Publishing is hard!
Barnsley, whose company saw sales fall 13.3%, the largest drop among the top 10 and despite Hilary Mantel’s Booker-winner Wolf Hall, explained it had been necessary to take “a lot of cost out of the business”, including cutting the number of titles published by 20%. “We are focusing more on profit than on market share [now at 7.3%],” she said. “Most publishers over-publish for today’s market.”
via Adapt to recover, warn publishing chiefs | theBookseller.com.
I like Osprey. I think they are very smart operators and they know what they are doing and why. They have also built two very nice niche brands (Osprey and Shire) that are almost instantly recognizable in their markets, certainly by the kind of people who buy books and information in those spaces. So the news that they have bought the HarperCollins science-fiction and fantasy imprint Angry Robot is pretty exciting.
Here’s how Angry Robot put it:
Following an acclaimed first year of publishing, the revolutionary science fiction imprint Angry Robot Books has parted company with HarperCollins UK. It will now run as an independent publishing imprint, with the full backing of niche publishing experts, Osprey Publishing.
And here is what Osprey told us:
We at Osprey/Shire/Angry Robot (we are going to need a group name) are all about publishing for specialists, whether your specialism is Panzer variants, timber-framed buildings or zombie novels. We want to publish books (and not just books these days) for people who are enthusiastic, knowledgable and passionate about their interest whatever it is.
What this might mean?
Tor.com has made it clear since its foundation that emphasizing niche can be a successful strategy for reader engagement and Angry Robot is doing a good job of replicating that in the UK with their Robot Army. I’d love to see even more accessible content that just their great and active blog but what they do now is good.
In terms of strategy, Angry Robot is a strong and build-able brand. I’d expect to see more community features over time and perhaps even some kind of membership much as Osprey has created on their home site.
The bigger questions are for HarperCollins. The sale of Angry Robot leaves them with Voyager as their main Science-Fiction and Fantasy imprint. That’s a fine imprint but their engagement strategy is a little up in the air right now. They moved from a community site which I always felt was far too sales pitchy toward a more blog orientated site.
The new site is much better, both visually and in terms of reaching out to readers but it lacks the openness of Tor.com’s site. Unless they address that soon, I fear they may fall behind. When you consider their authors and the passion these superstars generate, this seems a shame. I think they could learn quite a bit from the imprint that have just sold off or simply by copying some of what Tor.com is doing.
Moxyland, by Lauren Beukes
We’re giving you the chance to have your short story published in Lauren (Beukes)‘s next book, Zoo City. In order to enter, all you need to do is write a short story (up to 3000 words) based in the Moxyland universe, using characters, themes and settings from the book to create your own work.
They have more on their blog. Lauren is the author of the Angry Robot published novel, Moxyland. But the smarts start on Authonomy otslef, firstly it has an extensive book page for Moxyland and a faily decent author page for Lauren (though this could easily have had a video and some more features, given the competition). And then they use the power of HarperCollins’ Browse Inside toolkit to display the entire text. That is brave.
I’d be hard pressed to find an issue with this project (other than the minor one I’ve already mentioned). It’s not just that Harper are embracing Fan Fiction and encouraging it even, but they have added real value to Authonomy by doing this. They have used clever cross platform tools to bring a really worthwhile competition to the Authionomy community and have, I think, created one of the most compelling and engaging promotions so far this year. All told, praise if deserved.
I’m enjoying my last day of being 29, successfully made a very big Beef Bourguignon!
Eoin
Cooking Light (Explored) by Flickr user Steve Wampler
This is a nice idea
You now there must be something funky going on when Techcrunch reports on a new crowdsource cookbook initiative. Even if it is from Amanda Hesser (Wikipedia & Twitter) and Merrill Stubbs (Twitter), two pretty well connected folk. The site is called Food52 and right now it’s just a landing page and a sign up*:
The site and the book will appeal to anyone who ever wanted to write their own cookbook but never had the time. But it won’t be a free-for-all. Hesser and Stubbs will make editorial decisions with give-and-take from the site’s members. To guide the community, every week two themes will be presented which will act as a call for recipes. This week’s themes (they are really assignments) are “Your Best Grilled Pork Recipe” and “Your Best Watermelon Recipe.” Anyone can submit their favorite recipes, along with photos or videos. Then Hesser and Stubbs select the most promising ones, test them, and choose the best two for each theme. They present these back to the Food52 members, who get to vote which one will make it into the cookbook.
“There is a huge tradition of community cookbooks, but none of them are user vetted,” says Hesser. Users can take part in creating the cookbook by submitting their own recipes and helping to edit the submissions through comments, ratings, and votes. (Recipes can be flagged if someone tries to pass one off as their own that is actually from another cookbook). Anybody who submits a recipe selected as one of the two finalist recipes each week will get a free copy of the book along with cookware tailored to their recipe.
The iterative process should bring hardcore foodies and fans of the authors coming back every week. By the end of the 52 weeks, Hesser and Stubbs will not only have the recipes for their cookbook, but also a built-in and built-up audience already sold on the book. It won’t be just a cookbook, it will be an artifact of their participation.
But it’s still in beta
I’m not keen on announcements and PR in advance of a website opening to the general populace. When will people stop doing that, wouldn’t a page of text explaining the site be better, especially when there is so much information already out there? Maybe a picture of the authors, a short bio, some links and scary concept but given that it’s a video site, maybe a video? I mean seriously! Still even a google search reveals some more juicy morsels.
Serious Eats (my current favourite foodie site) for instance offers is links to a tour of the kitchen and videos from food52 on vimeo:
But what really caught our eye today is that Hesser and Stubbs seem to have quietly started uploading to a Vimeo account, which is full of what appear to be test videos—along with a couple great nuggets: an introduction to the Food 52 concept, and a video tour of Amanda Hesser’s envy-inducing kitchen—complete with the now-customary refrigerator-baring.
The entire project has a nice sense of buzz about it in the publishing world too, coming as it does with a book published by super-hip Harper Studio.
All told, I see good things coming from this. Having crowdsourced the content for a book published by Mercier last year, Our Grannies’ Recipes, I can guess at the problems they may encounter. Whereas Ourgranniesrecipes.com was very much a no money, seat of the pants endeavour, I like that food52 seems likely to be well funded and have the opportunity to expand the social and user content features that small investments allow.
Best of luck to them, I watch this space with interest.
Eoin
A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it’s bad.
~ William Bernbach
Advertising works you know
And I clicked on the link for the Voyager Books site that I spotted on Tor.com hoping that I would be brought to a site that offered a more UK based perspective on Sci-Fi and fantasy, because as brilliant and wonder as Tor.com is (and it is brilliant and wonderful), there are differences between American and European culture, and that gets noticeable after a while. I thought I might find a different perspective with Voyager. Sadly I was completely disappointed by what I jumped to.
A series of bad experiences begins
It’s not just that the front page is not the community page as with Tor.com nor that the Voyager Books homepage is a page crammed with ads for their books, fair enough everyone has a different approach, not everyone can be as subtle and inclusive as Tor can.
It’s also not just because when you click on the community link the first page that Voyager dumps you at is their competition page which offers you a nice opportunity to win books and then tries to default lock you into sponsor e-mail (bad mojo guys) and the rules exclude non-UK residents and have an error in the details, claiming to be both open until 31st July 2009 and telling is that winners will be notified by January 2009. It is also not just that when you click on the banner on the competition page you are dumped into an error page, oh no, they have warned me on the homepage that this is beta, I know the bedevilling nature of links.
The Bad Mojo Competition Submission
And continues
And it’s not just because the books are organized pretty poorly, for instance if you click on Fantasy/Epic Fantasy all you get is a list. No way to sub-sort by forthcoming or best-seller or release date nothing. Yes you can search (and actually the search is pretty good) but the lack of thinking about how to categories and sort books come out in what should be a really useful page Author Series, which offers not links to all the books of a series by the one author but a text page just listing them. What on earth possessed them? What an easy win linking the books would have been. Contrast that with the the well executed series links that To-Forge have on their actual book site (series are indicated and linked to a series page and each book is numbered by sequence) and you see why Voyager is losing badly here.
To the nuts and bolts
And to top it all the registration page is not really a community registration page, it’s an e-commerce sign up page. Have a look, you will see what I mean. Compulsory address and phone number, why on earth does a community need those things? Tor.com doesn’t, in fact their sign up page is sparse and the additional profile info is by choice not demand.
The Voyager Registration Page
The Tor Registration Page
And then there is the free stuff
Of course Tor actually gives me something I want. Before Tor.com my reading on and about Sci-Fi & Fantasy was low, not by design but through lack of interesting online material. Tor has changed that with its new stories, blog posts and links to interesting books. I hoped that Voyager would offer these things too, but no, it has only brought me an e-commerce site, dressed up as a community with nothing new to offer me.
Thumbs down Voyager Books, a poor show on many levels. Perhaps rather than say:
Voyager Books is an ecommerce and community site for science fiction, fantasy and horror fans of all ages from HarperCollins Publishers.
On your about page, you should simply say ecommerce and be done with it?
Eoin
