Gooselane is running a special promotion this week. Each day they are offering one book at a discounted price. Today’s pick is Roadsworth featuring 450 reproductions of this Canadian artist’s work. It’s awesome urban art. Love it.
Watch for savings the rest of this week on:
YOU comma Idiot
The Famished Lover
Miller Brittain
The Black Watch
Beaverbrook: A Shattered Legacy, and
Ganong: A Sweet History of Chocolate
Gooselane is running a special promotion this week. Each day they are offering one book at a discounted price. Today’s pick is Roadsworth featuring 450 reproductions of this Canadian artist’s work. It’s awesome urban art. Love it.
Watch for savings the rest of this week on:
YOU comma Idiot
The Famished Lover
Miller Brittain
The Black Watch
Beaverbrook: A Shattered Legacy, and
Ganong: A Sweet History of Chocolate
Penguin Canada has launched Razorbill.ca which is actually a Ning site. I was curious about Ning in its early days and belonged to a couple of networks there so nothing really came of it. I’m interested to see what Penguin Canada does here.
Razorbill is a hub for conversations about YA fiction, pre-launch news and author chats with folks like Joseph Boyden (love him), Hiromi Goto, Charles de Lint and Carrie Mac.
I joined because of some thematic convergence that the marketers will like to know about. 1) I got my Amazon news blast recommending hot titles in January. The first title was John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. I visited the book page because I liked the cover. Read the blurb to understand that it is YA fiction and has something to do with a girl who has cancer. Didn’t strike me as anything I needed to act urgently on so I carried on with my day. 2) I got an email from Robyn at Citizen Optimum introducing me to Razorbill, and including a link to grab a blogger badge, like you see below. John Green’s The Fault in our Stars is mentioned in the email. Hm. 3) I check out Razorbill and because I’m procrastinating about the day job, I sign up for an account. Then I complete the tedious form to eventually find the link to the badges. And here we are.
So anyone checked out Razorbill.ca? What do you think? Worth it?
I’m tired of all the little “community” sites. It’s like having a ton of party invites from different friends and eventually just staying home. Authors—do these sites help you? Marketers—do the analytics suggests these influence purchases directly or indirectly?
1. A free app called iBooks Author will let me, or anyone, create a digital interactive textbook. My gears are already turning as apparently from the live blogs, it’s very fast to create an ebook, which means I can cross off that New Year’s resolution from 2011 (I believe in carry over resolutions. I still have to make bread, which was a resolution in 2008.)
2. An update to iTunes U, which lets educators share and communicate curriculum with students using the iPad. There are a number of courses that people can take for free via iTunes U. This means I should check out whether I want to offer an online marketing course via iTunes U as you can apparently design and distribute complete courses, including audio, video, books and other content. I assume there’s a paid version too? Will need to check, unless some kind soul will tell me in the comments.
3. A new textbook store called iBooks 2, which is also a free app that will feature digital ebooks for schools. Major textbook publishers are on board, and I’m excited about the enhanced ebook possibilities for textbooks.
For enhanced ebooks, iBooks really offers the best capabilities. I really hope textbook publishers create some cool stuff here!
I’m excited about the announcement. What do you think?
I spent a couple of evenings reorganizing our bookshelves at home to be colour coordinated and organized by genre. Apparently so did crazedadman (read that one more time craze dad man). Not only did he organize his own shelves, he then thought to get his wife and a ton of volunteers involved in making this stop-motion video of animated books.
The fine folks at TravelingStories.org have sent me the 2012 calendar that is helping raise funds for their organization, which provides books to kids who have none and strives to inspire a love for reading everywhere.
Traveling Stories finds schools and/or orphanages that want a library but cannot afford one on their own. Usually the school or orphanage already has a room for the library, they just don’t have the books or staff to run it. So far they have launched libraries in Sudan and El Salvador. In the US, their strategy is to inspire kids to read by hosting interactive literary events.
Looking at my shelves this evening, I discovered that I have a number of Canadian favourites. If you’re looking for a great summer read, these are all books that I have read and kept because I liked them so much.
Posted by Monique at 09:20 PM.
Filed under:
Books •
Over the last couple of days I have been pondering stories and storytelling. What makes a great story? What makes a great storyteller? As these thoughts have been bouncing around in my head, I came across a book from Red Clover Press called Monoculture by F.S. Michaels.
Red Clover Press is the little publisher of art, culture, and big ideas. And, their first published book is the aforementioned Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything. I think it’s interesting for a publisher to chose their first work to be about stories.
“Storytelling is a form of immortality. It goes from one generation to another,” says the American author Studs Terkel. Now memories and stories can fade, become diluted, or gain more momentum than deserved, but the act of publishing that story secures it in a particular time and place. I think this is why authors seek publication, it’s not enough to just write. Published works become a legacy.
But not all great stories are published, or publishable. When James and I talk about stories, we’re typically talking about how stories help us make sense of who we are, where we come from and where we are going. Monoculture is about a master story that takes over and narrows our understanding of our place in the world, or how to fit in the world. So far, 100 pages in, it’s a pessimistic story about economics and efficiency are altering our social activities. But these aren’t necessarily the stories James and I discuss. We’re inclined to chat about universal stories.
Here is the thematic convergence. Amongst all the thinking about stories this week, I stumbled across a video clip of Kurt Vonnegut discussing the shape of stories and how these could be programmatically understood. With tongue firmly planted in cheek, I pass along this story:
Posted by Monique at 08:42 AM.
Filed under:
Books •
Wow! Vancouver is holding a major Canadian poetry conference in October as part of the Vancouver 125 celebrations.
The Vancouver 125 Poetry Conference is a four-day poetry conference, October 19-22, 2011. The focus is new generation of poets, which are defined as poets who published their first book after 1990. The conference is presented in partnership with the Office of the Poet Laureate of the City of Vancouver, The City of Vancouver, Simon Fraser University’s Writing and Publishing Program, The Vancouver International Writers Festival, The Vancouver Public Library and the Listel Hotel.
This is an amazing opportunity to enjoy poetry from poets across North America.
Participants include Griffin Prize winner Christian Bök (Eunoia), Griffin and Governer Governor-General’s Award finalist Ken Babstock (Airstream Land Yacht), Griffin shortlisted poet Suzanne Buffam (The Irrationalist), G-G nominee Evelyn Lau (Oedipal Dreams), and Michael Turner (Hard Core Logo).
We have some non-poet here, but the keynote reading will feature Governor-General’s Award and Griffin Prize winner Don McKay (Strike/Slip); prolific and esteemed U.S. writer Fanny Howe (On the Ground); and fellow American Martin Espada, a Pulitzer Prize finalist (for The Republic of Poetry).
According to a recent Vancouver Sun article, there was a landmark 1963 poetry conference, which brought some U.S. superstars to town. Hm, clearly time for another major poetry event.
The conference will be at SFU Woodward’s in October. The 90-minute sessions will be for readings and discussions.
Plus V125PC coincides with the Vancouver International Writers Festival, which means there will be a lot of literary madness going on in this city.
The Vancouver 125 Poetry Conference will be held Oct. 19-22 http://v125pc.com/
@v125pc
ShelvAR
The perfect app for frustrated librarians dealing with mis-shelved books. This augmented reality app for Android devices makes rearranging a joyful chore. Developed by Miami University’s Augmented Reality Research Group. http://www.muarrg.com
National Post says “West is best”
Brad Frenette talks books and publishing on the westcoast with Billie Livingston, Ian Weir, Kevin Chong, Caroline Adderson, John Vaillant, Timothy Taylor, Annabel Lyon, Zsuzsi Gartner, and Steven Galloway. http://arts.nationalpost.com/2011/04/29/vancouver/
Storytude is a website and app for Android and iPhone that lets you find stories based on your location. The fictional stories based on read-world locations can be called up as a literary way to discover a city. At the moment, Storytude is focussed on Germany, in particular Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich and Cologne.
I’ll Show You Mine edited by Wrenna Robertson,
photography by Katie Huisman ($40 includes shipping in NA)
I’ll Show You Mine is the first publication of Vancouver-based educational publisher Show Off Books. The book is a series of photographs and personal stories from 60 women. The intention is not pornography or erotica but rather to accurately and objectively display the beautiful diversity of the female genitalia, as said to me by publisher Whelm King in a phone conversation prior to publication.
I admit to feeling weird about browsing a book of vaginas because there aren’t many interactions that women have, aside from porn, to be presented with labia. Puppetry of the Penis gave me the same feeling, but after 5 minutes with the “hamburger” and “windsurfer” I was thinking of Play-Doh rather than sex organs.
With I’ll Show You Mine, the lighting of the photographs brings humanity to the subject matter in a way that is not normally seen in women’s studies textbooks, clinical pamphlets, or adolescent sexual education materials. The women’s anecdotes and short stories are also coming from a place of emotional support for young women (or rather any woman) who is anxious about what “normal” looks like.
I’ll Show You Mine is an educational resource meant to counteract the pervasiveness in North American culture to let pornography set the standard for what female genitalia should look like.
I tweeted about Matthew Ingram’s post Book Publishers Need to Wake Up and Smell the Disruption and received replies from my publishing friends that were inline with the comments Matthew received on his blog. But Matthew struck a chord for me, not with his outlier examples of self-published authors selling great numbers of books for less than a dollar, but with his comments about the accumulating evidence that Kindle and iPad are industry disrupters and, in particular, that they are going to continue to have an impact on author-publisher contracts. Again, we can argue about what we consider evidence, but this is my perspective from marketing, sales and technology.
1. Technology Continues to Transform the Publishing Industry
The Product Life Cycle for some categories of printed books is in decline, meaning that the revenue generated by that category has gone from development, introduction, and growth, peaked at maturity and is now in decline (declining revenue).
Cooks still want the content, but instead of buying 101 Fast and Easy Recipes they are searching Google for what they want to make for dinner that night.
And Google just made that easier by introducing Google Recipe.
In that Decline Stage, publishers have exercised all the options:
* Maintaining the product as is.
* Reducing the costs and finding new uses for the product (rejuvenating backlist)
* Lowering prices to liquidate inventory (hello front of store at Indigo)
* Promotion (reinforcing brand image, celebrity-driven)
But at the end of the day, this is a declining category. Due to brand or author loyalty, profitability may be maintained longer for some. Plus, product life cycle doesn’t map completely to a predictable sales forecast since, in the case of cookbooks, the product doesn’t stand alone. Each book category is part of a larger ecosystem, it’s not dying in a petri dish independent of other factors.
That said, Matthew Ingram’s post Wake Up and Smell the Disruption calls to mind that marketing managers do need to address the challenges that products in a declining stage are likely to face.
For example, in the case of cookbooks, would-be-buyers are also happy to access content for free online.
A common publisher argument is that the quality of a cookbook vs. the quality of an online recipe vastly differs.
Quiz:
Is the above image from a cookbook?
Or from a blog?
The fact that free content exists means that some would-be-buyers will chose free over quality, or just as good over quality, especially if free = as good as paid.
Cookbooks, Travel, Reference: the next publisher argument is that these are outliers. Maybe they are right now, but they won’t always be.
Kindle, Kobo, iPad and even mobile phones are changing the game.
Let’s just look at text-based fiction and non-fiction. I’m not talking about the reading experience of architecutre books, photography, or kids books, just basic text.
Here’s the competition in a would-be-buyer’s mind:
* Print copy, hardcover, of The Shallows for $33.50 from an independent bookseller
* Print copy, hardcover, of The Shallows for $21.00 from Indigo at a 34% discount
* Kobo, digital edition, of The Shallows for $9.99 at a 63% discount on the list price
The arguments about whether digital is a better reading experience or not are inconsequential to many would-be-buyers when presented with $9.99 vs. $33.50 or even $21.
If you said to someone, “would you like to pay more for that,” the answer is rarely “yes.”
Digital editions of books and app versions of books are directly competing with the print editions.
* an ebook buyer is the same buyer as print
* same demographic/psychographic
In terms of marketing, this is good because we know these people. In terms of sales revenue, it’s bad because ebooks do not represent a new, expanded market audience.
The power buyers of ebooks are:
* 30-44 years old
* women
* employed
* they entered the ebook market 6 months to 2 years ago
* as power buyers, they buy weekly
* urban
In terms of unit growth, sales units are up but this does not compensate for lost revenue.
In our above example, $23.51 differentiates the ebook version of The Shallows vs. the print edition.
We are seeing at least a $5 differential for ebooks vs. print.
In addition to that lost revenue, as an ebook buyer buys more ebooks—becomes more at ease with reading digital vs. print, enjoys the simplicity of buying on-demand, and is rewarded with reading on the go or at night in bed with the backlit screen—they buy fewer hardcover and paperbacks.
Ebooks do canabalize print (especially when measuring revenue dollars).
(This is the point I have mulled over the least so contemplate and critique vs. simply criticizing please.)
The four categories here are:
Dogs: Low market share and low growth rate. They neither generate nor consume a large amount of cash. Backlist titles.
Question marks: Rapidly growing but also consuming large amounts of cash. Because they have low market share, do not generate much cash. The problem child. eBooks and apps.
Stars: Strong market share but also consume large amounts of cash. Frontlist. Especially frontlist print+ebook. Stars, if well positioned, can become the next cash cows and ensure future cash generation.
Cash cows: Leaders in a mature market. Generate more cash than they consume. Generates a relatively stable cash flow. Value can be determined with reasonable accuracy. The ideal print book.
You can see, of course, the immediate limitations. I’m not sure how many publishers can quickly identify their Cash Cows, as the margins in publishing are so small.
The other issue is that the many factors of profitability are overlooked in this simplified view since the products in each quadrant are not independent of the others. A dog of a cookbook could still help another cookbook gain competitive advantage. The amplification of awareness for series, or the celebrity book that is really about giving the author competitive advantage over others on speaking circuits are other examples of how this ecosystem isn’t as simple as the above framework.
The reason I bring up the matrix is that it’s a starting point for discussing resource allocation and strategic planning for those products in a Declining Stage (print books) and those in a Growth Stage (ebooks and apps).
The growth stage is the period where sales increase as more customers become aware of the product and create demand, which fuels retailers to become interested in carrying the product.
Certainly what we are seeing with the growth of ebooks and consumer demand for Kindle and iPad.
Regardless of Matthew Ingram’s examples of outliers like Seth Godin, there are fundamentals publishers need to face:
1. Book publishing is a technology-enabled business.
2. A conversation about a technology-enabled business is a conversation about market changes.
3. We can argue about the speed of change and the type of changing coming, but we should mentally prepared for the fact that change is coming (like waves on a shore).
4. There is a lifecycle for everything. People argued to keep scrolls, but they printed those arguments in bound books. (See Johannes Trithemius)
5. Few people are successfully managing the product lifecycle in all 4 quadrants. (DRM and borrowing restrictions are not endearing consumers yet publishers are implementing these measures as a necessary way to support the required staff to keep both print and ebook development during this transitionary period. Matthew Ingram points out some of the mathematical challenges of the author-publisher contracts in his post, which aren’t endearing authors either, who I think are the glue that holds the whole thing together.)
6. “Change happens through a process, not a product” (Kate Fialkowski). The internet and ereaders have changed the way we read. Search engines, websites, wikis and blogs have changed the way we publish and share information.
7. The game changers tend to be outsiders to the industry. Music changed because of the development of MP3, which meant we could more easily share music, which led to peer-to-peer sites like Napster. Then iTunes changed the cost structure. Blockbuster > Netflix. Banking > Online Banking.
What I took from Matthew Ingram’s article was just another reminder that as Kate Fialkowski says, the game changers redefine the ecosystem, change the business models, price points, distribution systems, and support processes.
A coffee at Starbucks costs more than a $1.50 because they changed the game. They can demand $6+ for what tastes to me like shitty, burnt coffee with excessive sweeteners that will likely develop gut rot for an entire generation because they created demand for that product.
Publishers fearing the lost of authors and staff is not equal to fearing that one of them wins the lottery.
If you value an employee, you should consider that they could win the lottery and leave.
But really, the probability of an employee winning the lottery is pretty low in comparison to the probability that good people will leave the industry altogether or that the smartest will be picked off by start-ups providing incentives to acquire the best talent. See Open Road Media, Kobo and any number of interesting new ventures.
I don’t want to haggle over the definition of “lottery” but I can tell you that the folks holding the big cheques are the ones doing ebook conversion and app development.
And a happy dance can be a lottery in itself.
(People in the system are going to make money in unexpected ways. The ones who will keep making money are the ones who understand the motivating factors of their consumers and are able to repeatedly win them over. Excuse me now, I have a new iPad 2 to purchase. Let me know what books to buy.)
Plain Words, Uncommon Sense A blog on books, writing, tap dancing, technology, and the other amusements of Monique Sherrett (or Monique Trottier in unmarried form).
Monique Sherrett lives in Vancouver, BC, Canada and is a litblogger, among other things. Find out more ...
"So misguided." A comment often uttered in my eclectic salon.
Contact
Send me book galleys, ARCs or review copies. Contact me at monique at somisguided dot com Contact me at Boxcar Marketing
Gooselane is running a special promotion this week. Each day they are offering one book at a discounted price. Today’s pick is Roadsworth featuring 450 reproductions of this Canadian artist’s work. It’s awesome urban art. Love it.
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