We had a very successful debut annual conference for Digital Book World last January, even though we didn’t conceive the idea until June, put together a group of helpers (which we now call our Conference Council) until July, or draft the initial program until August. This year we’re way ahead of that schedule. We’ve put together a fabulous Council to advise us this year and we’re having a meeting of many of them this week to discuss the agenda and to start getting suggestions for speakers.

The Council gives us wide exposure and connections to the trade publishing industry. That way we make sure we don’t miss any ideas and we don’t miss knowing about any talented people whom our audience would want to hear.

We have several publishing company presidents and CEOs (Sara Domville of F+W; Marcus Leaver of Sterling; Maureen McMahon of Kaplan; Brian Napack of Macmillan; Dominique Raccah of Sourcebooks) and some presidents and CEOs from other companies and support organizations in the industry (Kristen McLean of the Association of Booksellers for Children; Tracey Armstrong of Copyright Clearance Center; Peter Clifton of Filedby; David Cully of Baker & Taylor; Joe Esposito of GiantChair; John Ingram of Ingram Content Companies; Scott Lubeck of The Book Industry Study Group; and Steve Potash of Overdrive Systems.)

We have other senior level executives, many with specific digital responsibilities (Peter Balis of Wiley; Ken Brooks of Cengage; Mark Gompertz of Simon & Schuster; Madeline McIntosh of Random House; Thomas Minkus of the Frankfurt Book Fair; Larry Norton of Borders; Kate Rados of F+W Media; Charlie Redmayne of HarperCollins; Adam Salomone of Harvard Common Press; John Schline of Penguin; Evan Schnittman of Oxford University Press; Michael Tamblyn of Kobo; Maja Thomas of Hachette; and Tom Turvey of Google.)

We have agents (Sloan Harris of ICM; Simon Lipskar of Writer’s House; and Scott Waxman of the Waxman Agency) and industry consultants and commentators (Michael Cairns of PersonaNonData/Information Media  Partners; Ted Hill of THA Consulting; and Lorraine Shanley of Market Partners International.) And because he is our media partner, we have help from Michael Cader of Publishers Marketplace as well. And we also get great input from others on the F+W Media team: David Nussbaum, David Blansfield, Cory Smith, Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, and Matthew Mullin.

So we have all the Big Six represented, as well as small publishers, industry-wide associations and service providers, wholesalers, digital distribution partners, retailers, and agents. All of these people have real input into the topic list and speakers. Many of them are joining us for a meeting next week to review our ideas for the program, which we previewed about a month ago.

Because Digital Book World tries to be at the cutting edge of trade publishing and digital change, we often face one or both of two challenges. Sometimes we believe something should be happening, or be about to happen, but we may not know where or whether the publishers leading the charge will talk about it. Several topics come to mind that fit that description: vertical efforts inside general trade houses; what houses are doing to adjust to reduced expectations for print sales in bookstores; how houses are gearing up or changing their sales efforts to compete in and serve a growing list of digital intermediaries; how enhanced ebook and ebook first creation change the traditional order of things in product development.

The other challenge we have to work around is when people can say things privately but not publicly. One topic that is very tough to talk about is ebook royalties, which is a major point of contention between publishers and leading agents at the moment. The big houses are pretty adamantly trying to hold the line (publicly) at a royalty of 25% of net receipts. But upstart publishers like Jane Friedman’s Open Road appear to be willing to pay 50%; publishing through Smashwords yields 85% (but sells the books without DRM, which would frequently scare the copyright owners of valuable properties); and self-publishing through a distributor would deliver a yield somewhere in between. (Remember: self-publishing ebooks carries no inventory risk.) In that environment, some agents are able to wring some concessions from some publishers. But the agent can’t talk about that without jeopardizing her ability to get concessions for her clients and no publisher will volunteer to reveal the isolated concession and start turning that into a policy.

Some things are just hard to discuss. Do booksellers, or even the publishers and wholesalers who supply them, want to talk about the possibility of their impending demise? But how can one plan for the future and ignore that elephant in the room? If a publisher suddenly sees the necessity of developing direct selling relationships with end users, after years of telling booksellers he was against it, does that publisher want to talk about those efforts in public?

When competitors participate in industry education initiatives, they must draw lines around what they will reveal and what they won’t. One ebook-responsible executive we know at a major house is persistently reluctant to reveal what he’s doing or what he’s thinking. But he has a boss, one who is proud of what he does and what their house does, who pushes him forward as a speaker.

Frankly, I think these challenges are greater for us than they are for other conferences on digital change that focus more on technology than they do on business practices. Very few publishers are masters of tech; usually they’re working with outside suppliers who are happy to share best practices. But business practices are different; they’re more sensitive. Sometimes the reluctance to share them is sound. Sometimes constraints are even legally required. Since our job is to focus on business practices, we’re glad to have relationships with very knowledgable players who will candidly engage with us on these challenges so we can figure out the best way to protect true proprietary knowledge but still disseminate valuable information.

We’re really proud of the illustrious group we have gotten to advise our efforts, and we get great value from them even though their first responsibility is to the company they work for. We feel confident that this group helps us cast a net that is wide and broad enough to assure us that any major development in the trade book world will hit our radar screen and that we’ll know if there are informed people willing to talk about it.does and what their house does, who pushes him forward as a speaker.

This post was originally published at Idealog.com and has been reprinted here with Mr. Shatzkin’s permission.

Mike Shatzkin is the Founder & CEO of The Idea Logical Company and of BaseballLibrary.com, and is the Conference Chair for Digital Book World. He has four decades of experience as a published writer and working in all aspects of the publishing industry – writing, editing, agenting, selling, marketing, and managing production. He is well known for providing insight into the knottiest questions of the industry, old and new, in a career that began with a summer job on the sales floor of the brand new paperback department of Brentano’s Bookstore on 5th Avenue in 1962.

I have found a way to describe the difference between the Digital Book World conference we organize for F+W Media and the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference which I believe is accurate and is certainly not intended to be a pejorative description of Tools of Change. I go to TOC and I find it very valuable, but different from what we’re trying to do.

Tools of Change explores developments in technology that have impact or can have impact on publishing (in general) and helps publishers (of all kinds) understand how to apply them. Digital Book World explores business challenges to trade publishing (defined as book publishers who work primarily through the retail network, or “the trade”) generated by digital change and helps publishers address them. So if I were organizing Tools of Change, I’d want to scan the horizon for technologies that could have an impact and ask “how?” Because I’m organizing Digital Book World, I’m looking at trade publishing’s commercial environment and operations for the impact of technology and asking “what should we do?”

The next Digital Book World Conference is set for January 25-26, 2011. That obliges us to ask: what will the hot digital change questions be eight months from now? What should we be planning to discuss then that will be immediate and relevant to the attendees we’re targeting: the editorial, marketing, sales, and digital strategy people in trade book publishing houses?

To help us figure that out, we’re in the process of recruiting the DBW 2011 Conference Council. That group of about 30 people — CEOs, digital strategists, and marketers from publishing houses large and small, agents, retailers, and independent industry thought leaders — will help us define the panels and choose the speakers who can enlighten and inspire. I’ll introduce you to that group in a future post; the team is in formation at the moment.

Today’s blog is to recruit the readers of The Shatzkin Files [and DigitalBookWorld.com] to help too. I hope you will.

Here are 15 topics, or speculations, we’ve identified to start building an agenda for discussion next January. Do you have any thoughts on any of these to refine our thinking? Some of these are ideas looking for examples: do you know particular people or companies doing things suggested here (or not suggested here) we should be highlighting? And, most important, what are we missing?

1. What’s going to be in an ebook? We’re definitely moving past the stage where the ebook is a “straight lift” from the print: half-titles, blank pages, and all. As ebook sales are rising, publishers are paying more attention to presentation and quality control. And there have been a few experiments with “enhanced ebooks” that contain added content and features, some of which are presenting books as “apps” to increase the functionality that can be offered. Where will we be drawing the line between “standard” new ebook features — dictionaries and linked notes, for example — and enhancements that might be worth extra money? And what enhancements will we see working in the sense that consumers see them to be worth paying for?

2. What will ebook sales channels look like eight months from now? In addition to the main ones we have today — Kindle, iBooks and the App Store, Nook and B&N, Sony, Ingram Digital and Content Reserve — will we be seeing substantial sales through Google and the Android marketplace, B&T’s Blio, and Copia as well? Will the mobile phone service providers be creating retail outlets that matter too? Will the retailers newly in the ereader game — Walmart and Costco and Best Buy — also be motivated to create a branded outlet of their own to sell ebooks?

3. To what extent will publishers view single-title marketing as a practical endeavor? We’ve maintained that title-by-title marketing is the Achilles heel of general trade publishing and that the steady erosion of book-format-oriented marketing opportunities (book review pages in newspapers, radio and TV talk shows) and verticalization call for different marketing strategies. Where will publishers’ thinking be next January on the challenge of launching each new title into the marketplace?

4. How much progress will publishers be making on establishing direct-to-customer contact? What has characterized trade publishing is its dependence on intermediaries to reach the market. And what has made trade publishing possible is the leverage provided by those intermediaries, allowing publishers to reach millions of readers through mere thousands of touch points. But all publishers today acknowledge that the intermediary structure is breaking down and direct contact with end users is necessary. How is that working out? We may need two panels to answer that question: one of niche publishers that will find it pretty natural to do and one of general trade publishers who will undoubtedly find it very hard and complicated.

5. How important is the mobile phone market? How fast is it growing? What kind of books work best on it? And what do publishers have to do differently to please that market than what they do for larger-screen PCs, tablets, and ereaders?

6. How are publishers tackling the shrinking marketplace for printed books? Are they shedding warehouse space or considering consolidation with other players? Are they renegotiating printing contracts, reconsidering what constitutes a “minimum run” or acceptable print book margins? Are they developing new short-run and POD models to complement their prior pressrun models? Are they launching any new books with a no-pressrun strategy?

7. How much progress are publishers making toward changing their workflow, so that we have “ebook first” editorial processes? Since the beginning of ebooks over a decade ago, the standard technique has been to make them after the print book has been completed, and for the editor and author to focus their efforts on making the best possible print product. There is an increasingly widespread belief that this is backwards, and more complex ebooks help make a compelling argument for reversing the order of things. How far will we have moved in that direction by next January?

8. Does the growth of ebook sales change the thinking of publishers and agents about the efficacy of dividing up the territories for single languages? Do publishers start to see a growth in offshore sales facilitated by ebooks? Anecdotal reporting by O’Reilly, which owns global rights in all its titles, suggests that they’re seeing big sales growth in digital from markets that are hard-to-reach with print.

9. Do non-US publishers start to establish more of a sales presence in the US exclusively through virtual means? We’ve been suggesting on this blog that the growth of online sales — print books and digital books — will soon enable reaching a majority of the US sales potential without inventory, which means without the need for a warehouse or a distributor. That should lead to greater penetration of our market by offshore publishers, in all languages. Will we see enough signs of this by January 2011 to build a discussion around it?

10. How does the future look for the brick-and-mortar bookstore marketplace? On this blog (and elsewhere), concerns have been expressed about the impact on bookstores of the increasing shift to online purchasing for both print and ebooks. Christmas 2010 is being viewed in the consumer electronics industry as the “ebook Christmas”. When we’ve had a chance to digest the sales numbers of new devices and we combine that with what we know about the impact devices have on a consumer’s print book purchases, how do we see the future of bookstores when next January rolls around?

11. Is “profitable self-publishing” an idea gaining credibility or is it a pipe dream? In 2009, author J.A. Konrath made a bit of a splash when he blogged about the substantial revenues he was earning putting his short stories and out-of-print backlist on Kindle without a publisher. Will there be more stories like this by January? Will this look like a viable option for established authors?

12. What’s the best approach to ebook distribution for small and mid-sized publishers? Will the original DADs (digital asset distributors) like Ingram Digital and LibreDigital provide the full service suite and sales effort that smaller publishers need? Or will the publishers-as-distributors model — notably including O’Reilly, who went into the business last February, as well as trade publishers and trade distributors like Perseus and NBN and Ingram Publisher Services, be the better option? How much is effective ebook distribution dependent on technical competence and how much of it requires sales competence?

13. After many years of discussion, are we yet beginning to see some new revenue models with any impact, like subscriptions (Disney has tried it now, in addition to O’Reilly’s Safari), selling books by the slice, or new models to compensate for library lending? We know that publishers need metadata-labeled fragments of their books for marketing purposes, but, for trade publishers, is there yet any indication that there’s a real payoff for that kind of tagging in sales revenue?

14. How much of the print backlist is still locked up by rights issues and what impact can different royalty offers have in clearing it up? Jane Friedman’s Open Road has had some success signing up established backlist for higher ebook royalties than the majors want to pay. Is the reservoir of candidates for this treatment substantial? How are agents and big publishers going to resolve these issues?

15. Is the notion of publishers building vertical presences on the web, so often expressed and promoted on this blog, gaining any significant traction in the real world? How are Poetry Speaks and Oxford Bibliographies Online and the forthcoming Pixiq from Sterling doing at establishing a new publishing model? What other examples are emerging or will emerge of publishers using delivering vertical solutions to create new business models?

At the 2011 Digital Book World conference, we want to be strategic and we want to be practical. And we want to be focused on the real-world problems digital change is forcing trade publishers to face.

Have we left out any of yours?

I have finished this but not posted it yet and am already thinking of things I left out. A substantial publisher I spoke to last week learned from having his trip to the London Book Fair cancelled that he doesn’t need to go there anymore. This company has already given up its BEA floor space in favor of a meeting room. And this CEO himself is no longer going to go to Frankfurt and can see the day not far off when his company will no longer take space there either. Are trade shows an anachronism in the age of digital communication? I have a feeling you readers and the Conference Council will think of a lot more.

This article was originally published at Idealog.com and has been reprinted here with Mr. Shatzkin’s permission.

Mike Shatzkin is the Founder & CEO of The Idea Logical Company and of BaseballLibrary.com, and is the Conference Chair for Digital Book World. He has four decades of experience as a published writer and working in all aspects of the publishing industry – writing, editing, agenting, selling, marketing, and managing production. He is well known for providing insight into the knottiest questions of the industry, old and new, in a career that began with a summer job on the sales floor of the brand new paperback department of Brentano’s Bookstore on 5th Avenue in 1962.

By Marian Schembari, Contributing Editor, Digital Book World

Everyone in publishing has been talking about “change”, throwing the term “social media” around like a game of monkey in the middle, and more often than not, we fret about these changes and few seem to know what exactly to do about it.

The most innovative and daring among us, though, don’t fret; they take chances.

Sometimes they work out (Pablo Defendini with Tor.com), and sometimes they don’t (Don Linn with Quartet), but the old saying applies: “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

The best example of this at the 2010 Digital Book World Conference was the “Synergizing the Book and Web” panel, where we had a chance to peek into the minds of four very different people with four very exciting endeavors, each attempting to combine book know-how and web savvy to create something new.

The panelists were Will Schwalbe of Cookstr, Lisa Holton of Fourth Story Media, Hillel Cooperman of Jackson Fish Market and author Alison Norrington.

Check out what these incredible innovators had to say for themselves:

Cookstr

The enthusiastic and charming Will Schwalbe is the founder of Cookstr, having left his position as editor-in-chief of Hyperion after 11 years. Cookstr’s concept is essentially “recipes you’ll love, from cookbooks we trust.”

So far, 300 chefs and authors are registered on the site and every day an author and recipe is featured. With the ever-expanding amount of free resources available on the web, cookbooks are having a rough time of it, but Schwalbe is constantly playing with new ways to monetize Cookstr and compensate its contributors.

The website offers the option to buy cookbooks and also hosts a Wine of the Month Club, where you can sign up and get a cookbook and two bottles of wine delivered to your door.

Monetization also comes in the form of advertising revenue shared with the rightsholder (usually publishers) and Schwalbe pointed out that they are the only cooking site that pays content creators for their content.

Additionally, the Cookstr site isn’t the only place that content can be accessed. Schwalbe is slowly creating a syndicated experience and now has deals with Bravo, whose recipe search is powered by Cookstr, and has partnered with the Daily Beast.

A Story Before Bed

This brilliant idea came not from a publishing veteran but from a software developer, Hillel Cooperman, who wanted to create a space that allows absent parents and grandparents to read to their kids.

The idea of A Story Before Bed came from the fact that Cooperman and his family are based in Seattle, while his parents live in Maryland, “2,744 traveling miles away.” He tried Skype as a way for his parents to read books to his kids, but the video was low quality; then he tried to videotape his parents reading with a scanned copy of the book.

Cooperman showed a demo featuring his daughter reading The Three Little Pigs, and the entire audience melted into a puddle of toddler-induced goo. Watch the video here.

(The best part is in the first few seconds when you see it dawn on her that she can’t actually read!)

A Story Before Bed has a ton of amazing features that make those little things you do with your kids possible, even when you’re far away. The books are 3D and the kids can see both the video of their parent/grandparent reading and the book itself. Adding to the cool factor is that the pages of the book turn in sync with the reading.

As for compensation, Cooperman said they have contracts with individual rightsholders, and at $6.99 a book, a percentage goes to them. In a surprising twist, Cooperman pointed out that they didn’t take on any investors, saying investors and The Man are “the same dude.”

“With software. we can be a lot more aggressive with experimentation.”

Alison Norington

Speaking of experimentation, author Alison Norrington takes the cake. A bestselling chic-lit novelist, Norrington experimented with her most recent book, Staying Single, by telling the story through a wide variety of digital platforms. The book’s main site consisted of daily posts where readers could subscribe for free (about 800 subscribers total) and receive a chapter via email every day.

But Norrington didn’t stop there. Her protagonist, Sophie Regan, had profiles on a number of social networking sites including Bebo, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and Second Life [Note: most of these profiles are no longer online]. She set up forums, interacted with readers and produced short YouTube documentaries featuring bad chat up lines, diving further into Sophie’s story.

Through this experimentation, Norrington learned a lot about what works in the digital world and what doesn’t. She thinks the genre might have actually held her back.

“With romance,” she said, “people don’t want to get involved. It’s not like crime; they just want to be told the story.” She also said she would have spent more time in preproduction and more time on YouTube, which apparently brought in the most blog traffic.

None of this was monetized as Norrington emphasizes it was all highly experimental, but she does want to try and sell the story as a book with the additional content.

The Amanda Project

“Fourth Story Media are doing very, very cool shit with transmedia storytelling.”

Ryan Chapman

The Amanda Project is a first of its kind transmedia experience – “an interactive, collaborative fictional mystery for girls ages 13 & up, told across a variety of different media including an 8-book series, a website that features games, writing, art & social networking, and a related series of blogs, satellite sites, music, and merchandise.”

It tells the story of Amanda Valentino, a mysterious high school student who “disappeared on the Ides of March,” and readers are invited to become a part of the story as they help the main characters search for her. Those stories become an integral part of the site, and some contributors have an opportunity to be published via a partnership with HarperCollins.

Lisa Holton, founder of Fourth Story Media, said, “everything is aggregated, from creating a voice to creating a sense of her character” and credits Our Stories as the “heart and soul of the site.”

Most recently, The Amanda Project partnered up with ModCloth to create a contest for Amanda readers. Girls used Polyvore.com to create a collage of clothes they thought Amanda would wear, and the winner received a $50 ModCloth certificate and a free signed book.

What an awesome and perfect example of synergizing the book and the web!

With initiatives like these, who could possibly worry about the future of publishing? Not me.

Marian Schembari digs social media and books. Usually at the same time.

By Iris Blasi, Associate Editor, Union Square Press

At the 2010 Digital Book World Conference panel “Get Noticed: How to Earn Attention for Every Book,” this much was true: the medium was the message.

The four panelists— Debbie Stier, associate publisher, HarperStudio, and director of digital marketing, HarperCollins; Ryan Chapman, Online Marketing Manager, FSG; Yen Cheong, Assistant Director of Publicity, Viking and Penguin Books [@yodiwan]; and Peter Costanzo, Director of Online Marketing, Perseus—were all masters of the art of the soundbyte, with ridiculously quotable tips and tricks that went flying out of their mouths and into the twittersphere. (Search #dbwpr on Google for samples of the frenzied live-tweeting.)

“I don’t know how to publish an author who will not engage online,” Stier stated early on, in what would become one of the panel’s most-repeated tweets. “It seems like Lotto would be more successful.”

“Everyone should think of themselves as online marketers,” Costanzo later added.

Authoring an Online Self

It was a given at the panel that, in today’s publishing environment, every author needs a web presence of some sort. The question was finding the online cocktail that best suits each individual. A website, a Facebook fan page, and a twitter account? A Wordpress blog and an active email list of subscribers?  What was reiterated time and time again was that online activity needn’t be expensive to be effective.

“I would rather my author have an updated Wikipedia entry than an expensive website,” Chapman said.

According to Stier, success in developing an online presence is directly proportionate to time spent. “It’s blood, sweat and tears,” she said. “If you put in three hours of time, you’re going to get three hours of results. If you put in ten hours of time, you get ten hours of results.”

With the understanding that an author has more to do with their days than play around online, time constraints were a consideration in the development of online campaigns. Recognizing that not all authors have the time or desire to blog, Chapman suggests pitching guest-blogging stints, as putting together five 1000-word blogs for the likes of Salon, Slate, and other similar sites can provide an effective payoff without the investment of full-time blogging.

A huge time suck for new authors can be time spent trying to “get” social media.  Acknowledging that, Stier hires social media coaches to help orient authors and works with them directly herself when she can.

Metrics as a measure of success

From Google Analytics to bit.ly, there are many tools to track traffic; the struggle is in making the connection to actual sales.  Hits are nothing if they go nowhere, said Chapman. “I don’t want to be in the million YouTube hits business.”

More than one of the panelists cited requests by authors to “make something go viral.”  Doing that is impossible, they said; the best that can be done is setting up all of the elements (such as coordinating consistent links sent out simultaneously from multiple origins) to make it as easy as possible for something to catch on.  But ultimately, no one can guarantee anything will go viral.

“Just make something fabulous and I’ll send it out,” Stier said plainly.

Additionally, “traffic doesn’t tell you everything,” said Cheong. It’s important to look at the stickiness of online content, including the number of comments to measure audience engagement. It is a matter of quality of quantity.

Publishing partnerships

An engaged author teamed with an innovative marketing and publicity team (“Mad Men, but without the racism and misogyny,” Chapman suggested) is central to a book’s success. And communication is crucial, as one hand must always know what the other is doing to optimize online outreach.

So, how to decide which blogs to target via online marketing efforts?

Outreach must involve a combination of big blogs and niche communities for maximum exposure, Costanzo said.  And here’s where authors can be particularly crucial in supplementing a publisher’s efforts.

“Author[s] should know [the right blogs], especially for nonfiction,” Chapman said.

Sure, publishers working their verticals will have made in-roads into their niches, but authors will always be the foremost experts in their field. It’s important for them to help guide publishers to the smaller alcoves on the web that may be particularly receptive to a certain book.

“I’m not going to say the New York Times Book Review doesn’t matter,” said Cheong, “but we have so many outlets online now.”

Trade Secrets

Moderator Kate Rados, Chelsea Green’s Director of Digital Initiatives, closed out the panel by asking for a single trade secret from each member on the panel:

1. Costanzo is happy to utilize author’s email lists in promos, but insists that the message must come from the author, not the publisher. Potential readers can spot inauthenticity from a mile away.
2. Cheong is a fan of Booktour.com.
3. Stier listens to Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech podcast for tech pointers.
4. Chapman likes to use Issuu.com to feature shareable material.

Iris Blasi is an Associate Editor at Union Square Press; she tweets about books past, present, and future.

By Marian Schembari, Contributing Editor, Digital Book World

“If you’re in marketing and in publishing and not in social media, you’re not going to have a job.”

~ Jennifer Hart, HarperCollins

If you’re reading this on the Digital Book World web site, it’s highly likely you “get” social media. You understand that you can’t have a book without a web site; an author without a web presence; or a publisher without a Twitter handle. But it’s not just about signing up for the latest social media tool.

Now that everyone and their mom uses social media (my mom does), it’s all about conversation and community and building credibility. During the panel, “How Publishers Can Build Their Own Communities: Using Social Media Tools,” Pablo Defendini (Tor.com), Guy LeCharles Gonzalez (F+W Media / Digital Book World) and Jennifer Hart (HarperCollins), with moderator Charlotte Abbott (Follow the Reader), talked about – wait for it – how publishers can use social media tools to engage with and build communities.

Listen, Engage, Repeat

Tor.com, the online sibling of the well-known sci-fi/fantasy publisher Tor Books, is also famous for covering (and selling) other publishers’ books. Not every Tor book gets featured on the site, and that fosters a certain amount of trust between reader and publisher. By creating a site that wasn’t only about Tor news, but also about the sci-fi/fantasy community as a whole, it became a destination for fans, regardless of who published their favorite books. That no other publisher is doing this means Tor looks pretty awesome compared to other imprints in the sci-fi/fantasy niche.

Since they’ve engaged their community as equals and not marketers, Tor has a foundation in place that enables them to connect with readers long before a book’s publication date. This is good for both Tor and for sci-fi/fantasy authors from any publisher, a feat Defendini described as “gratifying”. He also pointed out that the complete lack of “us vs. them” mentality adds to the conversation.

“Publishers need to stop looking at other publishers as competition.” Amen!

Jennifer Hart, sometimes better known as Book Club Girl, is a major blog advocate, saying, “The idea that bloggers have to beg for authors is not the case. Most authors want to talk to readers and they understand bloggers are the way to do it.” When you work with paperbacks like Hart does, book clubs are your bread and butter. And what better way to target book clubs than by creating a web site specifically for them?

Not a site to promote HarperCollins’ books, but one that consistently sparks the conversation about books in general, helping authors – any author – get their name out there and start engaging with passionate readers. Hart established a personal connection with readers based on her tastes, love of books and a contagious excitement about book clubs.

It isn’t about publicity, it’s about listening; but if you play your cards right, the publicity will eventually follow. Engaging with a community on social media platforms isn’t a one-shot campaign, it’s an ongoing, listen-and-connect-with-your-audience kind of thing.

Digital Book World’s Guy LeCharles Gonzalez talked about creating buzz for a conference that didn’t even exist 6 months earlier. He attributed the earned attention to an integrated mix of email, LinkedIn, Twitter, and a series of free educational webinars that covered the primary themes of the Conference.

“Be where your community is, listen to what they’re talking about and what they’re asking for,” Gonzalez advised. “Find your niche. If you don’t have a niche, you better get one.”

Beating the time-suck

But what about time? Where does social media fit in an already busy day?

One issue that came up several times during the panel was the issue of social media as a major time-suck. If your blog/website/Facebook page actually gets the traffic you want, it can make upkeep difficult to manage. The panelists suggested setting up Google Alerts and Twitter searches; using Google Analytics to gauge what works and what doesn’t; and retweeting links when there’s no time for in-depth engagement.

Hart advises publishers to be vigilant about monitoring traffic because it helps identify what’s resonating with your audience, and what isn’t, to figure out what people find most interesting. Comments are also an effective way to keep your ear to the ground. However, the bottom line is that if you do this right, it’s going to take time.

“Sleep is optional,” she noted, half-jokingly.

“’Time-suck’ is relative,” Gonzalez added. “Social media isn’t a time-suck, it’s an investment; it’s probably one of the more important things you can do with your time.”

[NOTE: DBW is hosting a free WEBcast, Social Media: Time-Suck or Investment, on Tuesday, March 30th @ 1pm EST. Register today.]

So while you may initially be tweeting and blogging mainly for your mother, that’s just the first step. If you’re constantly feeding the social media beast and have a little bit of patience, it can turn into an incredibly important, valuable and, most importantly, fun tool.

If there’s not some fun involved, “ur doin it rong”.

Marian Schembari digs social media and books. Usually at the same time.

Tim Brandhorst, Deputy Director, Book Publishing, American Bar Association.

I’ve been meaning to write about my single favorite twenty-minute timespan at the 2010 Digital Book World Conference a couple of weeks ago.

Mike Shatzkin brought in one of the editors of a small erotic romance publisher, Ellora’s Cave, for a one-on-one conversation in the morning plenary session on the second day of the conference. There was a bit of nervous laughter at first from the audience, partly because of the genre and partly because Shatzkin did a great job framing the issue (and the interview): how a handful of women far outside the NYC publishing mainstream have managed to do everything completely backwards from the large NYC houses, yet have, in the process, gotten everything exactly right for their niche.

The laughter was gradually replaced by an awed silence as Raelene Gorlinsky, a charming, smart and unassuming woman, described with perfect clarity how Ellora’s Cave has evolved.

Gorlinsky told the tale of EC’s founding a decade ago by Jaid Black, a writer of erotic romance stories who was told repeatedly that there was no market for such a subgenre, but was convinced that there was a market… if only she could reach it. Out of necessity (lack of capital) and a keen understanding of how her readers would want to obtain her stories — mixed with a bit of luck (she had a computer science background) — Black set up a web site and sold her stories as e-books only, direct to consumers, with no print versions and no intermediary distributor.

Year one sales were $43,000.

Business has grown steadily over the past decade, and annual sales this year are expected to be over $5M.

Ellora’s Cave publishes erotic romance–basically, romance with a much higher proportion of bedroom scenes. Perhaps not surprisingly, the e-book format fits nicely with this genre; purchasers might hesitate to buy printed erotic romance books in a bookstore, but there’s not much danger of embarrassment in downloading an e-book from a web site.

They now publish approximately ten new titles a week, all as e-books, and maintain an extensive backlist (why take an e-book out of print?) of over 2800 titles; and they’ve started offering their bestsellers as print books, too, BUT with a big twist.

Because they don’t want print sales to interfere with their main e-book sales, print editions are released 3-6 months after the initial e-book.

EC also allows various retailers to carry their products, but with a window of at least a couple of weeks, so EC is sure to capture the initial direct-to-consumer sales from their most rabid customers on every new title. And direct-to-consumer purchasers are well-rewarded for buying directly from EC: they receive roughly 50 percent off the retail price. The average price for an EC title on their site is between $5 and $6; on Amazon, the Kindle versions sell for $11 to $12.

In other words, EC has, through disciplined pricing and format decisions, retained its direct to consumer model, and thus retained control and maximized profitability.

Royalties are dramatically different than typical publishing contracts, too. Authors receive 37.5 percent of the cover price of e-books–yes, that’s right, 37.5 percent. They receive a more traditional 7.5 percent on the p-book version; and all royalties are calculated and paid monthly!

Ellora’s Cave experimented with using Lightning Source and other POD providers for a while, but realized the margins just weren’t going to work with POD at their low price point. So EC did something else completely counter-intuitive: they bought their own printing press. They now print their own books, as they receive orders. They do runs as small as 15 books, and have their own warehouse and fulfillment center.  (For Amazon orders of print books, EC simply has loaded all their titles into Amazon’s CreateSpace, and Amazon PODs their titles as ordered.)

Having their own press means they can also profit from custom publishing: they can do custom covers and special promotions with very small print runs, at a nice profit. They have tapped a whole new revenue stream by listening to their customers and offering their customers varying formats at varying price points.

Ellora’s Cave’s staff is roughly 40 people, of which fully 20 are editorial. Just think: a publisher that has its own printing and fulfillment, its own e-commerce web site, and is financially sophisticated enough to pay royalties monthly–yet half its human capital is devoted to editorial staff, most of whom generally work offsite.

Content creation is considered the single most important thing, and is appropriately funded.

It was a fascinating twenty minute conversation–I’ve literally thought more about the questions EC’s model raises than just about anything else at this wonderful conference. Translating their model into a more traditional publishing model is now the challenge.

[This article was originally published on the PubForward blog and has been reprinted here with the permission of Mr. Brandhorst.]

Tim Brandhorst is currently deputy director of book publishing for the American Bar Association.

By Iris Blasi, Associate Editor, Union Square Press

“When you’re an editorial assistant, you don’t get lot of great agents coming to you, so you have to scour the web,” Patrick Mulligan explained from his perch on a 2010 Digital Book World Conference panel entitled The New Farm System: Scouting Blogs and Self-Publishers for Commercial Books.

Mulligan, a senior editor at Penguin’s Gotham Books, earned his position on the panel by doing just that—and scoring two blog-to-book hits in the process: 2007’s NYT-bestselling “The Truth about Chuck Norris,”  Mulligan’s very first acquisition at Gotham, and 2008’s “I Can Has Cheezburger,” a collection of over 200 of the best selections from the LOLcat meme. He was joined on the panel by Kate Lee, an ICM agent so well known for ushering authors from the internet to bookshelves that she was the subject of a 2004 New Yorker piece, and Simon & Schuster’s Sulay Hernandez, an editor who brought the romance novel website SmartBitchesTrashyBooks.com from web to page with the Touchstone Fireside publication of “Beyond Heaving Bosoms.” The panel was moderated by Foreword Reviews’ publisher, Victoria Sutherland.

The list of blog-to-book successes is now so long that PostSecret and “Julie and Julia” now seem like quaint and distant memories. But from “Stuff White People Like: The Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions” to “F.U., Penguin: Telling Cute Animals What’s What“  to “Cake Wrecks: When Professional Cakes Go Hilariously Wrong,” the phenomenon shows few signs of slowing.  From research done on Publishers Marketplace, Mulligan estimates that more than 50 blogs nabbed book deals in 2009. (Because only announced deals are included in the database, it’s likely that the total number is far higher.)

WHAT MAKES A GOOD BLOG-TO-BOOK PROSPECT?

All three panelists reported feeling pushback from retailers due to market saturation. Still, they said, lack of novelty isn’t a reason to abandon the concept—just to be picky. Not everything from the web works, they cautioned. “It takes more art and timing to get it right than you might think,” Mulligan said.

The three panelists were also unanimous in calibrating authorial expectations, warning would-be bloggers that not every webmaster receives a huge payday for publication. There’s a huge range of advances paid, Kate Lee said, clarifying that figures are easily inflated since that the books most talked about “have had high-profile, mid-six-figure advances and have worked.”

“It comes down to really good editing and keeping a sharp eye out,” she added.

The beauty of mining the web for content is, of course, the built-in audience. The danger is inextricably tied to that same fact: how does one cull content that remains authentic enough to the sensibility of the website while simultaneously being “new” enough to attract a print audience?

Much of that depends on the author, Sulay said. The most desirable combination is an author who is tech-savvy and knows their category, but is malleable. They can’t be so married to their content and design that they will be resistant to the benefits a traditional publisher brings to the table.

Publishers are also seeking authors who will continue to push their product, Sulay added. “When you write a book, that’s not the end,” she said in a sentiment echoed in multiple venues at DBW2010. “You really have to be out there to promote it.”

Particularly with crowd-sourced web books, part of an author’s promotion involves the community that made them a hit in the first place. “What they have done is nurture a community,” Mulligan said. “If we can capture just a portion of that in a bookstore, those are big numbers to publishers.”

FIVE TIPS TO GO FROM BLOG TO BOOK

Think your blog can be the next bestseller? Here are some tips for aspiring writers:

1. Consider your category. The web is a goldmine for humor writers in particular. “If you’re funny and your voice is unique, people will come to it,” said Mulligan.
2. Pay heed to tradition even in a digital environment. The best way to catch the attention of an agent or editor? “A good, old-fashioned, well-written query,” said Lee. “There’s really no substitute for that.”
3. Think ahead. In standard publishing contracts, the burden of obtaining permissions for reprinted material falls on the author. For sites dependent upon reader submissions, do yourself a favor and have readers surrender rights to their content prior to posting, as TextsfromLastNight.com smartly does at sign-up.
4. Don’t show all your cards. Added value is essential to publishers, as they don’t want to reproduce what is already available for free online. Be mindful from the outset about holding back some add-ons that might work best for the book.
5. Show you can drive traffic. If a blog launches in the forest, does it make a sound? Great content will only get you halfway. Focus on links from other websites, as they act as a kind of endorsement and quality control, demonstrating your proven ability to promote.

The main challenge blog-to-book projects must over come is the initial question: Why even bother to make a website into a book.

It’s simple: When it’s a website, said Mulligan, “you can’t give it to someone as a gift.”

Iris Blasi is an Associate Editor at Union Square Press; she tweets about books past, present, and future.