Book-A-Month Publisher
NPR's All Things Considered had a piece the other night on Jonathan Karp, former EIC at Random House and now publisher and EIC of Twelve, a publisher that produces one new book a month. His impetus was interesting:
A welcome relief? Perhaps. It's important for businesses to realize what they are doing and to make efforts to find "products" that will appeal to customers, and publishing is no different from any other industry. However, let's look a bit deeper. On one hand, their strategy is generally a "me too" approach, in which they all look about for what seems to be selling and then try jumping on that bandwagon. The mathematical result amplifies each accidental direction, making the entire industry lurch this way and that without more thoroughly thinking through what it is doing. It's the old problem, seen in strategic planning circles, of trying to plot company direction by looking at history. Knowing what has sold in the past has some value, but that only tells you where you've been. Real breakthroughs come from figuring out where you should go. When you look only at sales histories, you're driving forward while looking only in the rear-view mirror - an old analogy, but apt.
Will Twelve find a different approach? It's hard to say. Karp comes out of the established way of doing business, and his first two books in the new venture were both hits - and came from Christopher Buckley and Christopher Hitchens, both name authors. Yes, he can marshall resources behind one book instead of multiple ones, but I think that may push him in the direction of largely looking for editorial safe bets. A large publisher can have a surprise hit come out partly because of the industry's traditional model (which corporations have been turning in a detrimental direction, I think): the hits subsidize all the other books. When you have only 12 titles a year, you'd better be making a lot of good choices.
At the same time, Karp (hopefully) has avoided the biggest problem with corporate publishing: a priori profit goals that may not relate to what the business might organically support. The large companies that bought publishers decided that the roughly 5 percent profit margins were due to the business ineptitude of the families that once controlled the houses. Certainly some of the practices that came out of that era - the ability of sellers to return books six to even 12 months after they purchased them - make it difficult to predictably do business. But I suspect there is also something inherent in the nature of selling books that keeps them from being quite the cash cows CEOs would like to order.
"What I really wanted to do with this imprint was to make a promise to every writer we publish that we would do everything in our power to make his or her book a best seller," Karp explains.In other words, he wanted to get out of the "legalized gambling" business model of publishing gazillions of books and hoping that some number of them would be a hit, and then get behind those.
A welcome relief? Perhaps. It's important for businesses to realize what they are doing and to make efforts to find "products" that will appeal to customers, and publishing is no different from any other industry. However, let's look a bit deeper. On one hand, their strategy is generally a "me too" approach, in which they all look about for what seems to be selling and then try jumping on that bandwagon. The mathematical result amplifies each accidental direction, making the entire industry lurch this way and that without more thoroughly thinking through what it is doing. It's the old problem, seen in strategic planning circles, of trying to plot company direction by looking at history. Knowing what has sold in the past has some value, but that only tells you where you've been. Real breakthroughs come from figuring out where you should go. When you look only at sales histories, you're driving forward while looking only in the rear-view mirror - an old analogy, but apt.
Will Twelve find a different approach? It's hard to say. Karp comes out of the established way of doing business, and his first two books in the new venture were both hits - and came from Christopher Buckley and Christopher Hitchens, both name authors. Yes, he can marshall resources behind one book instead of multiple ones, but I think that may push him in the direction of largely looking for editorial safe bets. A large publisher can have a surprise hit come out partly because of the industry's traditional model (which corporations have been turning in a detrimental direction, I think): the hits subsidize all the other books. When you have only 12 titles a year, you'd better be making a lot of good choices.
At the same time, Karp (hopefully) has avoided the biggest problem with corporate publishing: a priori profit goals that may not relate to what the business might organically support. The large companies that bought publishers decided that the roughly 5 percent profit margins were due to the business ineptitude of the families that once controlled the houses. Certainly some of the practices that came out of that era - the ability of sellers to return books six to even 12 months after they purchased them - make it difficult to predictably do business. But I suspect there is also something inherent in the nature of selling books that keeps them from being quite the cash cows CEOs would like to order.
Labels: books, publishing
posted by Erik Sherman | 5:03 AM
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