Tag Archives: publishing

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Electronic Arts invites the pirates to tea

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graffiti pirateIn amongst this week’s headlines of ludicrously disproportionate damages being awarded to the RIAA and assorted governments (including my own) clamouring loudly for the privilege of tucking themselves into the moth-eaten and holey pockets of Hollywood, we find a ray of pragmatic sanity: the CEO of computer games publisher Electronic Arts is openly asking software pirates to redistribute their titles. Why? Because they’ve worked out that it’s easier to make money selling stuff within the framework of a game than it is to sell a game itself.

EA thinks this is the secret to stopping—or at least curbing—piracy: games should be services, not products. Or at least products that should be selling other products. We already knew that EA would like to turn Tiger Woods into a subscription-based product, and Sims 3 is a game that wants you to constantly be creating, downloading, and buying new virtual items. The old business model was selling expansion packs, but that was too complicated: why not cut out the retailers and turn the game into its own store to sell the products?

“I’m a longtime believer that we’re moving to selling services that are disc-enabled as opposed to packages that have bolt-ons…. So the point I’m making is, yes I think that’s the answer [to piracy].” Riccitiello told IndustryGamers. “And here’s the trick: it’s not the answer because this foils a pirate, but it’s the answer because it makes the service so valuable that in comparison the packaged good is not. So you can only deliver these added services to a consumer you recognize and know… So I think the truth is we’ve out-serviced the pirate.”

It’s interesting to see a big games vendor like EA waking up to ideas that industry pundits have been suggesting for years, and I expect we’ll see some of the others abandon their King Canute impersonations when they realise that it works. Going forward, I expect that within a few years it’ll be virtually unheard of to “buy a game”; instead, we’ll subscribe to them, or spend time in them socially much the way we do with Facebook now.

That said, I suspect it’s too late for the major music labels to change course given the huge amount of money they’ve pissed away on trying to defend their old business models from change, but I struggle to sympathise; after decades of them screwing consumers and artists alike, I’m rather enjoying seeing the boot on the other foot. [image by Robyn Gallagher]

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Publishing 101

The would-be writers among you might find the following two items of interest, dealing as they do with the less glamorous aspects of fiction publishing. First up, John Scalzi explains why writers in their thirties are still described as being “new”, even though they’re kind of old by comparison to musicians and actors at similar career points:

1. Writing an entire novel is something most people have to work up to. Because you know what? Writing sixty to one hundred thousand words of fiction is not something most people cannonball through, even if they assure you, with the appropriate amount of false modesty, that they’re really better at long-form fiction. Maybe they are, but they still had a long walk to get there.  I’m better at long-form and it took me until I was 28 before I could do it. Meanwhile I’d been writing short for years up to that point, in the form of reviews and columns and humor pieces and (yes) occasional attempts at short fiction that I mostly abandoned after a page or two. Lots of people in their teens and early 20s start novels; rather fewer finish them.

Elsewhere, Andrew Wheeler takes a more business-orientated look at things as he runs through the essentials of book marketing, starting with something called “channel mix”:

It’s deeply wonky, I know, but at the core of the business of selling books is knowing where and to whom you’re going to sell. A “channel” is a way to sell books, and there are more of them than you think.

It’s easy to get blindered in the book world, and to assume that the big chain stores are the only way books get to readers. It’s more true for fiction than for non-fiction, but there are still more options than you think.

[…]

If you’re an author, your publisher will have a marketer thinking about these channels (or the subset of them that publisher has an effective salesforce to reach), and — if you’re lucky — your editor will also think about this as well. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore it; the author is always the best expert on her book, so you can help by suggesting possibilities.

(Authors often have unrealistic hopes, which you should keep in mind. It’s not always the author’s fault — some authors are monomaniacs who think their book on cheesemaking in Scandinavia will be a major Oprah pick, but most are just optimistic people who think that the Society for Shadetree Management would really, really like a new middle-grade novel about Becky Balsam, Forest Ranger if they only took a look at it. So be careful about pushing your suggestions too forcefully. Make suggestions, but also listen closely to what the people at your publisher tell you.)

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Google grenades the ebook punchbowl

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I dare say that if you’ve an interest in publishing as an industry, you’ve already heard that Google has announced its own ebook store will open late this year. A summary from Tomorrow’s Trends:

Google stated that it will allow publishers to set eBook prices.  The cost of the eBook will probably be higher than Amazon’s current eBook prices.

This will certainly start a format war.  Google does not have a dedicated eBook reader and I do not see them getting into the eBook hardware game.  This will push companies to create eBook readers that will connect to Google’s new store. Certainly Amazon is ahead of everyone in regards to ease of use and the ability to download eBooks via a wireless connection.  Hopefully this will give all of us multiple choices on purchasing eBooks.

Credit where it’s due, the Big G knows the value of biding its time for the right moment. This is the game-changing announcement that I’ve been expecting for the last nine months, the potential trigger for an explosive growth phase in ebook hardware and distribution. An analogy to digital music seems appropriate: the Kindle and the Sony Reader are your iPod equivalents, tied to specific content-buying channels and/or file formats to keep the profits as close to their makers (and their partners) as possible. Now the ubiquitous Google is getting in on the game of selling the content, savvy tech firms will be watching closely to see which file format wins the popularity war, before starting to churn out affordable generic readers that can display them without restriction.

Now, as discussed before, ebooks are probably never going to be as big a deal as downloadable music has become (though one can dream, right?), but I’m confident that this will be the tipping point at which another content market suddenly leaps into the digital domain. Hopefully by Christmas time this year I’ll be able to get a decent eInk device that doesn’t lock me in to one content provider, just like my charmingly generic media player…

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Amateur hour is over – Amazon becomes a publisher

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This year is just burgeoning with disruptive change for the publishing industry, and here’s the latest cat among the pigeons: Amazon have decided that they can do more than just distribute books. They’re going to start republishing them as well.

Even great books can be overlooked. And authors with great potential often struggle to connect with the larger audience they deserve to reach. We’re fortunate at Amazon.com to have customers who know a good book when they read one, so we’ve introduced AmazonEncore to help connect authors and their books with more readers.

AmazonEncore is a new program whereby Amazon will use information such as customer reviews on Amazon.com to identify exceptional, overlooked books and authors with more potential than their sales may indicate. Amazon will then partner with the authors to re-introduce their books to readers through marketing support and distribution into multiple channels and formats, such as the Amazon.com Books Store, Amazon Kindle Store, Audible.com, and national and independent bookstores via third-party wholesalers.

How successful this will turn out to be, I have no idea. Knowing how prevalent spurious reviews can be on Amazon – particularly on self-published works of dubious merit – I’m curious to discover what sort of vetting process they’ll go through before actually deciding to push a title out of obscurity and into the spotlight. Perhaps they’ll give Harriet Klausner the editorial hotseat…

[Via George Walkley, marketing and digital strategist for Little, Brown Books here in the UK.]

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Discounts and risk in the ebooks market

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Remember that post from Evan Schnittman a few weeks back – the one titled “Why ebooks must fail”? Well, he promised to start discussing potentially workable models for the ebooks business, and that’s exactly what he’s now doing.

The first follow-up is titled “Discounts Must Align to Risks”; it looks at the current deep-discounting procedures that prevail in the dead-tree books business as it stands (which share risk between publishers and retailers), and presents three possible ways for a similar system to be applied to the otherwise intangible ebook:

The following ideas, if massaged and improved on by enough smart people, may help evolve trade ebook selling into a practice that wisely shares the risk and provides stimulus and margins for all involved. These models are not new – they are culled from today’s trade retail models. With that in mind, here are three discount models for discussion.

The first is called On Consignment, and it would operate exactly as it does today, except with shorter, perhaps dramatically shorter, discounts. Discounts should align to risk and there is very little risk being shared in this model.

The second model is called Advance Purchase (non-Returnable). Rather than rely on the timing of sell-through at the reseller, publishers are paid for ebook sales in advance. So, resellers that wish to carry an ebook of a publisher can order it as they currently do, or they can purchase the number of “sales” they believe they would make in a given period of time, and pay for this upfront at a greater discount. For this model, a retailer should receive discounts similar to those given on non-refundable sales in print.

The third model is called Refund for Credit (Returnable). Essentially it is a “returns” model for the ebook market. It’s designed to allow retailers to take risks on a larger pool of titles, as they can receive credit by “returning” some of the advance “sales.” This model helps retailers get a better discount for a title than they would if they order On Consignment, but less than the Advance Purchase model. It also helps publishers, as there would be greater incentive to pre-pay for sales for a wider variety of titles, enhancing the cash flow. Again, this model should employ discounts similar to those available for returnable sales in print.

These ideas are probably old hat to industry insiders, but for the rest of us peering in through the shop window it’s an interesting insight into the way the industry works, and the ways it might adapt to change in the near future.

Schittman makes the point that his blogging is not “sanctioned by, endorsed by, or even remotely associated with” his employers at OUP, but one wonders how many people on the inside – of the OUP, and publishing in general – are keen for this discussion to be dragged into the open, and how many would rather sit on the lid of Pandora’s box.