Business Model for eBook Only Publishing House
Written by David on January 21st, 2009Consider this open source business development.
I wrote this at 6:30 PM, after not having eaten all day, while standing on the platform at the West 4th Street subway station, three levels underground. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether these are ideal or disastrous conditions for creating a business model for an ebook only publishing house.
Update: What I’m trying to do here is not flood the world with ebooks so that quality content gets lost among all the bad content. Rather, I want just the opposite. I expect ebooks (both self-published and not) to one day be nearly as numerous as blogs are now. What this model attempts to do is help readers filter out the bad stuff and discover the good stuff. It would help both readers and quality writers. (Thanks to Scott Douglas for illuminating the need for this clarification.)
- eBooks only (or mostly).
- The publisher accepts authors, not manuscripts.
- Therefore, authors can publish whatever they feel is necessary: something book-length, something article-length, a short story, a paragraph, a sentence, a poem, a play, a script or a rant. Fiction or non-fiction. Finished or not finished. The idea is not to create and package “books” but rather to create a forum and content delivery system for quality writing that will appeal to a certain type of reader. Think of it almost like a hybrid book/magazine publisher.
- The publisher focuses on developing content to suit the tastes of readers in that publisher’s market. Not a niche, necessarily. Just a shared taste.
- The publisher publishes hundreds or perhaps thousands of writers.
- Most content is free.
- Most revenue is ad-based. The publisher and the author share revenue from ads on the author’s home page and pages with the author’s content. If content is downloaded to a reading device, it still has the ads. Use either a pay-per-click or pay-per-impression model.
- Readers can purchase subscriptions to a publisher or to an author. When they do, they get ad-free content and perhaps some value-added content (if such a thing exists). I know, this sounds like Salon.com circa 2004, but just try it and see.
- Update: Readers can also purchase ad-free content by the unit, rather than buy subscription.
- Ads are sold either by the publisher or by a third party (not the author) and will appear in the content for all of that publisher’s authors.
- The publisher provides the technological infrastructure, including the ability to incorporate video, audio, photos and whatever graphics may be appropriate.
- The publisher provides editing to maintain standards.
- Update: As Mike Cane points out, the publisher should also provide ebook designers and cover artists. Few writers are equipped to do these things well, and they shouldn’t have to be.
- Authors are responsible for their own publicity and marketing, in whatever form it may take.
- The publisher does promote itself collectively, however, as the home of great authors to those in the target demographic.
- If they wish, authors may post works-in-progress and solicit reader feedback.
- All published work may be commented upon by readers.
- Quality pieces (regardless of length) within a publisher’s body of work perhaps can be voted on with a Digg-like system, to draw other readers to quality material.
- It’s not really ebook only. Readers who want to order print-on-demand cheap paperbacks or beautifully well-made hardcovers can do so and pay properly for the privilege. If readers want something, the publisher should gladly take their money for it, at a profit (shared with the author).
- Publisher and author must sign a deal for a certain amount of time so that successful authors are not continually fleeing to the highest bidder (or the publishing house that offers the best deal).
- Authors retain all rights to their content. If an author leaves a publisher, she takes her content with her.
- Update: In case its absence did not make it clear: no DRM.
- Of course, any writer could still go it alone with his own web site. What the publisher provides are:
- validation for readers…they know they’ll be getting content up to a certain standard most of the time (just like now!)
- a community of readers with a shared taste
- technological infrastructure
- quality editing (if it’s not good, readers will go elsewhere)
Details to be worked out later.
Someone is gonna get rich with this, and it ain’t gonna be me. I prefer writing and coming up with kooky ideas.
Update: This could work even better as a not-for-profit endeavor or as a cooperative of some kind, as long as standards were maintained.
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22
AM
“The idea is not to create and package “books” but rather to create a forum and content delivery system for quality writing that will appeal to a certain type of reader.”
I could be mistaken, but I think Al Gore already invented something like this called the internet.
I’m just messing with you. Keep up the good blogging.
22
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Very true! This is not so different, with the essential additions of a filter for quality content, editing and value-added technology.
22
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Sounds good David, I like the idea a lot. Just got to win lotto to get it up and running. Ain’t that always the case though.
I never knew you were so intelligent. Must have been the place you are working!
22
AM
No ads, no “publishes hundreds or thousands” of authors, and probably no subscriptions.
We have too many ads in our lives already. Ads in paperbacks were tried in the 1970s. FAIL then, FAIL now.
eBook-only publishers who succeed will focus to a tight audience. I keep thinking of Hard Crime in the US and Do Not Press in the UK. Both are *publisher* brand names I trust and would read *anything* they put out.
That’s what’s needed for eBooks.
Once a reader understands what a *publisher* is offering, they will be more willing to sample *more* of that publisher.
This is why current print publishers devised imprints. Unfortunately, the imprints have a diluted “focus” and really act only as guides to bookstore shelving and marketing.
What eBooks need is an Apple-like cult status for marketing. Apple doesn’t do certain electronics. Likewise, an eBook publisher wouldn’t do *all* kinds of books.
By slicing everything this way, readers know where to go for what they like, publishers know the audience, and there’s room for as many publishers as possible without the interference of a distant corporate Board.
22
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Mike, I’m in complete agreement with what you say about publishers focusing on a tight market and creating a brand that readers know they can trust and go to for a certain kind of content. Why the existing big publishers aren’t doing this kind of thing already (apart from the vestigial and meaningless imprints) is beyond me.
Regarding the number of authors a publisher might take on, I think it would depend upon the publisher. Some might do fine with ten. Others might need a thousand to make an overall profit with a more long-tail approach. The essential thing is that quality and consistency is maintained at the publisher. Much more difficult at a publisher with a lot of authors, but perhaps it can be done.
Pricing could be flexible as far as I’m concerned (my first four bullet point are the most essential elements, I think). I of course understand why you’d not want ads, but then how will authors and publishers get paid (as they should)? Since this model attempts to move away from the idea of a “book” (though book-length works would certainly still be included), I feel we also need to get away from traditional book unit pricing. Pricing according to what is read rather than what unit is purchased is my way of trying to do this. I don’t like ads any more than the next guy, which is why I’d like to try reasonable premium rates, whether for subscriptions or not, for those who didn’t want to see them. If not ads, if not DRM, then what?
22
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This, I love.
e.g., Softskull?
23
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This sounds a little like the subscription model from the early modern period of bookselling, circa Samuel Johnson. Maybe this is where the technology is taking us - back to a tighter coupling between readers and writers with the publisher as more of a conduit than a gatekeeper. Of course Joyce, Pound and Eliot got their start with subscriptions and self-financed publishing…
23
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Thanks for the reminder, Phil, that the self-publishing stigma is a fairly recent aberration. Historically it is the norm for writers, including the greats (most of whom would almost certainly not be published today by anyone but themselves).
21
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Very true! This is not so different, with the essential additions of a filter for quality content, editing and value-added technology.