Report from New York Comicon

I wrote about the show, primarily focusing on what it meant for book publishers; the piece below appeard in Publishers Lunch, March 5, 2007:

By all accounts Reed’s second New York Comicon was a big success. While they have not yet provided official statistics, the rough numbers indicate three-day attendance of approximately 40,000 people. That total includes about 4,000 registered trade visitors and exhibitors–among them 600 comic book retailers, 500 booksellers, andmore than 500 librarians.

Of course Comicon is primarily a consumer show (the floor was trade only on the first day, Friday until 4 pm)–something traditional comics players know well, but is relatively uncharted territory for book publishers. The aisles were packed with fans of all types and ages, wandering the show floor and participating in all the related and decidedly non-book activities (signings with comic artists and writers, video game demonstrations, and Dungeons and Dragons style board gaming, for example).

Book publishers exhibiting included Scholastic, HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin, Roaring Brook’s .01 Second, Hachette (trade books as well as their new Yen imprint), various imprints of Random House [Ballantine, Pantheon, Del Rey and others], Continuum, Simon & Schuster, Watson Guptill and Abrams. Which means that there were some notable publishers not in attendance, and certainly no book distributors other than Diamond were to be seen.

All the publishers I interviewed were enthusiastic about the show, and seemed ready and able to interact with the throngs of people that crowded the aisles. We saw lots of books being handled, some being given away and quite a few being sold. But not every book publisher seemed to understand the difference between a trade show and a consumer show, and they will need to rethink their approach to the show in light of the energy demonstrated by so many of the comics and graphic novel publishers.

Most publisher booths did not seem designed with the kinds of fans that come to Comicon in mind. One booth we visited had no publisher representative for a considerable amount of time, leaving only a lonely but talkative author to draw people out of the crowds. Too many booths that felt like BEA, not Comicon.

It was clear that the comics publishers themselves, with much deeper roots in this market, appear to be more comfortable with their consumer base and know far better how to handle themselves at a consumer show. Many of the large and small comics publisher spaces were packed continuously, most notably Tokyopop, Viz, Dark Horse, Oni, Marvel and Vertigo.

Still, the presence of traditional book publishers and their growing commitment to comics publishing, graphic novels and pop culture was evident and clearly made an impact. The audience for comics and video games is a broad pop culture universe that book publishers need to understand and actively engage. Interacting with the people who make up this market as individuals is a remarkable opportunity for publishers of all kinds. The continuing growth of NY Comicon makes a great testing ground right in the backyard of many publishers to meet this enthusiastic consumer base and gain new consumer marketing skills to further engage with this lively (and crucial) market.

Booktrix creates Simplified Author Website Program

Authors are flocking to the web, creating websites and blogs of all kinds, and for good reason: there is no better way to build and support relationships with your readers than by creating a compelling web presence.

But choosing a strategy and building a website are not generally all that simple, and sometimes the simple solutions are not workable. Booktrix is pleased to offer high quality, modern, fully functional, attractive websites designed specifically for writers, built by our team of experienced web development team at incredibly reasonable prices.

Our feature list includes everything an author will need to create and maintain a powerful presence on the web.  Our sites work for web novices and experienced users.  Your individual author or book site will be designed to fit the nature of your work, and will reflect your values and design input.  And you will find it easy to maintain and add to your site over time – so you can truly own your own “home” page on the Internet.

We take a streamlined, smart approach to every project and believe that the best work is done efficiently and economically – stay simple, and deploy quickly.

Our pricing reflects our dedication to simplicity without sacrificing quality, flair and intelligence.  And every site comes with valuable support: a simple to use administrative interface, technical assistance for non-technical people, even free hosting for the first year of service.

If you are interested in learning more contact us right away. We’ll send you a brochure, show you some of our work, and make it easy for you to make your presence felt on the web.

Distribution Basics

The latest news regarding the PGW component of the larger AMS bankruptcy is promising, at least for the PGW clients. Perseus will purchase Avalon, the largest PGW client, and has enlisted Charlie Winton, Avalon’s principal (and also the founder of PGW), to come on board. Perseus then reportedly made a very favorable offer to the remaining PGW client publishers - proposing to take over their contracts and in a relatively short period of time, make good on something like 70% of the money owed to them by the bankrupt PGW.

This is a far better outcome than any of the publishers could possibly expect from PGW either in liquidation or any reorganized version of it, so it would seem likely that most, if not all of the PGW publishers will make the move to what will now be a powerhouse distributor in Perseus (which already had absorbed CDS and Consortium).

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This seems as good a time as any to talk about book distribution, how how it works, and will work in the future, and what publishers and even authors should know about the dynamics of working their way through the supply chain to market and sell their books to readers.

Over the past several years, the overall landscape of the book business has changed considerably. There are still many, many places to buy books in the United States and buying books online has become big business (Amazon alone now represents as much as 10% of total books sold), the number of entities buying books for resale has declined. Something like 90% of all books sold by an average book publisher will go to fewer than 10 customers - including wholesalers!

Faced with hundreds or even thousands of book publishers, retailers and wholesalers rely on distributors to help them rationalize their supply chain. It’s more or less impossible to sell books to Barnes & Noble, Borders, Books-a-Million or Costco without a distributor, and while anyone can sell to Amazon, it’s alot easier utilizing the services of a professional book distributor.

And while there are still a fair number of distributors in business today, along with larger publishers and university presses that offer distribution services to smaller client publishers, recent bankruptcies and purchases have clearly narrowed the field.

With a more concentrated retail marketplace, distributors are rationalizing their business models, some are specializing in certain types of books or publishers, while others are setting more stringent size requirements for publishers they will work with. Since it has become relatively cheap and easy to publish books, distribution is now much more of a buyer’s market, as there are simply so many books and so many new publishers. It has clearly become more difficult for a new publisher to find a distributor, even as distributors compete amongst themselves to sign up the relatively few publishers whose sales volume or sales profiles makes them highly attractive as clients.

Publishers of different sizes and profiles have very different choices available to them. Generally, the size of the publisher dictates the distribution models available - smaller publishers have fewer options, the largest publishers have the greatest array of models to choose from.

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In our next post, we will cover the different distribution options available to publishers of varying sizes. One note for all publishers who currently are distributed by another company - no matter the size of the distributor, you should file a UCC-1 form memorializing your ownership of inventory consigned to your distributor with the Secretary of the State within which your books are warehoused. If you have not done this yet, do it immediately! If you need specific advice about distribution contact Booktrix - we can help.

New Business Models for Authors and Publishers

We have spent a lot of time working on new publishing models over a long period of time. In fact we can take some credit for understanding that new business models for publishing have been made possible by the changes in the retail landscape and the rise of popular tools for book production. Today it is cheaper than ever to create and publish a book – and harder than ever to sell one. But in these times of change and dislocation, new opportunities arise. The definition of publishing (“to make public”) has not changed – but the relationships between publisher, author and markets can definitely be changed now, and for the most part, for the better. If you are an author or a publisher, or a business that creates or owns content, and you would like to explore different ways to publish, market, and distribute, please contact us.

Book production and printing - all shapes and sizes

We have over thirty years of experience in production and print management.  We have on tap a long list of experienced book designers, cover artists, typesetters, copy editors, proofreaders, indexers, as well as developmental editors, line editors, and writers.  We can help you with any and all aspects of the book production process, from inception to production of files for printing or ebook conversion.  We’ve produced just about every type of book, including four color and high end photography books, and are happy to be engaged at whatever level makes sense for your needs.  We are experienced in digital short run and print on demand environments, can produce galleys, and can handle production management and print buying if you need those services also.

And our experience and abilities are not limited to books – we can assist with catalog production, sell sheets, newsletters (print and online) and any other graphic needs you have.

Writing, books and the future of reading - Part 1 of a long essay

Human culture today is adapting and re-adapting to the complicated changes engendered by the utter connectedness wrought mainly by the internet and the world wide web in the 21^st century.

Where we are today is the summation of everything that has gone before us. Human culture is a complex, recursive machinery, an ecology as complex as that of the natural world (and yes, it is equally possible that we will destroy our culture even as we are so close to having destroyed our planet!)

We are so enmeshed within our immediate reality we often forget how short a time we humans have been writing, shorter still since we invented the book as the near perfect mechanism for containerization and transmission of knowledge between human beings. The year 1455 marks the beginning of the Era of the Printed Book. We have no such date for the inauguration for the Era of the Electronic Book – yet – but it is certainly coming soon.

The massive explosion of shared knowledge and experience that began with the distribution of printed books to ever increasing numbers of people has accelerated as technology itself has driven us forward (often without regard to downstream costs such as the destruction of natural forests for the creation of paper, pollution of our rivers by poisonous ink residues, the terrible ecological cost of papermaking itself, as well as the increasingly painful environmental costs of transportation as books are shipped to market and back in the commodity economy).

Clearly, the establishment of a poplar book culture and the transmission of knowledge and experience, the growth and expansion of writing based culture of ideas, has always been inevitably entwined with commerce and technology. Books are a great and powerful force for democracy, ideas and knowledge (thus they are always banned or controlled by dictators, who are always threatened by the free flow of ideas through the written word).

At the same time, books have always been created and sold according to commercial principles, thus in most of the world today, capitalism and mass consumer culture. Books are commodities after all, differing from shoes, no doubt, by their essential nature and deeper values, but subject nonetheless to all the economic forces, good and bad, that affect commerce and culture in an essentially one dimensional economic model.

(By this I do not indict only capitalism – neither does socialism nor any other existing economic model take into account the true economic underpinnings of our society, i.e. the costs of natural resources and their depletion).

So we experience a constant contradiction of the market society. Today more books are published annually than ever before, yet we see suddenly and perhaps not coincidentally, that overall book sales are either flat or declining. In the US and in other developed economies new patterns of book sales and distribution are emerging – we live in the era of the blockbuster at the head of the chart of sales followed by a very short “body” of books that sell less well and then an extremely “long tail” of millions of book titles that sell each in tiny quantities but in the aggregate in very large numbers — see Chris Anderson’s new book and website “The Long Tail” for a clear and explicit explanation of this phenomenon.

As with all cultural products (music CDs, film and video DVDs, video games, etc.) traditional real world retail book markets have narrowed choices in the blockbuster economy, shortening the window of opportunity available for a newly published book to be seen on shelves, in competition with thousands of other book titles all seeking the limited mindshare of the busy consumer.

This gives rise to several underlying questions:

• Who chooses what we are allowed or enabled to read?
• What processes affect availability of books and ideas?
• Is the commercial book business successful in filtering out the “bad” and promoting the “best” of writing?
• Similarly, how do economics that underpin the scholarly and supposedly noncommercial publishing sector affect their processes?
• (and there are many who question even more basically the hierarchical notion of ideas that is inherent in almost all contemporary literary culture).

Meanwhile, the rise of the internet and the world wide web has already begun to significantly alter the way ideas are transmitted and shared in our modern society. For traditionally printed books, the internet creates the opportunity for the millions of books, commercial and otherwise, that lie within the “long tail” to become available (although this effect plainly has even greater power for digital products where the cost of production is powerfully reduced – but more on that later). We have Amazon for new books, ABEbooks, Alibris and Ebay for used books.

Almost no book cannot be found online. For a reader, there has been no better time to search for and find books than today - although it is still clear that this abundance benefits only those with tools to search for them and a pre-existing knowledge of books and literature – for most readers this “over” abundance of books may in fact mean that readers actually recognize even fewer “real” choices in the marketplace of books. And while the market for books will continue to evolve and change (not always in ways we will like or enjoy or feel is good for writing, writers and readers), often based on market forces we may not be able to envision, it is in digital technology that we have seen and will continue to see the greatest impact on our culture and society.

Web Marketing - how to succeed in publishing

The Web – massive and noisy as it is – makes it possible for authors and publishers to reach audiences directly.  Done well this brings incredible long term value to what you do.  Yes, it is sometimes very time consuming, and it does require a great deal of ongoing commitment, but if you want to sell books (or any other form of published content), it is incredibly gratifying and can be extremely profitable to have real relationships with your readers.

There is so much we can do to help you build these relationships.  Direct marketing is like learning how to do a new sport.  You’ve played baseball all your life- now you need to learn to play some tennis.  Different muscles, different tools, different playing field, but once you’ve learned the basics and had some time to practice, it will make a lot of sense.  And you will have some fun too.

AMS, PGW and Chapter 11

We’re following this one closely.  We have lots of friends involved.  And unfortunately, a great deal of personal experience in distributor and book wholesaling bankruptcies.

Is AMS the largest Chapter 11 filing in book industry history?

Blogging, Podcasting, Online Communities

You’ve certainly heard of blogging, and you likely have read some of the hundreds of thousands of them that exist now. For authors and publishers, blogs can be powerful tools – they can be integrated into your work in many valuable ways. Similarly, podcasts and online video can be incredibly useful ways to present your books and authors to audiences. Creating communities and building online relationships through the use of “new media” tools like these are an integral part of what we can do to help you expand your ability to communicate with readers – and for them to communicate with you.

And don’t forget that this can be a lot of fun!

Marketing, PR and Advertising - on the Web

E-commerce and Selling Direct to Consumers

If you are a publisher or author, the web enables you to have a direct relationship with your readers.  We can help you learn how to take advantage of this opportunity.  Do not delay!  Start now.  The sooner you begin, the faster you will learn, and the more books you will sell.
BookTrix can provide publishers and authors with a complete array of programs, from market analysis and product
review to creative marketing including flash animation (VidLit), direct-to-consumer campaigns, targeted advertising
(that really works), email marketing, search engine marketing and optimization, web site design and implementation,
email list management, blog building, online book tours and author appearance, e-commerce and store buildouts and
management, sales review toolsets, and much more.

Booktrix > Every Trick in the Book

E-commerce and Direct Selling on the Web

Independent publishers and authors who want to publish their own books can no longer rely solely upon booksellers or other retailers (or libraries) to reach their ultimate consumers. There are too few retailers, too few shelf spaces available, and too much competition for readers’ attention. Going directly to consumers to sell books is something that all publishers today must learn how to do. It’s not easy to be both a publisher and a retailer, but the internet makes it much easier to accomplish. Today, there are great tools available for book marketers, and we can help you build your presence on the web so you can become an effective seller of books and related products. Remember - with great content you will always find an audience - if you work at it intelligently and effectively.

Selling directly to consumers

Independent publishers and authors who want to publish their own books can no longer rely solely upon booksellers or other retailers (or libraries) to reach their ultimate consumers. There are too few retailers, too few shelf spaces available, and too much competition for readers’ attention. Going directly to consumers to sell books is something that all publishers today must learn how to do. It’s not easy to be both a publisher and a retailer, but the internet makes it much easier to accomplish. Today, there are great tools available for book marketers, and we can help you build your presence on the web so you can become an effective seller of books and related products. Remember - with great content you will always find an audience - if you work at it intelligently and effectively.

Distribution