Reboot Books > „How To Fix What Is Broken“. On increasing efficiency, ‚going direct‘ and better rights trading

In case you have missed the recent online debate at ReBoot Books on April 21st, find here below some key talking points from the discussions – and a 16 minute video excerpt from the panel „In search of the final consumer„.

As a registered member of ReBoot, you can even view the full three sessions in the ReBoot Box!

The day-to-day challenges under pandemic market conditions for a publishing company are adding up to a long list, said Planeta’s CEO Jesús Badenes in his opening statement at the ReBoot online debate on April 21, 2021.

The business has become more complex, with smaller average print runs and other titles gaining in popularity as book buyers‘ references changed. For the head of the largest publishing group in the Spanish language, the key to an efficient management response can be boiled down to a four-letter word: Data.

Having the right data at your finger tips allows to better manage the inventory, finding the right balance between increasing digital products, and using flexible print-on-demand solutions for physical books, which helps to lower returns and make ecommerce more customer friendly.

This allowed Gerd Robertz, CEO of German BOD – a provider of both PoD and of author & self-publishing solutions, and a sponsor of ReBoot – to follow up seemlessly. These same solutions are available not just to big corporations – Planeta’s turnover tops that of New York based Simon & Schuster, or French Editis group. Even small independent publishers or a self-published author can provide the same convenience in fast delivery, and harvest resulting data insights, to develop a strong and targetd marketing.

Publishers and retailers must „build a customer journey„, added Jason Spanos, Chief Revenue Officer at KNK, an internationally leading software provider to the book business, and a sponsor of ReBoot. During the pandemic, KNK particularly focused, with a newly established, dedicated team, on monitoring how quickly customer engagement and habits were changing. „We simulated meetings at libraries, or in coffeeshops, or now in their online social exchanges“ for learning to quickly adapt to new patterns of engagement.

Gaining data, organizing them within one company, or even sharing data more openly that what is common today triggered the subsequent lively debate between both speakers and experienced book professionals in the audience.

Today, said technologist Matt Turner, people interact digitally in order to then buy physical books – or opt for entertainment media instead of a book, like series or games in streaming TV.

Thus publishers must learn to better understand their own products and, as Anne Bergmann of the Federation of European Publishers added, explore the co-existence between sales and streaming services for e-books and digital audiobooks, in order to avoid mistakes that had done great harm to the music and the audiovisual services a decade ago.

Companies need to integrate workflows and data flows within their organization, and not just look at data gained through distributors and retailers, argued Brian O’Leary of the New York based industry think tank BISG.

How all this can be brought to fruition in the day-to-day company life was richly illustrated by Julie MacKay from the American subscription platform Scribd, Peta Nightingale from the British author services platform Bookouture, which had been acquired by Hachette, as well as Rafaela Pechansky of the Brazilian reading community TAG.

How well established in innovative forms to connect and network are seen in the trade of rights and licenses will be summarized in a separate blog post in a few days.

You can’t wait to access the full debates in video recordings – and join us also at the next live event on June 15, 2021, then you should become a full member of ReBoot. Registration is simple at https://rebootbooks.org/

It is all about the details! ReBoot’s workshop „Assessing the Damage“ identified winning and losing experiences in the international book business under the pandemic.

The season’s first workshop in the “ReBoot: Books, Business and Reading” on 25 Feb 2021 took off with promises of a wild ride between some countries and segments where the book trade significantly expanded, driven by an increase in reading, while other markets and segments of the industry had to confront loss and swings in consumer habits.

Print book sales in Germany, Austria and Swiss 2011 to 2020 (data by MediaControl, analysis Ruediger Wischenbart.

Print book sales in Germany, Austria and Switzerland 2011 to 2020 (data by MediaControl, analysis Ruediger Wischenbart Content and Consulting).

In Sweden, publishers recorded gains in revenue of 8.7% in 2020 – and a stunning surge of +21.5% in (mostly digital) units. For the first time digital overtook physical sales, and most of digital turnover was earned through audiobook subscriptions.

The USA saw 9% more copies shipped, while revenues stayed flat with +0.8%. The real drama however required to go into the details, as online sales surged by +43% in 2020, bringing print books up +8.2% in revenue, and ebooks +12.6%, while physical bookstores, drowned by -28.3%.

Germany (-2.3% in book revenue) and France (-4.5%), the two usually boringly robust European markets saw each an up and down along the Covdid-19 year, shaped by lookdowns and closures of bookstores, followed by bold interim recoveries, praised as proof for the resilience of the book sector. But again, a deep rift opened, setting apart the overall market performance from a much more challenged brick and mortar retail sector, where turnover dropped by -8.7% and unit sales even by -12%.

In Poland, unit sales were remarkably robust, but returns fell off quickly, as heavy discounting led to price wars. E-commerce moved mainstream even in countries with a particularly low digital penetration, like Greece.

Overall, the ReBoot workshop provided data and analysis on some 20 different territories all over Europe and the Americas, covering namely Argentina, Austria, Brazil, China, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Portugal, Sweden, Norway, Turkey, UK, US, and by industry segment fiction and nonfiction, as compared to children and young adult, as well as by formats and sales channels – notably print, ebooks, audiobooks, e-commerce, and subscriptions, as well as digital library lending.

In many countries publishers found themselves in a stronger position than retailers. Pandemic sales hit hardest the big chain bookstores, while giving some advantages to small independents and, of course, online (or omni channel) shops. Digital library loans soared. Backlist titles gained ground, while front-list – put aside a few blockbusters – saw their share in decline. And in many parts of the industry, new alliances and new fields for experimentation opened.

We are grateful to all participants, and in particular to those sharing their insights and learnings, including Andrew Albanese (US), Johanna Brinton (UK), Carlo Carrenho (BR/SE), Giacomo D’Angelo (IT), Sonia Draga (PL), Michalis Kalamaras (GR), Thad McIlroy (US), Gerson Ramos (BR), Enrico Turrin (BE/EU), and Burcu Ürsin (TR).

A complete video recording of the session, and presentations with rich data and detail, will be made available to all registered ReBoot members in the ReBoot Box.

Register now at www.rebootbooks.org to get your pass offering access to the Box and to the next Reboot events on April 21st and June 15.

We thank our sponsors Media Control and the Austrian Ministry of Culture for their crucial support.

Launching ReBoot 2021: The Repair Shop. Assessing the damage and fixing it!

ReBoot 2021: The Repair Shop. Assessing the damage, and fixing it.

After a widely received first season in fall 2020, with four Preparations Workshops and a 6-hour state of the industry debate on October 13 – attended by 200 experienced industry leaders from 28 countries in a unique mix of heads of worldwide corporations and small local innovators –, it is time to move on.

In the first half year of 2021, ReBoot proposes a systematic assessment of the damage, based on a rich survey of multiple data sources and intertwined with a structured set of workshops, with the goal of comparing lessons, experiences, and proposed solutions.

ReBoot will focus on how authors, publishers, suppliers, and retailers:

  • Operate in highly dynamic markets, defined by changing consumer habits and mounting competition for consumers’ attention and budgets;
  • Manage seamlessly multiple formats, business and distribution models, while new entrants from other media industries approach the same audiences;
  • Learn to directly target consumers, build sustainable communities around more granular audiences, and attract the best creative talent for books and readers.

The Repair workshop calendar foresees three units of 2-4 hours in the first half year of 2021:

  • 25 FEB 2021: Assessing the damage, and identifying the key lessons for looking forward;
  • 21 APR 2021: How to fix what is broken, and who can offer the best tools for that aim;
  • 15 JUN 2021: Navigating to new islands and sailing with the winds of change.

You can subscribe to all three ReBoot units plus get permanent access to the ReBoot Box, which contains rich and relevant documentation plus video recordings of all sessions, at a flat rate of € 149, or buy tickets for each unit separately at € 99.

We invite sponsors and partners to engage with ReBoot on a continuous basis, with customized cooperation packages starting at € 5,000 for 1HY2021.

Find out about all details, and register right away at www.rebootbooks.org.

Follow us for updates on Twitter at @rebootbooks

You can recap ReBoot in fall 2020 in 3 blogposts:

  • Workshops 01 and 02 (on consumer habits and on hybrid publishing here)
  • Workshops 03 and 04 (on supply chain and on bookselling here)
  • ReBoot: The Conference here.

For book fairs, 2020 was (not is) a watershed moment. On Reed Exhibitions pulling the plug at BookExpo, and related news. About the current re-writing of the publishing play book.

At BookExpo in May 2018, a CEO roundtable with, from left, the Association of American Publishers’ Maria A. Pallante, Macmillan’s John Sargent, Simon & Schuster’s Carolyn Reidy, and Penguin Random House’s Markus Dohle. Photo by Porter Anderson, Publishing Perspectives, used by permission

At BookExpo 2018, a publishing „CEO  roundtable“ hosted by the Association of American Publishers‚ Maria A. Pallante, had 3 heads of New York Big Five publishing corporations debating the future of the industry. I don’t recall details, but am certain that all three speakers were upbeat.

Two years and a bit later, Carolyn Reidy of Simon and Schuster has passed away, John Sargent has quit Macmillan and Holtzbrinck, and only Markus Dohle is still in his position as CEO of Penguin Random House, and announced just a week ago that his group would pick up Simon and Schuster. Another major American trade and educational publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt stands for sale.

And now, BookExpo, together with its consumer sibling BookCon, the by far largest industry gathering in the US, and the States‘ only public platform for welcoming international publishers and other vendors of the book business, has been „retired„, as the press release of Reed Exhibition, the parent company, camouflaged their decision of pulling the plug. (See the summary in Publishing Perspectives)

My personal book fair calender for 2020 saw me packing for London in April, and shortly thereafter for Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. I was considering Leipzig, and would have observed closely Bologna and Paris from afar. Already, I did not plan to attend BookExpo in New York in late May, as I couldn’t anticipate any business for me at the event. Beijing in late August was still undecided. In fall, I obviously planned for Frankfurt, and then Ljubljana in November. I was considering Guadalajara, as my interest in Latin America had seriously increased lately, while working for Cerlalc, the UNESCO partnering organization based in Bogota, Colombia.

None of these events would have any physical presence or attendees, it turned out.

Instead, together with a few friends like Carlo Carrenho and Klaus-Peter Stegen, we decided as early as late April to launch our own, purely digital conference format, ReBoot: Books, Business and Reading, which eventually took place with 4 workshops in September and a 6 hour marathon series of industry debates on October 13, 2020, which normally would have been Frankfurt’s opening day.

I summarize these details not out of nostalgia, nor anticipating any „return to normal“ in 2021. Yet I am an optimist. I am confident that the vaccine will have a – hopefully broad, and not limited to the rich countries and mega cities only – impact on our lives and businesses.

I am fairly confident that the book business overall will cope, and adapt – which is synonymous to ‚deeply transform‚ – in the course of the pandemic. But I am also convinced that the same may not necessarily apply to book fairs. At least those in North America and in large parts of Europe, plus Japan. For all the rest of the world, this is a different story, which I’ll address another time.

There surely will be industry gatherings in the future, with actual visitors, with some kind of exhibits, and certainly with receptions and parties, probably as soon as in early summer or fall of next year. But I would wish to be a fly on the wall when a sales representative of Frankfurt or London will call up the person in charge for marketing budgets at Penguin Random House, Macmillan, HarperCollins – or, very similarly, at Planeta, Bonnier, or German Bastei Lübbe in spring 2021, in the ambition to sell some significant booth space. ‚Best of luck‚, as those hard nosed sales reps would say.

All the big, and many medium sized companies have their finance people right now spending hours and days in home offices and zoom calls to figure out how to slash office space and rent, shift resources into a more de-centralized model of organization, invest – hopefully – heavily in streamlining their workflow and otimize their processes (ERP companies, but also Salesforce/Slack and other will further expand), AND they will be, at the front end of their operations, all about  ‚the consumer‚.

„D2C“ – Direct-to-Consumer will be the magic formular for 2021, I am sure.

These moves will fairly quickly result in shifts in companies‘ internal power balances, hopefully by just even more strongly separating what, on a day-to-day basis, editorial does, and what the ‚back office‚ does with what editorial is proposing to them – or in return, by drastically re-framing the set-up in which editorial is supposed to do their work.

That swing does not necessarily clip the aisles of good editors in theit creativity. But it may rewrite the overall playbook of book publishing.

To give just one example: Anything more ‚niche‚ may be handed over to some ‚special arms‚ of the organization, or be delegated into new (or already existing) ‚author platforms‚ – as in publisher + Wattpad cooperation deals.

In less fortunate organizations, which will be around too, it will be a new regime that hardly breathes that old air of sniffing out that new genial literary hero who might be a winner of some award half a writing life later.

These are, of course, just a few guesses. But for traditinal book fairs, they carry a few clear lessons. First of all, there is little reason for publishers to spend a fortune on renting huge booth space, add more money for flashy cusomized stand constructions, and send over hald the company staff for a week.

Fairs will be closer to festivals on the one hand, and on the other hand to the more operational, small-table plus hotel-bar-and-dinner-separée type of the rights business. In addition, the ‚industry talks‚ will be hybrid at best, and much debate will be within closed settings– e.g. behind corporate community walls, rather than public.

For the ever more pressing opening up, embracing new ideas, interact with an ever growing number of new comeptition from new entrants and start-ups, this may become a huge problem. For letting in new company talent, the result may be a desaster, really endangering a necessary renewal of the professional book communities.

But, as an optimist, I see all these ‚problems‘ mainly as bringing some transformative strains that we all have seen coming already before the virus struck, didn’t we?

With regard to BookExpo, Michael Cader now wrote in his Publishers‘ Lunch: „The show itself had diminished for years.“ So let’s move on, and make the best of it.

PS: David Unger, of Guadalajara FIL, commented in the Facebook group Publishing without borders: „Rudiger: for many years BEA was running itself into circles and into the ground. It had no identity and changed its focus and format sometimes twice a year. It cannot be compared to other international book fairs that have very clearly defined roles and focuses. I know you agree with me.“

This allowed me to specify, how I would differentiate between 3 types of international book fairs:

 Full agreement on part 1, BEA. Not so sure on part 2, which I would split into a) Frankfurt, London, Bologna, b) Beijing, Sharjah, Guadalajara, Madrid/Barcelona, perhaps Italy Paris, Göteborg and c) the many ‚other‘
To a) frankly I see no way back to the old ‚charging high price booth space‘ business model for any of that top tier group. No way.
To b) These are different, as hubs for specific, commercially relevant regional markets, plus their price tag is much smaller, due to local subsidies, subsidies to national collective stand models and much more affordable booth spending anyway, so they make more sense perhaps, economically,
To c) an entirely different kind of beasts, either as national show cases of local industries (my domestic Austria being such, or focused on selling books! (All across the Middle East), etc.
So we have a LOT to figure out, I guess.

 

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.

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