O-Books Author's Blog

When we first started publishing in O Books 5 years ago, with about one title a month, we were pretty ignorant about scheduling in the trade/retail area. Having mostly prior to that been producing color books for other publishers, you got their books to their warehouse, and the responsibility ended.
It took us a couple of years to realize how important it was to get the information about the books available for the trade 6 or 9 months before publication. Which in turn meant having the details of the book (cover, page extent, price etc) firmed up in time for that.
It took us another couple of years, whilst coping with the rapidly growing number of titles, to get the systems in place to enable that to happen.
Compared to three years or so back, when the majority of titles tended to miss their targeted release dates, now they virtually all hit them. Our main effort is directed not so much as getting books in print for publication, as having them ready 4 months before publication, so there are advance copies to send out to the kind of media that want 4 months notice.
Not that everything now runs through smoothly. There’s still the odd one that misses the date altogether, for one reason or another, which creates more hassle in terms of re-scheduling and responding to queries than 10 other titles put together.
And the bulk of our work is not actually on the key stuff like working on the manuscript or the sales, it’s shuffling changes around in the year or so between getting the manuscript and publication. It’s like the old Heineken ad, there’s always another database in a corner somewhere that you can’t reach.
Every few years main accounts seem to want information a month earlier than before. Exactly why that schedule is extending when everything else in life is getting faster, and when “just in time” is the mantra to which everyone except for the Ministry of Defence, pharmaceutical companies and similar work, is a mystery to me. I suspect it’s got something to do with the fact that people running book chains nowadays and buying books for supermarkets have had nothing much to do with “books”. They’re retailers. Imported from groceries, or stationery, or retail consultancy, to run a chain of bookshops. They’re used to seasonal buying patterns. The orders for autumn oranges are placed at Christmas. The orders for Christmas cards are placed in the spring. Buying and sales budgets accordingly are fixed 6-12 months ahead. Makes it easier to plan for the bonuses.
So if you miss these extended schedules on books, it’s a reason for them not to buy. Doesn’t seem to make a difference if there really is a hot book though; our title with the largest pre-sales this year is coming out in November and we didn’t know anything much about it till August, and got the manuscript in October.
So it’s a mechanism that works for the main accounts, feeding everything else through a slow funnel, but it doesn’t actually help the vast majority of authors.
Because, frankly, if the orders through bookshops are going to be very modest, (and a shop stocking a few tens of thousands of titles is unlikely to stock any new first time author unless they have some really heavy backing behind them), is it worth adding 6-9 months on the schedule to make it available? If it’s going to be in the mega-category where the trade magazines are talking about it in their “major hits for 2011” through to December 2011, and that comes out in December 2010, so the whole package of information is needed some months prior to that, in early Autumn – an 18 months schedule from finished proofs, or 2 years from finished manuscript – then fair enough. But most authors I reckon lose heart when faced with a prospect of publication 12-18 months after they’ve finished the book (or double that for most publishers). The momentum goes. Unless they’re a professional author churning them out regularly, life moves on.
So having just got to the point of being able to meet these schedules regularly, I reckon it’s time to abandon them. Most of our working time is spent servicing a system that doesn’t deliver. The future is not here.
We should move to a 6 month schedule. 6 months is what the wholesalers need. But we have to do it from when the finished proofs are ready, for text and cover. Otherwise it would be chaos trying to get all the changes notified around in a shorter time frame. We’ll schedule the book firmly when we have it ready to print, for 6 months ahead. That means we can get advance copies 4 months ahead of publication in time for the national media etc.. who want it.
It means we miss out on the schedule the sales rep at NBN work to. So they won’t be taking the book around 6-9 months before publication. We’ll figure out ways around that. It’s going to be our main challenge over the next year.
We’ll not be changing the schedules on titles that are already up on the website (too many people to notify, and half of the time they won’t go through, so will end up in confusion). But for titles that haven’t been firmly scheduled yet, it’s 6 months from approved final proofs. It’s simple, straightforward, and means we can stop flaffing around with changes all the time and work on the sales instead.
John Hunt

This entry was posted on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 10:28 AM and is filed under O Books Publisher blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.