local publishers or foreign publishers available on Amazon.com Kindle store)
3. And of course, if a small market publisher sells global digital rights to a book they publish, then the digital editions of locally published books will sell through the larger market
4. The quietest form is of course digital sales to residents who have retailer accounts in other territories, ie English Address for Amazon.co.uk Kindle sales (small I’d wager but without the stats who knows)

These sales are starting, slowly but surely, to leak sales from small markets to large markets. The levels are unquantifiable right now in anything but the most sketchy way, but they are surely growing with each Kindle,  Kobo reader, iPad, iPod Touch, iPhone and Android device sold into a small market. The proliferation of devices offering ebooks sold through large market retailers  MUST be driving sales from those markets. When those retailers start sharing their data (and how likely is that) we will know for sure.

Over time the sales impact will become pronounced, especially if the small markets don’t develop a local infrastructure for selling ebooks. Imagine for instance if all digital sales in Ireland were made through Amazon, Apple, Google and Kobo with maybe a small share for the rest? If the system remains as now, no digital sales will ever be recorded and the market for books will shrink dramatically OR at least  it will seem to.

Actual Vs Observable Data
This is a bigger issue than it sounds like and is deeply relevant. As digital change moves on, small markets get a false idea of how rapidly their market is shifting, or at least publishers native to that small market do. If sales are happening in the estores I’ve already highlighted then the local market doesn’t see them. If 20% of the market shifts to digital, but buys its books from foreign retailers, then the market will fall by 20% and it would still look like digital has no presence.

Clearly there are offsets here. For instance, if a local publisher starts putting their titles on those outlets they will start selling books and will realize that the digital shift is ALREADY happening, or perhaps they will realize that even if it isn’t happening, they can sell some of their books to a global customer base.

What’s more, local offices of large publishers (quite a few of which exist in Ireland) will be able to see their rising ebook sales through their corporate parents and will know well enough how quickly digital sales are growing.

But even so, the data for the smaller market as a whole will be fractured and patchy, controlled by outside forces whose good will cannot be relied on and all the time digital will seem, because there is little reliable evidence to the contrary, to be a marginal market.

In this strange  scenario, local publishers remain unwilling to invest in digital because they feel the market is small but equally the market to them remains small because they have not even invested to get a few titles digitized and for sale on these foreign platforms. The only way to see beyond the apparently tiny size of the market is to take the leap and invest a small amount, but companies, in the absence of data, are rightly reluctant to do so.

Conclusion
So there it is, the Differential Rates Of Digital Change Problem. It’s not a problem for larger publishing markets of course and I don’t see any real way of addressing it until figures for digital sales begin to be shared more freely by the large companies like Apple, Amazon and Google who are not really minded to share it.

The only way beyond it is to accept on faith that digital is growing in smaller markets but in hidden ways, then to step beyond that and start offering your products digitally. This doesn’t have to be a huge investment (and if you doubt that, spend some time online reading about ebook creation from text files) but it does need to happen and it needs to happen soon.

There’s A Problem
I’ve written before about how small markets, both English language ones like Ireland and other territories with major markets in similar languages, face challenges when it comes to ebooks:

So we have large publishers seeing sales internationally that they can EASILY service at little marginal cost. Acquiring the right to sell to those markets is a sensible strategy that hedges against future global digital sales while delivering real if small sales now.

But the impact on smaller markets is large
Take for example Ireland (I could as easily choose the English language markets in Spain, Slovenia or San Marino), where ebook sales are lower than 1% right now. From that perspective any Irish publisher approached to do a deal for a title they have published in Ireland would be fools to let that deal flounder over digital rights.

And yet, at what point would a publisher be crazy TO do a deal that required them to cede global digital rights; 5%, 10%, 20%, 25%, 50%? What’s more, if a publisher agrees the principle now at sub-1%, how can they hope to grab back that principle at 5%, 10% or 75%?

But What To DO About It?
I’ve been pondering one solution to that problem for a while and I thought I’d roll it out. It isn’t fancy, it’s hardly innovative, but it SHOULD become standard practice for small market publishers ASAP.

And it is simply:

Set a time period for reverting digital rights at 3, 5 or 7 years. Make sure this is independent of print rights, or at least make sure that a publisher can hold print rights even while digital rights revert. If you like, allow for a renegotiation of key points at these break years rather than a reversion, but ensure that YOU have the right to revert nonetheless.

This doesn’t sound like much, but it is a prudent and sensible precaution for the small market publisher.

Here’s Why?
Consider the following, your market for digital books isn’t huge now, but it is growing, perhaps faster than you realise (see my next post for why that’s the case). By ceding global rights a foreign publisher will take advantage of a global ebook-market selling ebooks to the new digital readers emerging in your market that hurts, in all likelihood, your local ebook retailer (if any exist), your own relationship with potential customers and your own understanding of the market.

The ebook market has changed quickly in the last three years and it will change even more in the next three. Setting the first reversion or renegotiation point at three years is therefore VERY reasonable. What’s more the front-list nature of the print book will almost certainly have passed at that stage.

After five years the market will surely be even more radically different and while it might be TOO long a period before rights revert, it would at least allow the small market to develop a real digital market. Seven years is the longest one should agree a deal of this nature. Seven years opens the possibility that your small market has changed SO much you own efforts at that point will be futile, however, if you use the seven years well, you SHOULD see a benefit of reverting.

One Final Thought
Whatever you decide when ceding global rights, make sure you are doing it as part of a strategy and not simply under pressure to do a deal. Short-termism now will almost certainly lead to your undoing as a publisher. NOW is the time for thinking, vision and long-term planning. Your survival is at risk.