Publishing

Go read This | Past, present and future | The Bookseller

~ Eoin Purcell ~ Leave a comment

Interesting piece by Stephen Page of Faber in The Bookseller:

Publishers and other media companies have always been as singular as those who invest directly with talent to license properties. This is changing. Netflix’s House of Cards demonstrates that players further down the value chain are trying to expand their role to include investment in intellectual property. Alongside this, the transformation of self-publishing has demonstrated that those upstream from larger scale publishers are also able to exploit copyright. We are all part of one continuum, and will co-exist to the benefit of readers and writers alike.

via Past, present and future | The Bookseller.

Go Read This | Macmillan To Publish First Novel From Swoon Reads, A Crowdsourced Romance Imprint And Online Community – Press Release – Digital Journal

~ Eoin Purcell ~ Leave a comment

Publishing is a complex ecosystem (something I wrote about nearly three years ago when I wrote about The Value Web that was emerging in trade publishing), one in which there is no ONE way to publish or be published. Here’s a very nice example of that reality in play:

Sandy Hall, a teen librarian from Hawthorne, New Jersey, posted A LITTLE SOMETHING DIFFERENT to the Swoon Reads site in November 2013. Within weeks, the manuscript was rated “Five Hearts” by the Swoon Reads Community and considered to be one of the most “Swoonworthy” on the site. This brought it to the attention of Jean Feiwel, Publisher of Swoon Reads, and the rest of the Swoon Reads Board. One e-mail and two phone calls later, Sandy Hall signed her first book deal for World rights. 

via Macmillan To Publish First Novel From Swoon Reads, A Crowdsourced Romance Imprint And Online Community – Press Release – Digital Journal.

Go Read This | Waterstones up, Quercus down—what’s the story? | Independent Publishing Guild in the UK | IPG

~ Eoin Purcell ~ Leave a comment

Very good piece looking at the competing fortunes of Quercus and Waterstones. I’d add a small amount of caution here. Firstly, the Waterstones figures are for the year up to April 2013 whereas the Quercus figures are more up to date. Even so you can follow the logic through from April 2013 until today, in many ways that makes sense because the impact of the kind of policies highlighted here would be more dramatic on publishers in the key Christmas Trading period than at any other time:

Now, cash management is closely related to stock management, so it should come as no surprise that Waterstones’ stock has come down as their cash has grown. I have no knowledge of the state of Quercus’ stock management, but it’s a pretty safe bet that they’ve got too much stock, probably of extremely good titles, sitting in a warehouse, intended for those big orders that never came from the retailers with those challenging conditions.

For independent publishers to remain independent, and sadly it looks as though Quercus will not, we need a relentless focus on cash management and cash generation. Our businesses and the titles and content that make them need to be profitable, and we need to use the digital print and e-book technologies that enable us to hold the lowest stock possible. Easy to say, and probably pretty obvious, but if we don’t hold it as a top priority we can easily be caught out.

via Waterstones up, Quercus down—what’s the story? | Independent Publishing Guild in the UK | IPG.

My Piece For FAQ | Silicon Dock: Are there any spill-over effects for the Irish publishing scene?

~ Eoin Purcell ~ Leave a comment

I wrote a piece for the Frankfurt Book Fair’s FAQ magazine this quarter about whether or not there was an impact being felt amongst traditional publishers in Ireland from the presence of large tech companies who have made Dublin and Ireland a base of operations in Europe:

The web forms a core part of their businesses in a way that is not yet true of traditional publishers. While they are growing their e-book segments, the latter still do most of their business in paper and print. This crucial difference might be the reason why traditional publishing has not felt much direct impact from the tech firms. Most traditional publishers have little interaction with them and, while the newer and smaller innovative publishers might use their platforms, services and tools, there is not much they can give the tech giants and not much the tech giants can give them.

‘I don’t see that the presence of the large new media and tech companies has had any particular impact on the domestic publishing industry,’ says Ivan O’Brien from The O’Brien Press. ‘They don’t really interact with us, and they inhabit a multi-national space, generally dealing with companies with a whole lot more money than we have!’

via Silicon Dock: Are there any spill-over effects for the Irish publishing scene? | Frankfurt Academy Quarterly

Go Read This | How To Create Value With A New Thing

~ Eoin Purcell ~ Leave a comment

An interesting piece by Baldur yet again. In lots of ways touching on the dangers of innovation and change to incumbents:

Building up in-house digital product development is risky and expensive, especially at the start when you have to build up the necessary expertise and tools to do the job and change your organisations implicit value network.

The problem is that changing an organisation’s value network is next to impossible without firing everybody (yourself included) and replacing them with different people. Adding individuals who have different values from those prevalent in your organisation won’t change the value network. It’ll just make your new hires miserable before they quit or get fired. Which means that building a top notch, in-house digital product development team is going to be difficult for most publishers.

via How To Create Value With A New Thing | Studio Tendra