Eoin Purcell's Blog

Eoin Purcell

When you get it really right
Waterstone’s have been pushing to make their online store a site worth visiting for a little while now. They only recently broke away from their amazon link up so I was pleasantly surprised when I came across this page.

Yes it is a promotional page and yes it is designed to promote only one book but it goes to show you the capabilities for really pushing a book. The book in question is The Lies of Lock Lamora by Scott Lynch. Interestingly the author page does not have a link or an embed of the video.

And it works
The odd thing about that is that I recently took the book from my TBR pile and moved it to the read next pile (this is a slight misnomer as the next pile is about four books high). Having spent time on the page I am now more than ever looking forward to reading the book and I think once I finish Fooled By Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, it’ll be the first book I pick up.

Which brings me to my point, how great the Waterstone’s site could be if they did this for more books. Hell, as a publisher I’d be willing to finance some of the work for many of the titles we are launching in the coming year and even for some of the backlist too.

Who else can do it
Remarkably though it reinforces for me the value of LibraryThing as a potential locus for promotion. After all so long as there was a strict separation of sponsored content from user and non commercial content it could be a great place to host pages of this type.

Hub or not?
it also reminds me of the positive discussion on the web recently about hubs, from Snowbooks (Here and Here) and from Penguin (Here), two of the publishers that seem to my mind to be most on top of the web as a community tool concept.

I have been considering this at length since I read this report. I have yet to follow up all my random thoughts but when I do I’ll post some more on the idea.

Ah the luxury of writing decently long posts
Eoin

Eoin Purcell

Over at Assignment Zero (A crowd sourcing News initiative which I encourage you to check out separately anyway) there is some good analysis of the debate about amateurs and professionals drawing together a few different schools of opinion and making what is the key point in my view:

But the debate seemed like a red herring to me. Should we only have
professionals doing the media or just let the amateurs have it?

Why is it an “either-or” decision? …..

You can find more here.

Enjoying a relaxing day
Eoin

Eoin Purcell

Brief but interesting post from the editors corner @ The Book Depository:
Here

Loads more but I’m rushing today!
Eoin

Eoin Purcell
I have yet to read the book (damned if I’m linking to it), but I will. If I find it is as bad as the author interviews suggest I will say more. If, as I think unlikely, I change my mind I will say so, loudly!

Andrew Keen
It would be very difficult for me to express exactly how angry this guy is making me. He is loudly proclaiming the evils of web 2.0 and blogging while holding out the Main Stream Media some kind of knight in white armour who we have for some obscure reason ignored. He holds out a selection of Straw Men to be shot down with swift blows of little substance and less meaning. He decries the hidden agendas of web 2.0-ers (in this interview he can be heard discounting the value of Wikipedia without admitting that he writes for Britannica Blog [though he does have a link on his own BLOG]

A selection of his quotes from this interview:

“undermining of authority, undermining of mainstream media, the undermining of expertise”
“wet dream for pr people . . slippery dishonest pr people”
“nobody really knows who anybody is”
“cultural anarchy”
Anonymity . .
“nobody knows who anybody is”
“creating media of spin and lies rumour and innuendo”
“nobody knows their agenda”

And how is it all going to be paid for:

“Much of it is advertising”
“Traditionally you had a clean distinction between content and advertising”

It’s like in his world Main Stream Media isn’t paid for by advertising but by some magic system. Is the journalist somehow immune to the agendas he discusses in this interview? Immune to commercial pressures because between him and the advertiser lie a few managers? Come on.

What annoys me the most is that he is using the very same techniques he derides so snidely to market his own book and campaigns for greater media literacy while ignoring the proliferation of discussion on the web. The reality is that he is a man with an agenda (sell more books) using exactly the same spin tactics he supposedly shuns.

He suggests that the web is somehow responsible for the Bush presidency and the war in Iraq happening (yeah I fear the link escaped me too) and shields the Main Stream Media from criticism on that point too. But what is worse he lambastes the web for undermining authority while earnestly suggesting that one of its failure is that it did not undermine the authority of a sitting president of the United States enough to prevent him going to war? You cannot have it both ways sunshine.

Th truth is that Main Stream Media is embracing the very technologies he abhors (look at CommentisFree)> What is more, had the Main Stream Media been quicker, their dominance of the medium would by now be almost assured, they had the brands to levy, the personalities and resources to deploy, but they failed to react and face now the task of unseating upstarts if they can before they achieve the dominance they have been used too.

Still annoyed at the pomposity of the man, enraged at the fact that such sloppy think might warrant a post but unable to contain the need to post about it
Eoin

Oh and in case you are afraid I am going off the deep end over one piece list to this one too he does it again here.

Eoin Purcell

Its not quite my thing: Aerosmith
But they do put on a fantastic show. I saw them last night in Marlay Park in South Dublin. The weather held and the band seem to be moving into Rolling Stones territory in terms of ability to just keep on Rocking (as it were).

What struck me on the evening though was not the band, or event he venue. What hit me was that literally thousands of people were recording, photographing and bootlegging the concert on a diverse range of cameras, phones and video cameras. It surely will not be long before the material hits YouTube or some other online video service.

The other element to the problem though is that no one seems to think this kind of copying is unfair. After all you pay €70 just to see them play and why not take a few snaps, record your favourite song as a memory, so what if you share that with 100,000 or 1,000,000 people on YouTube, isn’t Aerosmith lucky to have such a great fan base?

Finger in the dam
And it hit me then that there was simply no way of stopping it. You can pursue the people responsible individually (hardly effective) and stop the material coming online (close down sites and ban certain videos) but those measures will prove either entirely negative or ineffectual. One because the individual cost will be greater than the reward and the other because videos will simply move to another site that does allow pirated or bootlegged material.

So what do you do and how will the reality that affects live performance hit other forms (I am thinking, naturally, of books). At first it seems a different game. Books can hardly be recorded live. But they can be photographed and passed about. You only need to look at Scribd to see copyright protected material I am FAIRLY sure isn’t posted with permission.

If the logic of the concert holds and I pay €20 for a book am I not entitled to share a few images with my friends and online buddies on Scribd?

Leaving us with a fairly clear shift away from respect for copyright convention as it now stands and is enshrined in law (I have to admit I feel like I am living the Nine Shift shifts now). If the majority do not respect the law, do not see the logic of the law and flagrantly breech the law without fearing retribution, is there any point of keeping the law?

I know my thoughts on this are rough and I need to think it through much more but it sure begs some questions!

Wondering
Eoin

Eoin Purcell

The doom first
Who wouldn’t be depress by reading this (Reg Required) article in The Bookseller (but actually a cull from The Herald which is free online and here):

The result? Publishers can no longer afford to take chances and authors who have enjoyed modest successes over many years are suddenly being dropped in favour of potential big hitters.
“They could be on their way to writing an opus, but will not be given that chance,” says Kean. “Ian Rankin, for instance, wasn’t an immediate success but his publishers stuck with him because they saw his potential. That wouldn’t necessarily happen now.”

The article’s main focus is Book Clubs but is concerned too with the side effects:

“The downside is that if someone goes into a book shop and buys the books that Richard and Judy have recommended, perhaps they won’t buy other titles,” he says. “There is no doubt that there are winners and losers in this. That’s something I feel slightly disturbed by. There is a sense that it is very much about corporate dealing.”

So where is the light?
Well here it is: if you happen to be one of those modest success squeezed out by the bigger publishers, I am happy to say there are tonnes of smaller, pluckier and braver publishers just waiting to do the job. Perhaps large advances won’t be forthcoming, maybe the massive campaigns the big ones can pull off will be a memory, but we can publish and publish well. We can drive sales and sell rights just as much as the conglomerates and we are always eager to try things.

What is more you will find modest success to a large publisher is a very nice little success to a smaller publisher. So maybe you have one or two or three books under your belt and your publisher is no longer on board. Maybe you have modest sales and a small but loyal fan base. I say you have a good platform and room for growth.

Get in touch, if not with Mercier (where I work) than someone else. The world of publishing doesn’t begin and end at the top five or even the top ten. Don’t be the victim of a dreaded publishing trend, buck it and move onto new and hopefully happier one.

Waiting for e-mails, letters and calls
Eoin

Eoin Purcell

If you weren’t enormously envious of everyone at TOC before now . . .
(And personally I was) then you will be now. It is not just that everyone who is anyone is going, its that the discussions sound so wonderful too.

For instance the POD discussion covered on the O’Reilly XML.com pages by Simon St. Laurent:

Why? I think the basic reason is simple – I’m one of those terrible people who’s always looking for books you can’t find easily in stores. They’re out-of-print, available only from the publisher, or otherwise obscure. Ingram was my friend when I ordered through stores, and then Amazon made a lot of things easier. At O’Reilly, I want POD for all kinds of reasons, from keeping old books in print to providing a way to test out new ideas without having to print 5000 books.

I’ve been expecting POD to happen for years. I spent too much time working at Kinko’s, I guess – I’d seen books getting made, if not the fine offset books typically sold in bookstores.

So here, now, it looks like it’s finally here. Lightning Source and other printers are offering print from PDF at rates that aren’t too insanely horrible relative to offset plus the cost of warehousing.

There’s still definitely a place for offset printing – offset has great economies of scale, and if books move out quickly, then the warehousing and other distribution costs don’t matter much. Offset will probably always make sense for initial print runs of books that will sell thousands of copies in a year – but that’s actually a relatively tiny share of the total number of books out there.

You can read much much more of the detail here. At least TOC has enabled em to widen my blog count for publishing and innovation in publishing. So for that at least thank you Tim O’Reilly.

An envious book nerd.
Eoin

Eoin Purcell

It’s a compliment really
That so many of the large publishers have Irish office here. Penguin run a neat little operation that has launched some great Fiction and Non-Fiction, as does Hodder. MacMillan has Gill&MacMillan an arrangement that gives Gill the best of both worlds, an independent publishing strategy with multi-national back up.

It is understandable from their perspective. Ireland is an extension of the UK book market in many ways. Hundreds of UK titles are sold here and we speak English after all.

If rumours (based on job adverts) are true then Random House is set to join their fellow giants in publishing a separate list into the Irish market.

Personally I welcome them.

Issues do arise
As you might imagine though, the presence of these companies has some negative side affects for Irish publishers. The first and most obvious is to increase the level of competition, the second advances and the third marketing prowess.

Not only do we compete with books exported from the British market which sell well here too, but we are forced to compete with their native Irish titles as well.

The size of the advances that the larger groups can pay is huge compared to most Irish publishers and so in commissioning too they have a distinct advantage. Talented authors know that they are likely to get a bigger advance and access to larger sales and marketing teams than if they stay with an independent house.

Personally what I find the most impressive is the ability of these large groups to pull off marketing and trade promotion coups. If you had witnessed the huge displays for this book in Dublin in the last few weeks you would be impressed too (to boot it has sold about 9,000 copies in 3 weeks according to Bookscan which is very impressive in this market).

It is a symptom of the problem that the book in question was the sixth book by an author who was nurtured by an Irish publisher before being poached by Penguin. When all is said and done though I am sure the increased sales of the first four books with no marketing spend is something of a consolation.

How do we cope
All this has the effect of pushing local companies into a tight spot. Without the resources of the larger companies we are forced to rely on clever commissioning, smarter marketing and on building market share in areas where these larger companies do not publish.

Of course in the long term that is not a winning strategy. In the long term we need to be competitive with the larger players. It requires us to adapt to their presence and to challenge them with innovative books and products. It requires us to find and publish new and distinctive talent that sells in Ireland and beyond the borders of our island. There are great examples out there to copy, we just need to look.

Most of all it challenges us to be better everyday, to be more creative in our thinking, more effective in our execution and to every day push the boat out. I’m not there yet but at least I know where I am going and I think I know how to get there.

Come along for the ride?
Eoin

Eoin Purcell

That’s what friends are for
One of my good friends is a person I have huge admiration for. I doubt he realises how much, as he spends a good deal of time looking outward and comparing himself to others, rather than taking stock of how much he has actually done in his life.

One of the reasons I admire him is that he has overcome adversities the like of which I cannot even begin to understand. Another is that he regularly refreshes my viewpoint by throwing a curve-ball into a conversation.

Just such an occasion occurred this weekend and jolted me out of a certain reverie. He asked me if I was pushing the boat out. He didn’t mean was I ‘having a cracking party’ or ‘celebrating’, he meant was I working as hard as I could.

He reminded me of the harshest lesson I have ever learned (the details are best left unexplored for now), that complacency destroys achievement. And by reminding me of that he made me ask the questions that help me avoid that lesson being repeated.

The complacent among us
Complacency is one of my major weaknesses (development areas in PC Speak). It is a truly funny weakness. I strive for a goal so hard and so long that when I achieve it I think I am sorted. I take a break and then get back to work thinking that I am working at the same level that got me to where I am but in fact I am taking my foot off the gas a little and becoming lazy. I am not pushing the boat out.

Its remedy
This has bitten me in the ass a few times in the past but now I have a few tester questions that try and jolt my sense of complacency:

⁃ Are you working as hard as you can?
⁃ Are your rivals working harder than you?
⁃ Is someone beating you at something you consider a strength?
⁃ Are you achieving you goals? (Key question)
⁃ Are you heading the right direction?

You want the answers to be Yes, No, No, Yes, Yes. To my mind anything else is trouble.

Why you might ask is this relevant to publishing?
Because it is an industry where smart, energetic and driven people work. There will always be hard workers, smart workers and often brilliant workers at companies that publish into your and other markets.

If you don’t match or exceed their efforts then you will fail. Maybe it won’t be spectacular, maybe it won’t be a hugely noticeable thing at first but five years down the line when your list is anemic and their list is kicking yours, you’ll know all about it.

This is especially true for the Irish market for reasons I’ll talk about tomorrow. So if I am ever fearful that complacency is creeping up on me, I asked myself those tough questions, act on the answers and redouble my efforts.

Enjoying this new found blog enthusiasm
Eoin

PS Check this site out.

Eoin Purcell

There are good reasons why some magazines should be completely Open Access — many scientific periodicals have moved to this model of distribution. They now have to pay their costs by levying a charge from the contributors or sponsors of the research reported. Also, Open Access makes complete sense for magazines which are essentially free in print; but we think it is unlikely that a consumer magazine which is completely Open Access will sell many personal subscriptions.

Seems to make sense to me
And so does the rest of it. You can read the above and its content here. The blog addresses the ideas that lie behind pretty much every news media’s archive policy in the five posts hitting on Moving Walls(A concept from Jstor), Conversion rates from free samples:

So what does this tell us? One lesson that we have taken from our monthly stats is that a significant increase in trial usage will boost subscriptions. It is actually a very obvious point, if a publisher promotes the archive of the magazine, and the quality of its back issues is more widely appreciated, more subscriptions will be sold.

Magazines are much like books in this respect. Just as Amazon’s Search Inside works — “Browsing pages sells more books”, so also with magazines. Browsing sells more subscriptions. If only dentists waiting rooms were points of sale, we would be leaving his surgery with a couple of subscriptions as well as our dental floss. Of course, on the web they can become that.

There is just so much packed into these posts. I like them because they are chatty and open, dealing with the issues and concerns of all publishers but specifically magazine publishers. And they are viewed if you like from the perspective of a relatively well placed observer whose interests are not opposed to publishers as the quote below makes clear:

Furthermore, the way our deal works with the publishers we absorb the distribution and maintenance costs of the digital edition. So it costs Exact Editions, not the publisher, a bit more to maintain an Open Archive. We think these costs are easily containable within the parameters of the small commission we obtain from selling additional digital subscriptions, so we encourage our publishing partners to offer Open Archives with a moving wall. The marginal costs of maintaining Open Access are marginal. So you dont need to feel sorry for us!

All in all a great sequence of posts with real information and insight behind them. And a very nice product too (See for example the sample edition of Prospect).

Reading more online?
Eoin