Post-pandemic strategies? Fix the supply chain of books!

Two seemingly separate pieces of news came in this morning: The International Pulishers Association released a survey on “Covid-19’s impact on global publishing“, based on a broad roundcall among their members worldwide. And perhaps surprisingly to many observers, the first challenge that the IPA study adressed was NOT bookshop closures due to lockdown – but an article on how “Supply Chain Disruption Leads to Ecosystem Stress“!

Books in a box with a flowerpot ready for delivery

Books in a box with a flowerpot ready for delivery (Photo: Ruediger Wischenbart)

Incidentally, German trade media like Börsenblatt and buchreport reported yesterday that one of the leading scientific publishers, Springer Nature, ditches their German logistics partner KNV Zeitfracht, and switches across the border to the Dutch “Centraal Boekhuis” (CB),  a collaborative initiative owned by some 800 Dutch publishing stakeholders, with a history going back 150 years, and active in both the book and – since a few years – in the health sector.

The IPA report summarized: “Publishers operate in a complex ecosystem with
printers, logistics providers, distributors, and retailers, meaning the supply-chain effects of COVID-19 control measures caused significant supply disruption.

KNV Zeitfracht had indeed drawn criticism recently for underperforming in the strained times of Covid-19 challenges.

But there is a much deeper, and more fundamental underlying issue which gained wider visibility only now.

Under pandemic conditions, with consumers migrating to online and digital purchases, especially smaller independent bookstores suddenly had to rely dramatically on their online capacities for their survival. But many discovered not just limitations in their own digital setup. The challenges were multiple:

  • Ordering books from wholesalers became fragile;
  • Catalogues of titles available for ordering by their clients had many blind spots;
  • Delayed delivery to the costumers required apologies;
  • Wholesalers like KNV in Germany suddenly announced plans to cut down on their traditional service of daily delivery, to just bringing orders to stores only twice a week.

To give just one example from my own customer experience: When I ordered, as a gift to the daughter of friends, a hardcover copy of the English original of the new Stephenie Meyer book “Midnight Sun” – certainly not an exotic title -, the online order was confirmed by my favorite indie bookstore with a note of caution that they couldn’t give me a precise date for delivery, due to supply chain issues.

In return, for a publishing giant like Springer Nature, their market and customer base are global. The Dutch Centraal Boekhuis, Springer Nature said, will take care of all their distribution worldwide. National services alone are simply not good enough anymore.

All these highlighted shortcomings are not only an involontary PR campaign to the advantage of Amazon.com, wich hosts a multilingual, ever expanding catalog of available titles, ready to be served to consumers around the world.

It much more highlights the fault lines of what will shake up the foundations of the book business, in getting their post-pandemic strategies right.

Music or books? Both! Spotify goes audiobooks

Things tend to change quickly these days. In August, publishers across Sweden had a new, transformative customer knocking at their doors – Amazon.

The only surprise was, why that had happened not much earlier. For many years, Amazon had been expected to go into the Swedish online retail market with a dedicated Swedish website, which by now is live.

A few months later, another new entrant is calling, an originally Swedish, now global service for music and podcasts. “Spotify has entered the book industry’s battle for audiobook listeners”, in the word’s of the leading local publishing trade magazine, SVB.

The Spotify announcement is probably as big as the earlier news from Amazon, and not just for Sweden. In these times of profound transformation of everything throughout our societies, the Spotify – audiobook move means simply that an outsider is coming in the ambition to re-invent the one segment where the traditional book business has been growing in recent years, audiobooks.

And Sweden is a very particular market in that regard. It has been pioneering ebooks and audiobooks early on, by making these things different than in other countries. Ebooks were initially an almost exclusive service from libraries. You did not buy an ebook in Sweden, but rented it from your local library.

This opened the path for subscriptions. You don’t need to own that new crime novel, or classic, or educational title. Accessing it, for a modest monthly fee, was good enough.

While in other parts of the world, book people insisted religiously that subscriptions would never work with readers, the Swedish start-up Storytel created  – and in the meantime expanded internatonally – just this, a thriving subscription service for et first ebooks, and then audiobooks. Storyel was one powerful driver, and innovator in the good old book trade.

But the upside-down does not stop there. Spotify, the music company, promises to re-invent the very format of books that you can listen to: “‘We talk about trying to develop the story in different ways, and are quite unlimited in the idea of what it could be’, says Johan Seidefors, Nordic content manager at Spotify, when he is asked if Spotify makes audio books”, SVB reports today, and Seidefors adds that Spotify “will work to make room for new formats.” There you go publishers.

Of course this will bring up many tricky questions, starting with how authors’ compensation will be handled by Spotify, which is challenged regularly for their royalty model from those musicians who are not topping the charts.

And we can, from our own research, clearly predict also that marketing digital works, be they ebooks or, even more so, audiobooks, and again notably those consumed through a streaming or subscription function hugely differently from traditional books. See numbers and charts in our two brand new Digital Consumer Book Barometer studies on German language countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland), and on Brazil.

We will keep monitoring these developments – so stay tuned, and subscribe to our newsletter, and follow us on Twitter @wischenbart and @rebootbooks .

NEW: The Virus and the Books  A Special from the Digital Consumer Books Barometer!

How did the Covid-19 sanitary crisis and the resulting lockdown impact on the ebooks and audiobooks consumption? Measuring transformative change, and lessons to learn for marketing digital consumer books:

  • Flat subsription models on the rise;
  • Ebooks successful beyond genre fiction;
  • Smart and highly targeted PR and marketing effective in gaining new consumer groups.

Free download from www.global-ebook.com – a Bookwire Insights report!

More on digital sales analysis in the  Digital Consumer Book Barometer is a deep dive into today’s ebook and digital audio sales in Canada, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and English Imports:

  • 3 years of sales data history;
  • Sales by price segment and country comparisons;
  • Comparisons by units and revenue;
  • Lifecycle of top selling titles;
  • Sales by genre.

Barometer for free download at www.global-ebook.com

Sponsored by

 

Netflix’ Kelly Luegenbiehl at the Global 50 CEO Talk 2019 in Frankfurt

Kelly Luegenbiehl, Netflix’ VP International Originals, will be featured at this year’s Global 50 CEO Talk at the Frankfurer Buchmesse on Wednesday, 16 October 2019, from 2:00 pm to 3:00 pm in the Frankfurt Pavilion. The Global 50 CEO Talk will be presented by Livres Hebdo (France), with Bookdao (China), buchreport (Germany), PublishNews (Brazil), Publishers Weekly (USA), and the Frankfurter Buchmesse Business Club, featuring the Global 50 Ranking of the International Publishing Industry 2019.

Kelly Luegenbiehl, Netflix, speaker at the Global 50 CEO Talk at Frankfurter Buchmesse 2019

Kelly Luegenbiehl will be interviewed for 60 minutes by the editors of the trade publications on Netflix’ current broad interest in original international stories and book rights for its productions and programming, the experience of working with highly diverse local stories for global audiences, as well as Netflix’ experience of working with the book, publishing and rights communities worldwide. The event will be chaired by Rüdiger Wischenbart.

Full press release here.

The Digital Consumer Book Barometer 2019, a pioneering survey of international e-book and audiobook market trends.

The Digital Consumer Book Barometer 2019 explores sales trends in e-books and audiobooks in Canada, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, and Spain as well as foreign language imports. Based on real sales data provided by leading distributors, it monitors and analyzes the impact of key parameters like season, price points or genre category in both units (volume) and revenue (value).

The Barometer 2019 can be downloaded free of charge here, and at its sponsors.

With its innovative and in-depth mapping approach, the Barometer allows authors, publishers and retailers to optimize their catalog strategies as well as finetune their marketing approach.

Audiences increasingly make their choices of content purchases by picking rather the stories that they are interested in, and not by function of format, like a printed book or e-book or audiobook.

This game-changing shift in consumer preferences is reflected in the report title “Digital Consumer Book Barometer”, to highlight the format-agnostic methodology of the Barometer survey.

The Barometer 2019 builds on experiences of the Global eBook series (since 2011) and the premiere European e-Book Barometer of 2018 by Rüdiger Wischenbart Content and Consulting, who also initiated the new report.

The Barometer 2019 is a broad and inclusive collaborative effort of book distributors, notably its sponsors Bookwire, DeMarque, Libranda and the International Publishing Distribution Association (IPDA), together with additional data providing partners CB (formerly Centraal Boekhuis), Ingram Content Group and Readbox.

Ebooks are different! We better re-think (and measure) digital consumer books altogether.

For gaining a more realistic understanding of digital markets, creators and consumers, new instruments are needed to measure and structure sales. And we deserve some novel ideas to grasp how ebooks, self-publishing, audio, streaming and ‘Studio’ platforms relate and compete:

  • The new “European eBook Barometer” is a unique collaborative effort for sharing deep sales data and analysis for Germany, Italy The Netherlands and Spain. Check a free download here;
  • The wide strategic panorama of our White Paper, “eBook 2018: Phase 02here makes sense of how multiple formats, competing business models and distribution channels, and entirely new players struggle with the new preferences of the consumers.

Digital consumer books multiply their appearances, dissemination channels and business models. The eBook barometer and the strategy White Paper Phase 02 provide orientation in the digital market environment.

Why I Am Deeply Concerned: About today’s Vote of the European Parliament on New Copyright Legislation

I thought at first to be ambivalent with regard to today’s vote of the European Parliament to pass new – and highly disputed – legislation on copyright. But the more I re-cap, the more certain I am:

Hardly any author – or creator – will earn an extra dime from a future “ancillary copyright” (‘Leistungsschutzrecht in German, where that concept originated from), given the typical author contracts with publishers; and second, as importantly, it will create yet another big burden, and risk factor, to any smaller, or non-profit, web content platform, which hosts “significant” amounts of content that they necessarily will want to “promote” – which is the new formula in the proposal that has been approved today by the European Parliament.

So the debate about fundamental rules of conduct in the digital sphere became, more than ever before, a game limited to the ‘big boys’, like big traditional media, big Internet platforms, and big politics.

The rest of us may hope for a few softening amendments between now and the final vote in January 2019. Yet we will be expected to stay still, and wait for such benevolent gestures from behind the sidelines.

Charming readers – by juggling with numbers. Invitation to a wild ride for publishers.

I peak over the shoulder of a well experienced trade publisher – she, or he, may work in a mid-sized imprint of a major group, or in some independent or even a boutique house -, with a few screens at the desk, a pile of recent charts and market reports to the left, and a smartphone to the right, the latter peeping regularly with some alerts that try to distract the attention of that publishing pilot from writing a paper on the house’s consumer strategy.

She understands that even traditional readers – in their majority urbanites, well educated, over 40 – have seen their ‘mobile time’ rising from modest 26 minutes in 2012 to over one hour in 2017. Among the new generation – we call them ‘Millennial Book Lovers’ -, that ‘mobile time’ has also doubled in the past five years, consuming now almost 3 hours per day.

How “mobile first” online activities compare between traditional readers and Millennials. However, Time spent on mobile doubled for both respectively over the past few years. Source and courtesy GlobalWebIndex 2018.

The reporters from publishing trade media have alarmed her this past January, that – in Germany –over 6 million book buyers, or customers, have disappeared over the same period of five years, bringing the maximum audience for publishers to 30 million, in a total population of around 80 million.

Our dear German colleague should sigh in relief, as the loss has been much bigger in Spain – with a market decline of over one third since the economic crisis of 2008. Only exports into Latin America held many houses afloat, accounting for up to half of all sales. And yet, the slide seems to continue, after some cautious news lately. Italy, too, has been shaken severely, but here, some solid bottom seems to have formed recently, if at the price of huge consolidation among trade publishers.

Even in Holland, traditionally a rock, or better: a dike to hold back the sea and its gushes, numbers show how the market for books has gone down continuously for ten years. More relevant for our publisher though are the shifts in sales channels and consumer habits. Books sold online have increased, and so have e-books for some years. A spectacular shift, happening at an amazing pace, comes from library loans, and from subscriptions.

We need to pay attention to many such trends at once, she says while pushing the smart phone a little further away, to escape the distraction.

We need to stick to our bread and butter, she argues now, to the rare books that hit the top of the charts, the well-established authors, well, we even need the copy-cat income, or other cheap thrills, to simply secure a continuous income. Experiments are not only risky and costly, at the worst, they may be a distraction altogether. And if the total number of copies sold may decline, some modest price raises can compensate the moderate loss easily. Book readers are affluent.

Flipping through the reports to her left, she feels comforted by that pattern of lower volume sales, compensated by increased turnover in countries as diverse as Germany, Great Britain or the Netherlands.

Oh, and a little more action in the children’s and adult department also never fails entirely, as the numbers show.

But woop. What is this? A Youtuber makes the number 1 bestseller – in fiction! In Germany! How is this possible? It is not even a real book, is it? The gamer needed a second author to help with the writing. A call to the market research agency confirms that they had intercepted a few early indicators on social media. But a number 1 in fiction? Oh, and the book seems to be out of stock, anyway. Well, not entirely. And where is it sold exactly? In bookstores? Amazon does not seem to be in the lead here. Really? How to find out? The Youtubers’ Facebook pages show not a single entry in a few months. No easy answers are available.

That Youtuber is a video person in the first place. But aren’t those videos really silly? Why on earth did they turn that into a book? Can we call on our bloggers, and what do our influencers say? We have started to talk to influencers, we did! But it turns out, they don’t know. Lately, we had read about video picking up on Social!

As the publisher turns around in a surprise move, I, thus far the invisible observer in the back, I get caught her gaze, as if I held a smoking gun in my fist.

In fact, I don’t. But I seize the opportunity of the moment to ask a question that is nagging me for some time: “What do you have, my dear publisher, in terms of content, of formatted stuff, of salable products, and as free goodies to draw attention, that you can feed into all those pipes and channels and platforms? How many bits and pieces can you sell for under 3 Euros or Dollars or Pound Sterling? How much audio do you have to make a little noise – and how much visuals that are fun to share? And how good are you at using that material, to generate customer leads, and learn, ideally in real time, what produces echoes, and what vaporizes? Oh, and what do you make of insights like ‘audio books’ are consumed by more men than women, while e-books are a women readers’ domain? And how much deeper are you prepared to go, when it comes to understanding your growing number of target audiences?” Well, these were more questions than only one, I admit.

What, for instance, is a publisher’s pitch to an airline, for licensing their new audio book titles for in-flight streaming? And what is the deal in compensation that they want to propose to the authors, and their agents?

Did you just say, Madam or Sir, that following so many tracks at once, all the time, is too challenging, too costly, too chaotic? That you cannot afford to burn even more money with interns doing time on Facebook, that in the end never sell books in any tangible ways, anyway?

Your competitors like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Audible will fill the gap willingly.

That brings me to my other question to the publisher: Who on your staff and around your own house report back, in some structured way, on what they read, or how their kids operate their smartphones. You understand what I mean. You have hired all those curious minds and eyes, who are all doing ‘social’ every day, I their leisure time! Some of them might feel flattered if they would be asked for their experience. Did you ask them already?

I admit, this will never be an orderly process, at least for some time. But right now, my inkling is that a lot of truly critical information sits in drawers and on hard disks, underused, if noticed at all.

We see, day by day, how publishing is getting ever more segmented. From formerly three distinct sectors, trade or consumer versus educational versus professional or academic, we have moved into an ever-thinner slicing of the cake that used to be served in the business of books.

Today, the top tier of blockbuster bestsellers is increasingly governed by agents. On the other end of the scale, in trade, self-publishing has formed an expanding segment, that increasingly follows its own paths to consumers. Here the new big entrants come into play. All around, you can find highly integrated ecosystems, not just Amazon, but platforms turning into cross-media aggregators like Wattpad Studios. They frame all the multiple conversations of people. To make it worse, those ecosystems are currently splitting up and specializing: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp. You can bet that while you watch, more are to emerge soon.

Where, and how, can you find your room to breathe, and operate, and bond with your customers, the readers!

To charm the consumers and readers in those competitive economies of attention, it will not be good enough to go simply after the familiar faces, that are “traditional readers and book buyers”. You will not build your community of readers in the lazy thought of harvesting just the low hanging fruit.

Instead, a dramatic stretch will be required, to not loose on the core audiences, while having eyes and ears and minds wide open to identify, in the center of any publishing organization, what is going on out there.

In a new “the winner takes it all” competition, which has already extended into publishers’ traditionally territory, one must be alert to where the stories play, in which formats, how trusted knowledge can team up with the right points of access, and the convenience provided by some merchants of such content.

The old as much as the new business models will need to find hybrid ways of exploitation, centered not on the middle men, like publishers or retailers, but on the authors, and the consumers.

Playing with the numbers provides the single most important set of navigational tools in such an environment. But for (trade) publishers, it will often be rather small sets of data, and not the ‘Big Data’ that telecommunication operators, consumer goods businesses or the global platform creators can generate and analyze. Publishers’ comparative ‘small’ data will for some time be brought to life by people – by staff, in the organization, when it is organized in efficient ways.

Charming readers, on a basis of juggling with well-founded insights often forms a critical competitive advantage in turbulent landscapes. This is not a privilege of a few corporate giants.

Data have become a commodity. Reading those numbers is the challenging exercise. You and your teams can learn these skills. The findings can be turned into a competitive difference in deciding the outcome of the game you are in. Left and right, new and often much smaller initiatives show how it works. Indeed, it does work.

Footnote:

The collection of examples, hints and observations in this article draws particularly on data and insights from around a dozen of market research organizations and publishing professionals from across Europe, especially Nielsen BookScan (on United Kingdom, Spain and Italy), Centraal Boekhuis (The Netherlands) and Media Control (Germany), the Federation of European Publishers, IG Digital of Börsenverein (Germany), as well as the GlobalWebIndex (reading and mobile), who presented them at the Publishers’ Forum on April 26 & 27, 2018, in Berlin.

Key parts of these presentations are available online at Publishers’ Forum.  The program of this event has been curated by us, in an appointment by The Publishers’ Forum GmbH, a Klopotek company.

Mapping translations of literary fiction across Europe: The Diversity Report 2016 brings data and analysis on how stories travel across borders.

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The Diversity Report 2016 discusses

  • By country data on major translation markets;
  • Which authors, publishers and genres shape the business of translation most strongly;
  • The role of public funding

Building on 10 years of research, the Diversity Report 2016 summarizes original insights for publishers, agents, authors, translators, policy makers and educators.

Free download at www.wischenbart.com/diversity.

 

A project of Verein für kulturelle Transfers / CulturalTransfers.org

 

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