The Independent

Hollywood Here I Come

On Thursday I'll be making my first trip to L.A. I drove past it once, actually twice I guess, while on tour with the Milwaukees. Nothing exciting. Going to my girlfriend's college roommate's wedding.

Hardly seems blog worthy, right? Well the subject was really a clever double-entendre, as I am also working on breaking into the world of producing TV shows based on books. My first venture will be pitching Shari Caudron's Who Are People?

I am very excited about this. At the core of my consulting business is the idea that authors and publishers need to look beyond their conventional understanding of how to turn their work into profit. Learning a bit about turning books into TV shows that can then fuel the sale of books seems like it will help position me to be successful in a new publishing economy.

Apparently I am not alone in this thinking. This Washington Post article details how Amazon.com is getting into the business of optioning books to the film industry. The Post article reads:

Positive reviews of "The Stolen Child" from customers, as well as the national media, fueled the decision to option the book's screen rights, Herdener said, adding that it was too early to speculate on how Amazon would market any film eventually made.

Publisher's Lunch noted that Amazon went to great lengths, at no expense to the publisher, to promote the book to its customers. Their efforts included mailing 100 galleys to top customer reviewers and 2 million stickers promoting the book inside Amazon boxes.

Publishers know that Amazon applies, shall we say, lots of pressure on publishers to pay for all kinds of co-op  that isn't nearly as effective as the kinds of promotion they did for The Stolen Child withouot charging the publisher anything.

Maybe I'm too much of a conspiracy theorist, but I really wonder what the deal is there. Did they buy the option then pull out all of the stops to make the book a success in order to make the option valuable? There is a piece of this puzzle missing somewhere.

Cash Flow

Peter Winkler over at Precious Cargo asked me (I'm paraphrasing) why publishers choose to publish more books than they can really pay attention to.

Well, there are a couple of reasons:

1 - Cash Flow. Because books are 100% returnable by retailers and wholesalers publishers can get caught into a real cash flow crunch when returns come in. Publishers need to keep pushing as many titles out the door as possible to hide the credits due for last season's returns. This allows cash to keep flowing, salaries to be paid, new books to be acquired, etc.

2 - The 80/20 Rule. Book publishers have based their business on the notion that 20% of the books they publish will float the 80% that fails. If publishers could find a way to publish only the profitable 20%, they would. But no one can guarantee a book's success. So publishers respond with this kind of thinking: "if we need 20 successful books this year, we need to publish 100 titles." I'm over simplifying for the sake of the argument, but you get the point.

Social Isolation

Over at The Man in Black Jason Pinter has a post about being increasingly disconnected to his friends. This is something that has been on my mind a lot lately because I've been working on Shari Caudron's WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE? (which, if anyone cares, is my favorite of all of the 100s of books I've worked on!).

In a way, WAYP is a response to Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone which is bemoaning the death of community in America. I have to admit, I haven't read the book, but from what I understand he writes about the decline in participation in all of those social organizations that men used to join so that they could drive tiny little cars in ridiculous formations in the local Memorial Day Parade. A better pop culture reference for my generation would be that in the year 2006 Fred Flintsone and Barney Rubble wouldn't be "heading down to the lodge so often. To Putnam, this is an indication of the death of community.

The book is nearly 10 years old now, but recently resurfaced when a much blogged study on the rise of social isolation became somewhat national news. The researchers doing the study were looking to disprove Putnam. However they ended up kind of validating his argument. What they really found was that people seem to have a decreasing number of close friends.

I think it is a big leap from having fewer people to discuss your trips to the therapist with (besides who needs close friends when we all have therapists?) to calling this phenomenon "SOCIAL ISOLATION."

So anyway, Shari's book is a chronicle of her time spent with various groups of passionate fanatics--people like Barbie collectors, Ice Fisherman, crazy Josh Groban fans who take out second mortgages to follow the cherubic popera superstar around the country and say things like "Josh On" (I kid you not!). Basically these are entirely new social groups that are based around shared interest not random commonality like geography (high school buddies, local civic organizations, etc.). Anyway, these sorts of things are on the upswing thanks to the internet and places like meetup.com. People able to develop relationships with people with shared interests rather than shared geography.

This, of course is all headed toward my favorite topic du jour: The Long Tail. In a way, Who Are You People is basically like a social long tail. The internet has freed people from the limitations of conventional social circles and allowed them to induldge more passionately in groups based on shared interest.

I really believe that whenever anyone is declaring the death of anything, what is really happening is not death, but a redirection of whatever it is that is said to be on the decline.

I am a target market

I feel stupid about how into The Long Tail I am. I always get squeamish when I realize that I am a target market for anything. Well, I am a target market for this. It has resulted in me not only buying the book, new and in hardcover no less (I'm Doing My Part!) but I have also renewed my interest in reading Wired--which I swore off of years ago.

If I were a real conspiracy theorist, I could be convinced that someone focus grouped people like me and built this book to sell just like record labels put together the Monkees, Journey, and Rage Against the Machine.

Marketing from the Publisher's Perspective

Last week I read this post by Jason Pinter on M.J. Rose's Buzz, Balls & Hype. He wrote:

Marketplace. Makes you angry, doesn't it? All writers hate this word. The marketplace. The marketplace. They hate the evil marketplace, how publishers cater towards this pernicious entity, trying to publish books that appeal to the marketplace. I hear from unpublished writers all the time who refuse to acknowledge the whims of this marketplace, who refuse to steer their works towards such a terrible destination.

The funny thing about this is that, at least in my experience, a lot of publishers don't really like "the marketplace" or "marketing" generally. Most people get into publishing because they think books are special things. There is an on-going battle between the publishing people who refer to books as "products" and those who don't.

 

The publishers in the "books aren't products" camp tend to approach marketing as a necessary evil. Publishers are too focused on jumping through B&Ns hoops to get maximum lay-downs and preserve their cash flow. I've been there and done that, so I'm sympathetic to the issues the publishers have to deal with .

The sad part of all of this is that publishers end up focused on marketing to impress retailers. When a publisher is looking to market to the broadest possible audience so as to get the biggest possible B&N lay-down, that is when the "watering down effect" can come in to play.

The urge to indulge in that kind of thinking is a big part of what pushed me out of my publishing job. Now that I am a publishing outsider, I am really excited about marketing. I am really excited to get involved with books that do something unique for a unique group of people. I am excited about the prospect of bringing organically developed, great ideas to people the who will be interested in those ideas.

That process is all about marketing. If you have a great book idea and you are afraid of marketing, chances are no one will ever know about your book. Embrace it. Enjoy it.

The key is that the publishing process stay focused on two things:

1. Developing a great idea into a great book

2. Connecting the great idea with the right readers.

If you buy into the whole Long Tail thing, you know that there are plenty of customers out there for just about any idea. The trick is finding them. That is marketing, and it is not evil. It can actually be fun.