O-Books Author's Blog

A Message from Archangel Gabriel

Dear Ones,

The significance of life is to know God with every fiber of your being. You are here to allow the nectar from the Divine spark of life to sweeten you and open your heart to Love. You are here to open your mind to the empowering presence of Divine Light, bringing you the clarity you need in order to bridge heaven and earth so you can live in greater awareness.

The significance of any life is to bring Divine Wisdom into your daily world, relentlessly letting go and releasing all that holds back this flow. With every breath you become the tuning fork that resonates to Divine Purpose working through you. With every thought you receive empowering wholeness into your being. Know that the quality of your future is dependent upon the nurturing of your spirit, and your belief in the significance of a life well lived in loving-kindness.

The significance of this time you live in is found in the global awakening, an evolution of consciousness all over the world. The belief systems that kept people mental hostages are breaking down. The old ways of reacting and behaving are no longer appropriate and the confusion resulting from the scrambling to replace the outdated forms is now rampant. The future is clearly unknown, though acceptance of the present with clear intentions for positive outcomes is a way to plant seeds for optimum life.

Signs of Awakening

As the acceleration of energy on the earth continues, people are seeking out new ways to deal with old issues, and a crack in the closed door of their minds can result.  Even a small of amount of light shining through this doorway dissipates the darkness within and hopelessness is lifted. These small actions and shifts in belief attract more and more of the same vibratory energy of hope, and an empowering sense of liberation results. Even if there is not an immediate obvious change in the outward circumstances of your life, a shift has occurred. As the envelope stretches it can never go back to its original shape. When one tries to go back, there is a sense of discomfort, an inner restlessness. This is a clear sign of an awakening within you.

Sometimes this restlessness causes fear. Coupled with thought forms arising from an unknown future, the fear may become so great, it can be all consuming. For many this discomfort is interpreted as a possible disease, which may indeed be created by repetitive thoughts of anxious despair and disempowering action.

Moving through the fear caused by disheveled lifestyles can be a journey requiring faith and a focus of attention, with perhaps the assistance from counselors and therapists trained to help bring the light of awareness into darkness and confusion.

Finding balance in the physical and emotional bodies through lifestyle changes in nutrition and exercise, and taking time to balance the mind can be very helpful. Nature is a great balancer of energy and offers a bounty of beauty in every season that can even be found in a city park, a botanical garden or your own back yard.

Allow Yourself to be Supported

For inner peace to prevail it often requires your intention to heal the fear behind the restless feelings and anxious thoughts. It also requires a new level of receptivity and a loosening of the fierce independence that will not allow you to ask for help.  During these changing times, giving your self permission to receive a new level of support is paramount. People need each other, and they need to know they are loved and cared for. Just giving a smile and a pat on the back can change a disheartened mind, and set forth a chain reaction of loving-kindness. In this way your life is transformed, and you are helping to create peace within you and on the planet Earth.

When you make a choice to love one another by accepting each person’s unique and individual differences, the world begins to transform. The old tenets remain true: “Do no harm,” and “love one another as yourself.” In fact, practicing loving-kindness toward your self is sometimes the most difficult, but this one act can have a profound effect on your capacity for happiness. It is often easier to offer kindness to a stranger than to give it to yourself. Loving acceptance of those parts of your self that are different from others may allow you to express your inherent gifts and talents in a new way. This creative expression can help you to find new resources that will assist you in living a more meaningful life. When you feel more loving toward yourself, your world looks brighter and more hopeful. Loving-kindness begins with your self.  If it is easier, however, to smile at a stranger than into a mirror, this action will still affect your inner self in a beneficial way. These feelings, thoughts and deeds all lead to increasing the vibratory rate of your being so you attract more Divine energy and goodness into your life. As synchronicities begin to occur, you will feel a new level of support from the Universe.

If you were to ask for assistance from the Higher Power working in your life, you would be surprised at the changes that begin to show up around you. New thoughts, new ideas, helpful strangers, and perhaps even clear Divine Intervention occurs, with creative solutions you never imagined possible. It begins when you open a small corner of your mind to possibilities, and let go of outdated beliefs about your self and about the way your world operates.  Since the old manner of doing most things will not work well anymore, your life becomes easier if you are willing to ask for help.

By taking these small steps to create positive change, your life will feel more significant. You become aware that you are adding value to the world, that a benevolent Universe is supporting you, and above all, you will feel profoundly loved.

And so it is.

Shanta Gabriel

For Archangel Gabriel

www.thegabrielmessages.com

Copyright: February 25, 2010

The number of books I’ve bought in my life must be at least 5,000. I suspect it’s twice that, but thinking about the cumulative total spent then makes me feel slightly ill, so I’ll take the conservative figure.
My wife’s number is not far off that. Then there are the times our parents have downsized to smaller houses, then flats, and we’ve added theirs. Add to that Christmas and birthday presents. Books given as presents by others to the children. 20,000?
If the first 20 years were mostly collecting, the last 20 years have been more “redistribution”. Because we don’t have 1000 feet or so of shelf space. There’s a spring clean every few years, weeding out a number for charity shops. There’s a continual migration of books in boxes to the attic, because how can you bear to give these ones away, you’re bound to want to reread them sometime.
But now the attic is full. And there’s all the other stuff that needs to go up there. The kids possessions/sports equipment/toys that surely must be needed by another generation sometime. There’s that baby chair that takes up a disproportionate amount of space, and the sledges, but they’ve come down through three generations….
And there’s the disturbing thought, given what a nightmare it’s been moving my mother over the last couple of weeks, having to fit everything (she really didn’t want to give anything up) into one quarter of the size, is this something you want to inflict on your own kids in decades to come? Shouldn’t we start sitting a bit more lightly on the earth now, rather than weighing it down?
If only someone could invent a way of getting all the books of the world into one, some kind of tablet where you could click on a button to find anything and read it. Never mind Gutenberg, it would be the biggest step forward since Moses bought the commandments down from Sinai.

Still getting the hang of this blog thing. Had a couple of comments from bookshops after the 29th January blog, my own comment in return got filed under a different name – so will restate things up here.

I see posts every day with comments like this one by Andrew Zack 4th Feb in the Huffington Post;
“I wouldn’t recommend anyone more than a decade from retirement invest in starting a bookstore. We are experiencing the beginning of the end of paper books right now. The brick-and-mortar store and the paper book will disappear faster than you might imagine.”

And it’s obvious that things are going to get tougher. But the end of the brick-and-mortar store and printed books completely? I just don’t believe it.

A lot will go, sure. Maybe the big chains will go – the shareholders will want somewhere more exciting to put their money. For independents not overburdened with debt, who happen to be in the business because they love books rather than retail, it could be different. People want to congregate, to browse, to talk to someone who knows their subject area, or them personally. They want to meet and listen to authors. Authors want to meet readers. Annual festivals aren’t going to take over this role.

Maybe we’ll be right back down to the number of shops and amount of shelf space that I referred to in the first blog. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Just means that bookselling gets back to being more intimate again, as the norm rather than the exception.

We publish a lot of authors, and encourage them to set up signing sessions in their local shops (too many of them happen for us to be the intermediaries in that). We want those bookshops there. They may evolve into something a little different, like libraries are. But whatever, they’re going to be part of the landscape, and we need to support them. Put our money (??) where our mouth is (got enough of the latter, not so much of the former). Just doesn’t seem right that shops are better off ordering stock from their main competitor. And what isn’t right we should at least have a try at changing.

So if any other independent in the UK (can’t work it in North America yet) is interested in taking up an offer of 50% discount on firm sale only, just contact Catherine.harris@o-books.net, and she’ll arrange it.

john

“One of the most exciting publishing events of 2009 was the emergence of the new imprint Zero Books. It publishes short, intelligent polemics on politics and culture, packing a lot of punch into about 80 pages and they are masterclasses in how supposedly tough theory can be made accessible and help us to understand society. The latest of these is Capitalist Realism by leading radical blogger Mark Fisher who has been blogging under the name k-punk for the past few years. It’s a sharp analysis of the post-ideological malaise that suggests that the economics and politics of neo-liberalism are givens rather than constructions. “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, Fisher spits, and his book takes in film, Baudrillard, Kurt Cobain, science fiction, mental health, bureacracy and economics. Zero Books are sadly absent from bookshops, but they are must reads.” Rowan Wilson, Verso Publishing and ReadySteadyBook blogger

This lovely and very gracious comment in “The Bookseller” (here’s hoping that lots of booksellers are reading it) on our new sister imprint, Zero books, prompted this second blog on the subject of bookshop sales.

Being sales manager (I think, have had no direct contact) of Verso, the leading political publisher from a left-wing perspective in the UK/USA, Rowan Wilson knows vastly more about bookshops than I do.

The books are never going to be in all bookshops though. And I do try and pin stuff down to what we can realistically do where. There are 20,000 bookshop accounts in the USA/UK etc. If we had one in each shop, and each copy sold through, being replaced by one more, our sales reports would show 40,000 of each sold, and Nielsen, which tracks bookshop sales, would show 20,000 of each.

But that’s quite unrealistic. From the info in “Our publishing process” on the website; Looking at the latest Bookseller analysis of sales in 2008; in the kind of non-fiction specialist areas that we mostly publish in, a sale of 3,000 copies in, for example, “popular philosophy” (rather than academic philosophy, where good sales are in the hundreds), would easily get you into the top 20 titles in the UK in 2008, into the company of authors like Julian Baggini, Alain de Botton and Bertrand Russell (yes, he still sells).

In comparison to this, the sales on the first two titles on Zero books (published late last Spring) are in the 1000-1500 bracket. Keep selling steadily. The more recent ones, more in the 500-1000 level.

Which is not all through bookshops in the UK. Roughly one third in the US, and amazon account for nearly half, on average.
Which is not getting them up into the top 20 in the UK, but then the authors aren’t writing to be popular, they’re not for everyone, and it doesn’t seem to me to be completely out of line with expectations for that kind of book. In fact, seems to be going well, given that it’s a new list.

The wholesalers have been kept in stock; the bookshops have had the info; which is not to say we shouldn’t be doing better – looking back, we seemed to have loosened up on Foyles, Blackwells, and not kept those sales going. On the other hand, they’re mostly in the Waterstones core stock list, or on their way there, and we’ve started to do more in the USA, and we haven’t had too many returns. The more recent “One Dimensional Woman” has sold more in the US than the UK, for some reason.

The more troubling questions are the broader ones. There are always going to be no more than 20 authors in the top 20, in any particular subject area. But if the sales in one major market like the UK are going to bring a few thousand copies at best, the vast majority are going to be in the hundreds, or dozens. So how do you publish good books in this area without pricing them at the academic £30-£100 range? And how many shops can you afford to ring/visit?

What more should we have done? There have been two major launches. Hundreds, thousands of emails/phone calls. Over 200 review copies sent so far. These have been in response to requests, rather than just blanket mailings of review copies, and the results have been;
Militant Modernist; 62 review copies sent, 4 reviews
Fear of Music; 74 review copies sent, 4 reviews
One Dimensional Woman; 33 review copies sent, 4 reviews
Cold World; 20 review copies sent, nil reviews
Capitalist Realism; 36 copies sent, 2 reviews
The reviews have all been great. But it’s an expensive way of getting them, about £10 a time by the time you add in warehouse charge, packing, post, paperwork, cost of book, arranging it.

We do need to strengthen ties with the most suitable bookshops, who specialise in political/literary/cultural theory, no doubt about that. But then, for that to work for both parties, you need a regular stream of good titles. So it’s pushing uphill on the sales while the cash is running downhill, with the investment in new, first time authors.

And the one thing I know, is that there is no necessary correlation between good books and sales. Doesn’t matter how hard you try you on the marketing, and on getting them into shops. Was just looking at our figures on a fiction title of last summer – good book, glowing endorsements from credible people, four articles related to the book on publication and one magazine extract, half a dozen book signings, two magazine reader competitions, twelve radio interviews, two TV ones, and we’ve sold 250 copies, with 155 extra going out as free for review
Squaring the circle of effort/time/cash/return with wanting to do the best for the author is what we wrestle with every day. On the first zero books, I’ld guess we’ve got the balance about right, though clearly can’t sustain quite the same level of effort across all new titles. But I post this up here in case anyone has any better answers.
John

Back in the 1930s Depression publishers started to put books into shops on sale or return, as the shops didn’t have the cash to buy stock to sell to customers. This time around, seems to me that the publishers are going to run out of cash to put the books into the shops.

It’s tough for the shops, I know. We stopped using a freelance sales team in the UK this time last year. They were running out of accounts they could call on and sell to. We publish a lot of titles in the religion/spirituality area; most of the few dozen SPCK shops in the UK closed down a couple of years ago. The more evangelical Wesley Owen shops were never quite our market, but they’ve mostly gone as well over the last couple of months. Borders closed down before Christmas, though we always found it difficult to get a foot in the door there anyway. So we visit Waterstones (the equivalent of B&N), some independents, wholesalers like Bertrams, Gardners (equivalents of Ingram, B&T etc), – for a dozen accounts you don’t need a sales team taking 15% of the margin. Our sales haven’t noticeably dipped in the UK as a result. Would they have done better with the sales team? Doubtful.

There hasn’t been the same relative level of closures in the USA. Maybe they’re better run, maybe book sales are holding up better – but I suspect it’s mostly a question of scale. With 600 or so superstores you have more room to cut and manoeuvre than you do with 60 or 6. In this case, perhaps what’s been happening in the UK is in front of the US.

More worrying though are the tactics used to stay afloat. Buying space is one thing, but you can take that or leave it. What is hard to affect is the rate of returns. And here, the hurt is probably headed more from the US to the UK.

From what I hear returns in the US average well over 30%, significantly higher than in the UK, and have done for years. With some accounts often running at 60% or more. When the returns come back to the warehouse, the big publishers tend to just put them to one side for pulping. Others give options, you can choose to send them for pulping, at about 15 cents per book. Or you can have them returned to stock, which is 45 cents per book, or 60 cents, or more. Some have a minimum charge of $3 to $4 to put a book back into stock. The books are inspected individually to see if they’re OK to go back into stock, and some are “improved” to get them back to their original condition – a smear touched up, a bit of glue added.

All books can be returned, often after a few weeks, even bestsellers, if that month’s stock levels in relation to sales need to be hit. It doesn’t hurt the bestsellers too much, because there’s enough “pull through” on the sales for the returns rate to be relatively low. For new authors, it’s different. People buy names they know.

I don’t blame the shops here, there are too many books for them to stock, the sales have to turnover fast enough to cover their costs. It’s just that the system seems unworkable.

It’s a downward spiral. The less likely a customer is to see the book they want in the shop, the more likely they are to order it online. Unless they want to browse a relatively small selection of fiction and feel the books by hand (and maybe then still order online to get a better discount) they get out of the habit of visiting the shops. Most sales come through word of mouth anyway, and if you’ve heard of what you want, you don’t need to browse for it. Whether ebooks (and their successors) get to 10% of the market in a decade’s time, or 50% (the most common estimate), or more, it’s going to further contribute to declining shelf space. And they’re going to push the price of printed books down, which increases the relative unit cost of handling them in the warehouse.

In the town where I grew up and first started buying books 40 years ago, there was one small independent that had been there for a century. New books on the tiny ground floor, second hand books on the four rickety floors above. Then came the new large airy malls, and the bookshps with them; one that later became Waterstones, Ottakers (which later became a second Waterstones), and what turned into Borders (now closed). The space given to selling books in the town was multiplied by factors of 10. I can see it going all the way back down again. There will be the occasional quality book that you buy off a shelf, but there will be more browsing of books online to see whether you really want to invest the time in reading; you will buy more, but at half price or less, you will read more, but put half of them down unfinished.

In the meantime, for the publisher, it gets harder to justify the cost of trying to get the books into the shop in the first place.

Our own returns rate in the USA has been relatively steady at between 27-35%. The steady overall rate has been disguising widening variations amongst the accounts. I realise that with a relatively specialist list we’re not representative. But Amazon as a % of our sales have gone up steadily from around 12% a few years ago to approaching 40% today, and they have no returns.

On the other hand Barnes & Noble have gone in the other direction, despite the efforts of the sales team. And the returns rate has gone up to 80%.
So for every 10,000 books sold in, 8,000 are coming back.
For a sample $100,000 worth of initial sales, or 10,000 books at $10 ($20 retail), the costings look like;
Distribution +sales cost at approx 25% of $100,000; $25000
Returns at 45 cents a book, for 8,000 books; $3600
2000 books sold; Revenue $20,000
Authors royalties $2500
Print cost of 10,000 books (some of which can be sold again); $20,000
Which leaves a loss of $31,000, before catalogue costs, marketing costs, pre-print costs, overheads etc.

It’s a lot of work to put in to achieve such a negative return. Particularly if authors then complain you’re not working hard enough to get books into shops. In fact, the harder you work, the quicker you go bust. At 50% returns it’s still unworkable. At 30% it’s marginal, and pushing trolleys in the supermarket car park looks like a good career move. OK, that has its problems, occasional wobbly wheels, rain, but less stressful, healthier, and leaves you time to read what you want.

There’s an obvious answer of course. Publish more commercial books. Fewer of them. Market them harder. Only bring out those you think there’s a chance of being picked up for store promotions, and invest everything in that.

20 years ago, 10 years ago, even 5 years ago, that would have been the right answer. Though then why not work for one of the Big Six publishers who has the clout to do it properly? Now, I can’t see it. It’s locking you into the downward spiral. Readerships are expanding, fragmenting, communicating differently. They’re more international, more local. More online, more diverse. With more choice, at more prices, in more formats. They can even publish their own book in the time it takes to read one. Why would a publishing company invest its future and that of its authors in single 3 for 2 or half-price promotions in one bookshop chain in one country that is struggling to keep its own head above water?

So, paradoxically, we’re better off not trying to sell books into (a lot of) shops.

So, given that an author can put a book up on Amazon themselves, what’s the point of a publisher?

Going to have to leave that for a future post.

john

I laughed my head off over the weekend. I was around with a bunch of relatives at my mothers. She has one of those old fashioned phones where you put your finger in the dial numbers and turn the wheel round (remember them? She is, after all, in her late ’80s).

One of my nephews, aged 10, who has his own picture-taking, all-singing and dancing mobile phone, was thrilled by it.
“What’s THAT?”
“ A phone.”
“Wow. That’s really COOL.”

We’ve been thinking a lot about gadgets, systems and digital books recently, trying to figure out the best way of handling it all on small budgets. How to get the efficiencies that speed and scale can bring whilst keeping things friendly and personal. How to handle more information whilst giving everyone enough time. How to square the circle.

It’s impossible to get exactly right of course. Depends in part on how fast you reckon things are going to change. One significant book retial chain, and online seller, and wholesaler in each country by the end of next year? Or in 5 years time? Are ereaders cutting edge, or allready dinosaurs in the path of more flexible, smaller, smarter gadgets? What’s going to be the “point” of publishers, and how far will their role be taken over by forward-looking printers, or retailers? That would indeed be turning the clock back a century or two.

The only certainty, surely, is that those trying to preserve the status quo will lose out. Publishing in the last couple of decades has looked increasingly like trade across old national boundaries used to be – several barriers from content to reader, a toll tax at each point, increasing the price at each stage but often diminishing rather than improving value. The next generation will look back on the days when the author got 10% or so of the eventual price, with 90% being lost to middlemen along the way, as medieval.

John
ps free ebook on how how many thinkers see the priorities for the future at

Seth Godin

Our own standard contract starts at 10% of income (receipts) for the author royalty, going up to 25% on quantity. Which I think is slightly above the norm (more in the help icon against “Sample contract”).

I guess keeping 90% might seem unreasonable. Self-publishers and vanity publishers make play of their more generous arrangements, author gets to keep 50%, or 80%, or whatever.

On the other hand, the average quantity sold of a self-published book is around 10 copies. The cost of getting books through the system, and marketing them, accounts for most of the 90% that the traditional publisher keeps. Publishing is not a particularly profitable business, at the best of times. It’s relatively small, miniscule compared with manufacturing or energy or finance, and most people in it are there because they like books rather than because they see a way of making serous money. If it was otherwise, and easy to make money publishing books, then it would be easier to get published.
Things will change though. You’ll get author collectives working together for marketing muscle, digital is going to lead to a higher author share however much the big guys fight it, sales online with their lower transaction costs will increase as a %, etc. At O-Books we’ve been driving down the publisher share of the cost over the last few years, through using this database of ours, which, for the author, has advantages and disadvantages. It enables the author to see what is happening, it gives them access to vastly more information than they usually get, but it also puts some onus on the author to use it. It reduces the “one-to-one” time.

So our cost-per-book has come down. We’ve used that to publish more books, which in turn helps to drive the cost down further (in dealing with design, print etc.). Our overall cost hasn’t decreased much, because about half our overhead in time/cost goes into developing the database itself. But it does set up the possibility of setting up a different kind of revenue-sharing.

Could we, for instance, move to a 60/40 split, rather than 90/10 (or 80/20)?

In theory, we should be getting there, as a possibility. There are two main problems. The first is that we don’t really make anything on the first 1000 copies. Not at the kind of retail prices we have. Too much info to process to get the book into the systems and through them. The second is that with the average first-time book 60% doesn’t cover the sales and distribution costs which we get charged for when you count in the returns, and the cost of printing those titles, let alone leave anything for overheads and marketing. Not at the moment anyway.

If the book was to turn into a strong, regular seller, it would be different – the returns come down, the print cost comes down. So here’s a suggestion; what if we left the current contract as one option, and had option B) a contract with no royalty on the first 1000 copies, but 40% after that, less the cost of sending out review copies (about $8 per book) and less the cost the warehouse charges us for returns (about $0.50 a book).

Would anyone go for it?

Note; I’ll put this up on the blog I’ve got now on the new website. I’ll probably start sticking general meandering stuff like this up there so we can keep the forum for proper questions and answers.

John

The schedule problem

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

blog 2
Thought I’ld better get another one done before losing the hang of it.
I used to hate going to the doctor’s surgery with one of my kids for their various aches and pains, because you couldn’t get through on the phone, couldn’t book appointments, and just had to turn up and wait for an hour or two until one overworked receptionist fed you through. You might only be there for 5 minutes, but you had to hang around for 10 times longer.
I had to go for something last week, and it was a completely different experience. You have to select from options on the phone (appointment, home call, pharmacy, renew prescription, etc..), which is always slightly annoying, but it was quick, not like one of those robotic voices saying “you are held in a queue, you are at number 26, your call is important to us”. And you can fix a time to go, and I was in and out in a few minutes.
I guess the surgery has about as many patients as we have people we’re in regular contact with, a few thousand of them. There aren’t more doctors there than there were before, but somehow they’ve got the system working so much better. Mostly by spending £ a few hundred on a decent phone system.
We spend about half our total overhead on continuous improvements to the systems in the business. Dealing efficiently with the queries is our particular problem. There are usually 100 or so separate ones on the average book, if you take it from contract all the way through to royalties, from authors, distributors – hundreds if you include media and shops, possibly thousands -and they can carry on for years, decades, even if the book has been out of print. There’s no way we can handle it on the phone, where you have to be reasonably nice rather than brusque. Maybe there’s some Nirvana around the corner where everything is digital and editing is automatic and books don’t have to be packed and shipped several times over before they arrive home, but it’s not coming in a hurry.
Bigger companies can split everything off into departments for all the separate queries. Trouble is, you end up with a really costly overhead structure, and have to confine yourself to books that can pay for it, and drop them when they don’t.
In smaller publishers, you have to be multi-tasking. Dozens or hundreds of emails a day, anything from disputing custom charges in New York to permission rights for a couple of pictures in Vietnam.
Trouble is, you stretch yourself thin catching up with this kind of thing all the time, and never get down to what you’re meant to be doing, improving a manuscript or getting sales.
A few months ago I changed my email address and passed the load on. It’s been great; I’ve started reading books again. I comment on every proposal that comes in. Think about the way forward. It feels better for the business.
But the indigestible lump of emails has just been shunted further down the throat. The office is more of an email call centre than a hive of proactive sales and marketing. It’s not like “send one email to sell 10 books”, it’s more like “send 10 emails to sell one book”. Several hundred billion emails are sent in the world every day, though there are less than 2 billion internet users. Worldwide, and in our little business, it doesn’t add up.
I think we’ll have to take a lesson from the doctor’s surgery. You can’t respond personally to everything. You have to choose a way of operating. With the big utility companies, you can phone them but you can’t email them. With Amazon, you can email them (or you can try, and occasionally get an answer) but you can’t phone them. With us, it’s going to be you can’t phone and you can’t email.
It shouldn’t be too difficult, now we’ve got the new website linking to the database, to set up a communication system that feeds you through the right channels to the relevant answer, and if the answer isn’t there, have someone at the end of the line who can provide it and make sure it’s put there for the future.
I think that has to be our next step, before we get crippled with emailitis.
John

Our new website here went live yesterday, such a relief to get it done at last! Thank you, Kate, and Apul – I kiss your feet. It’s taken a couple of years of work. I expect it’s something that should have taken us a couple of months, but the difficulty has been in linking it to the information in the company database, so that it feeds through the various systems. So getting it to work has involved reinventing a load of other stuff in the “back” area. And with a dozen or so new titles a month coming out there’s always a huge amount of detail that needs updating, and with the old website we had to re-enter everything separately, which keeps putting us behind, etc…

There’s some tidying up that needs to be done. A number of reviews, endorsement comments etc. that need changing. Chunks of information to add in “Author resources”- that hasn’t all fed through yet. Bear with us for a few days while we do this (ps; if there are any authors reading this, you can do it yourself; if you just amend the copy on your book details page, or add a photo to the editorial & production page -if your photo isn’t on the website- it will feed automatically through. Similarly, add your website details to “author address” in “Change details” and that will come through).

There’s a lot more stuff to come. Soon you should be able to look up any author event/talk/workshop/launch happening in your local area. At some point we’ll move to direct sales from the site, and get digital books up there, free chapters to browse, free books in some cases – as often as authors allow us, forums for articles, submissions and requests for review copies coming through the website, videos, podcasts, etc. For authors who don’t have their own websites, we’ll enable them to turn their author page here into one.

So it’s a beginning. The emphasis throughout will be on openness and sharing. That’s what’s driven this list from its start, back in 2004, a conviction that new times call for new ways of doing business (and going back to some old ones). We’re aiming to make all our contacts (16,000 or so, heading towards 160,000 I hope) freely available for anyone to browse. For readers to be able to add their own reviews, comments, and contact addresses that they feel appropriate. For other publishers to benefit from it if they find anything useful. My guess is that we’ll end up some kind of peer-review system for submissions, where we as publisher are largely taken out of the loop. An open source approach to the system, so anyone can add applications/amendments to the software if they see something that can be improved. An open finance policy, so that salaries/profit, author/publisher share of income, are visible to anyone.

But we’ve a way to go on that yet, still got to get the basics working. It’s still a small business, we have no full time employees, the market (and even the definition of what a “book” is) is changing so fast it’s impossible to figure out what it’s going to be like 3 years down the road, so we’re just taking a punt on all this and hoping that we’re reading the runes roughly right.

Further down the line though, I see the idea of a “publisher” acting as gatekeeper between authors and readers as an anachronism. A relatively short-lived 20th century phenomenon, suited to the age of mass-publishing with paperbacks and restricted buying channels, but out of place in the internet and digital age. So having just felt over the last day, with this new website, that we’ve finally got close to being a “proper publisher”, the job for Monday is how we get beyond that. Because though the traditional publisher will always be there to cater for the top bracket of bestselling authors, along with agents and lawyers, they’ll be increasingly irrelevant for the vast majority of authors and books.

Dunno what I’m meant to say in any future blogs, haven’t done one before, and I’ve probably shot my bolt here. Might be the first and last one. Still, we’ll have a place up very soon for authors to write their own blogs. And you could always comment on this one, which might prompt another.

All the best…
John