POD for authors and publishers

If you are interested in print-on-demand (POD) technology, you might be aware of the O'Reilly Tools of Change conference last week. A posting on the company's blog, O'Reilly Radar, here describes a relevant day of the conference. The post, by Sarah Milstein, links to presentations such as "digitizing your backlist" and "incorporating POD into a profitable publishing strategy", as well as to twenty more. Here are some highlights provided by Sarah from the talk by Niko Pfund of Oxford University Press:

" * Authors are often resistant to POD, fearing that pirated copies of their books will wind up on the Web, and they'll lose control over their material. OUP has hit on an analogy that helps authors embrace the new: the editors point out that nobody cares how wine is bottled; similarly, POD is just another system for creating a familiar package. And for many authors, POD means that OUP can now offer eternal life for their books.

* POD has, in some cases, inverted the traditional publishing model. Previously, the company spent a lot of time trying to figure out if a book was selling well enough to keep in print. Now OUP sometimes finds titles that are bringing in enough revenue through POD to justify bringing them back onto store shelves.

* OUP, like every publishing house, has had a history of tense and lengthy meetings over the size of print runs. No longer. POD has given them the flexibility to standardize their print runs without jeopardizing sales, freeing them from negotiating the numbers for every title. Niko referred to those as "among the meetings he misses least."  "

Also on O'Reilly Radar, Peter Brantley writes a post on localizing print on demand. "Publishers maintaining digital files of the books in their catalog can use POD to print copies when individual or small batch orders come in, or when it appears that renewed interest in a title is mounting, without having to inventory expensive physical holdings against the vagaries of uncertain demand." This is the kind of project I was writing about in my post that was ripped to shreds by an unpleasant person called Mr Henry Winkler (I think that was his name, I'm not going back to his vitriol to check on that) and a couple of chimers-in.

Interesting also, that O'Reilly publishing itself is adapting the Apple Mac business model that made itunes and ipods such a commercial hit. The golden egg was the realization that the "unit" that people want to buy is not the album but the song [tune] and to turn that desire into a paying proposition. In similar vein, O'Reilly is now selling its books as individual chapters, as PDFs or other formats, as explained here by Tim O'Reilly himself. The company publishes technical books, for which this business model is, er, better suited than it is for fiction, as Stephen King can tell us.

An articulate, and relevant, creative fiction author's view is here, on the Charkin blog. I thought the author's letter is an excellent analysis of the current situation in publishing (the conventional way) from that particular perspective, and the response from the publisher spot on. Read the (16 at time of writing) comments that attempt to wrestle with the paradoxes and viewpoints.

I wanted to round off this post by mentioning an article on another blog about the subject, but I can't, for a bizarre reason. At the end of this post is a line stating that one cannot quote or cite (emphasis mine) from it without permission. In 32 years of being an author, editor and publisher, I don't think I have ever heard of this restriction before. Has anyone else? In my experience, everyone is only too delighted to be cited -- careers can depend on it, even. I am sure there is no legal reason why one should not cite someone's work without their permission, but I'll respect the writer's wish.

Comments

[Clare]

That line about his agent toward the end of the Charkin blog seems very poignant to me just now...it's such an eloquent letter - it seems such a shame he isn't published when so much rubbish is. But things will change. I think we have to believe that.

[Mary Scriver]

I think it has been underreported how much the traditional publishing industry, through failure and simple change, has invited self-publishing, which is often based on Print on Demand.

First, publishing houses were bought up by international corporation who expected the same kind of investor profits as Campbell soups: that is, 10% or more. This pushed the business from a educated gentleperson's enterprise to the ordinary commodification that in other contexts might be called "prostitution."

Second, advances for works not yet written had to be justified but works not yet written are of necessity unquantifiable. This threw the ball to the market research and fame-is-fortune people. The amounts of advances became a feature of publicity and were compromised by Hollywood-style book-keeping anyway: deductions for all associated costs.

Third, the whole problem of print runs, much exacerbated by the brilliant decision of the tax people to consider books inventory to be taxed and also the simple physical necessity of keeping books warm, dry, and pristine meant a motive for short print runs and quick liquification which are deadly for books that need time to develop an audience. Again, the Hollywood model: profit in the first hours of existence.

Fourth: The corporation model required "lean and mean" staffing which meant many editors who formerly developed the "house focus" by putting in many days of reading in offices were pushed out to being "agents" who had no house, no focus, no stable, no handholds but the necessity of earning a living. I discovered that some agents are not making a living by selling books but by kindly offering "for a fee" to rewrite over-the-transom works to make them saleable, which was formerly called "editing" and paid for by the publisher.

Fifth: Proofing and fact-checking are time-consuming and time is money, so -- beyond maybe Spell-checking -- those quality-control elements went out the window. Anyway, fewer and fewer new hires were capable of proofs OR researching a fact.

Sixth: The author has to be promotable, so one strategy is to represent that books are written by popular people, though ghosted by someone else, or to represent the author as a larger-than-life person. This is the slippery slope that took us to the "packaged book" which is invented by sales people right down to hiring someone to tour around pretending to be the author.

Seventh: Publishers had somehow made a devil's pact with bookstores to allow the stores to return all unsold books. Not just the ones that are still clean, undamaged and saleable, but also the ones that have big dayglo sale stickers or are shelf-worn or that are simply in the way when it comes time to inventory for a tax-audit at the first of the year.

Eighth: A person who has spent his entire life in media work was recently shocked, SHOCKED to discover that publishers don't bother to spend money on promotion or ads anymore.

This is rapidly turning into a blog instead of a comment, so I will end, and finish the train of thought on my blog.

[Maxine]

Thanks for your thoughtful, as ever, essay, Mary. You have it right in your first point, I believe: book publishers need to adapt to this model or they'll just cease (most of them) -- someone else will set up to do the same thing -- well, they already have. OUP seems to have realised this, as, in a limited way, have Random House (whose programme I wrote about in my last post on the topic, the one Mr W got upset about).

With the Espresso machine (if that is what it is called), the publisher's life is even easier.

Your fourth and fifth points are interesting: I've heard quite a bit about publishers who don't offer editing services any more.

Look forward to reading more on your blog. One significant point (I learned from when I was a bookseller) is the cost of keeping stock. Books are very cheap per unit sale, so they are very expensive to keep. Hence the remainder industry has also got so huge (because of all the trends you note in your list). Another big argument in favour of publishers switching to POD for most of their titles, for sound business reasons -- if they can make all the necessary technical adjustments. It sounds as if it was quite a culture shock for OUP and not that easy (internally) for the company to make that switch.

[Susan Balée]

Very interesting comments from the guy at Oxford University Press. If POD is so cheap, I'd like them to give me a free copy of the "Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature." I contributed three essays to it (on the history of American autobiography; on Flannery O'Connor; and, with Dana Gioia, the entry on H.W. Longfellow), for which I was paid decently, but I never got a copy of the book. Why? The sucker costs around $500, and even with an author discount, $250 is too rich for my bank acc't. Obviously OUP's primary market is libraries -- what a wad they'll make with those inflated prices and POD technology.

Also, I disagree with the analogy about bottling wine: Many people are upset about the new innovation of plastic corks. Even though they're better than cork (and cork trees are ever scarcer because of the bottle-stopping industry), wine aficionados really *don't* like either plastic corks or twist-off caps (even though new technology makes both perfectly air-tight seals for wine bottles). My point being that once you see one logical fallacy, there are often more to follow.

I've nothing against OUP, but they're an academic press connected to a very wealthy university. I doubt if Podunk State U. could charge $500 for its encyclopedia of American lit. Then again, perhaps no one would buy it from Podunk S U -- it lacks brand recognition. Another problem with so many vanity presses and PODs.

Catch-22s, everywhere you look. Where's Joseph Heller when we need him?

[Mark Vane]

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[James Aach]

Fascinating link and comments. In the past, publishers have sometimes been viewed as a filter to keep bad writing off the shelves. It seems their filtering practice may now be changing to forego quality considerations (more frequently) and exclude books instead on the basis of "poor marketability". It would be interesting to understand, beyond celebrity, what makes a book "marketable" in the eyes of those making that decision. While selling the most books is a rational priority, the current approach would seem short-sighted if publishers are counting on readers to keep buying product, regardless of the quality of its content. The frequently disappointed young reader is less likely to become a middle-aged reader. Perhaps this publishing trend is just a reflection of the focus on short-term profits versus long-term sustainability that seems to have plagued business in recent years.

Of course, there are many quality books by relative unknowns still being published by established houses. As an example, there seem to be thousands of well-written books about the current, angst-ridden lives of young city dwellers that are published each year. Do these really sell well enough to keep meeting marketing standards? Or are other factors involved - an old-fashioned interest in high quality, a keen interest in the topic by the decision-makers themselves, and so on?

[Maxine]

Susan: I am not quite sure if you are saying that the OUP encycl was, in fact, POD? I agree that there is a library market which publishers will protect, but what I think Mary, and certainly I, are writing about now is the "regular book fiction" market -- there must be a big difference in pricing between an encycl/dictionary for institutions and a regular mid-list novelist who can't get published in the celeb/marketing culture of modern publishing but who would have a more than respectable "long tail" of sales if their books were POD by a publisher. And the price is going down all the time, eg this Espresso machine that one reads about all over the place. Amazon, for example, does POD books (via Booksurge) for £8 or so.
Who is to know whether OUP will take a leaf out of O'Reilly's book and start to produce POD subject by subject -- or letter by letter;-) (I'll have the x, that will be cheapest. or maybe q)