Topic: Amazon Wins?

This episode of The Roundtable was webcast live at 1pm EDT on Thursday, July 22, 2010.

• Register to participate LIVE.
• Subscribe to the audio podcast.
• DBW Members can access the on-demand archive of The Roundtable.

Featuring:

Laura Dawson, Publishing Industry Consultant
Pablo Defendini, Interactive Producer, Open Road Integrated Media
Kate Rados, Marketing Director, F+W Media
Bridget Warren, Former Co-Owner, Vertigo Books

Special Guest:

Sarah Weinman, Publishing Reporter, AOL’s DailyFinance

Moderated by:

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, Dir. of Programming & Business Development, Digital Book World

Links:

eBook vs. Hardcover: Beyond the Headlines

Depending on where you get your news, and how far beyond the tweets and catchy headlines you tend to read, yesterday’s well-timed press release from Amazon (they release their 2Q report on Thursday) either came as a shocker (TIPPING POINT!) or an interesting soft data point in need of further clarification.
Amazon chooses its words carefully; in the midst of the Kindle hype, Bezos made a point of noting that ”our hardcover sales continue to grow.”

Publishers Back Amazon on E-book-Hardcover Figures

Interviews with several major trade houses found all acknowledging that they were selling at least as many e-books as hardcovers through Amazon with one major publisher reporting that in the last couple of weeks the ratio had been higher than the 143 e-books to 100 hardcovers Amazon reported for the second quarter. “[E-book] sales are growing week by week,” this publisher said.

What Amazon didn’t say about e-books

Amazon is a master of selling paper books online and still offers the best user experience. It has transitioned that experience over to the e-book world and Kindle Store and clearly had much success. But in the digital book world, where pricing is largely fixed now (at least for traditionally published books), you’re starting to see a more level playing field as Barnes & Noble invests millions in its online arm and Apple knows a thing or two about user interfaces. Sony and scrappy upstarts like Kobo are also trying to get in on the e-book game, though consolidation seems inevitable.

Why Amazon’s Kindle Won

And marketing can make the difference between an OK product selling OK and selling in gonzo numbers. The Kindle was an OK product — that is, it could read books and make buying them easy, but the hardware design was from Bizzaro World, with buttons that could be easily hit accidentally. But people put up with that OKness for the ease of buying, the lowered expense of buying, and the ability to read with less clutter and less weight.

Literary Agent Plans E-Book Editions

The literary agent Andrew Wylie, who has announced that he will publish digital editions of works by some of his clients. Mr. Wylie said his new company would focus on older titles whose digital rights are not owned by traditional publishers. The books will be available exclusively at Amazon’s Kindle store for two years.

Twitter (as RTd by @digibookworld):

RT @Knownhuman: #DBW Have we really only been in a Kindle world for 33 months now?

RT @eBookNoir: #dbw – so who will the battle will be between? Amazon and google and apple? Is kobo and the rest going away?
 
RT @Knownhuman: #DBW Didn’t Amazon directly court several power agents directly late last year? (Yes. Was Wylie one of them?)

RT @susanmpls: #DBW Worth pointing out Wylie is working w/ successful authors, not new/unknown/debut authors who have no existing audience.

RT @MoriahJovan: No, why did he [Wylie] go with Amazon versus APPLE??? That’s the better question. #dbw

RT @eBookNoir: #dbw What if apple sends iBooks out to the world for other devices, will that change things if apple gets their act together?

RT @jfallone: #dbw ePub is now last hope of being Kindle Killer. Enhanced functionality & open source dev could leapfrog closed Mobi format.

RT @MatthewDiener: Is Amazon really putting the pressure on IDPF w/r/t ePUB: How do they keep ePUB standard from becoming irrelevant? #dbw

RT @neustudio: Amazon wins? Noooooooo. . … mobi is a pain to code!!! Format exclusivity is evil!! #DBW #ePrdctn

RT @MatthewDiener: Amazon Kindle /Mobi won on easy to convert (Amazon did it for free/percentage points). Result: more books, faster. #dbw

RT @MatthewDiener: ePUB is harder to create, though more robust. Makes the standard slower to adopt because less titles are available. #dbw

Topic: Defining Failure

This episode of The Roundtable was webcast live at 1pm EDT on Thursday, July 15, 2010.

• Register to participate LIVE.
• Subscribe to the audio podcast.
• DBW Members can access the on-demand archive of The Roundtable.

Featuring:

Laura Dawson, Publishing Industry Consultant
Pablo Defendini, Interactive Producer, Open Road Integrated Media
Bridget Warren, Former Co-Owner, Vertigo Books

Special Guests:

Don Linn, former owner/CEO, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
Mary Ann Naples, VP, Development, OpenSky

Moderated by:

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, Dir. of Programming & Business Development, Digital Book World

Links:

10 Signs that you’ve got an innovation dysfunction – Jim Carroll

• People laugh at new ideas
• Someone who identifies a problem is shunned
• Innovation is the privileged practice of a special group
• The phrase, “you can’t do that because we’ve always done it this way” is used for every new idea
• No one can remember the last time anyone did anything really cool
• People think innovation is about R&D
• People have convinced themselves that competing on price is normal
• The organization is focused more on process than success
• There are lots of baby boomers about, and few people younger than 25
• After any type of surprise — product, market, industry or organizational change — everyone sits back and asks, “wow, where did that come from?”

Publishers can no longer boondoggle – Stephen Bateman

• Restructure the business so that it has a newly articulated mission – the business needs to look “out” not in
• Put your best people on your biggest opportunities – move bums on seats to get new momentum and fresh initiatives in the business
• Create a culture of “initiative” not “fear” – recompense the bold
• Budget for failure – things are going to get a lot worse – don’t be meek – bring sales down then bring your costs down in line to preserve your margin and some headroom

Publishers Need to Fail Better, Cheaper, Faster - Rebecca Smart

If you perceive that your only environment is that encompassed by your current supply chain then you’re only going to adapt to changes in that environment – so the response to the digital challenge viewed in this way would be to create and sell e-books. If you put the consumer at the heart of your thinking you can consider instead each group of customers you serve and what they might want on top of what you already provide, how they might want you to serve them differently in the future. More to the point, you can ASK them, listen and respond.

The “Fail Week” Challenge - Ryan Chapman

A successful editor aims for three profitable books out of ten. Shouldn’t a successful online/new media department try for the same? Sadly, the departments I know of don’t attempt ten projects in a year. They’re aiming for the fences with every swing. At FSG, I’m dialing things down a bit. Instead of grand attempts to Save Publishing, how about just hitting a double? (You know things are bad when I’m using sports metaphors.)

Long story short: I’m aiming to fail harder.

Twitter (as RTd by @digibookworld):

RT @babetteross: we’re seeing innovative things for sake of innovation and not based on strategy #dbw @donlinn #DistractedByShineyObjects

 RT @MatthewDiener: “We are great at failing with books everyday.” @donlinn Grt pt; an industry surviving on 10% success rate w/ print. #dbw

RT @babetteross: Pubs don’t always look before they leap @ljndawson #dbw ie. taxes w/ agency pricing, not all have backend process to handle

RT @MatthewDiener: $500K advance for book that will be lucky to earn back vs. $500K for MarkLogic server and an end-to-end XML workflow #dbw

RT @deegospel: Why aren’t bookstores cultural centers anymore? Where are the cultural centers & do they accommodate readers? #dbw

RT @MissAdventuring: #DBW Innovation or desperation – bookstores working with google? | RT @eBookNoir: desperation i think

RT @bakersmark: One thing we don’t do in this industry is postmortems to discover why a book failed and what we could have done better. #dbw

RT @babetteross: Are silos at typical publisher, tech vs editorial vs marketing, creating an inability to analyze effective processes? #dbw

RT @MissAdventuring: #DBW #oldspice leveraged traditional with new media and self-reflective humor = success. Lessons for publishers?

RT @TomThompson: You wouldn’t have heard about Old Spice on twttr unless it gained the traction through the ad spend. That plus genius. #dbw

RT @babetteross: The important thing is to learn from your failures. Get back on the horse and keep going. @donlinn #dbw

Topic: The Self-Publishing Opportunity

This episode of The Roundtable was webcast live at 1pm EDT on Thursday, July 1, 2010.

Subscribe to the audio podcast here. DBW Members can access the interactive video archive of The Roundtable here.

Featuring:

Laura Dawson, Publishing Industry Consultant
Pablo Defendini, Interactive Producer, Open Road Integrated Media
Kate Rados, Marketing Director, F+W Media
Bridget Warren, Former Co-Owner, Vertigo Books

Special Guests:

Jane Friedman, Director of Content & Community Development, Writer’s Digest
Moriah Jovan, Author & Publisher, B10 Mediaworx
Carla King, Co-author, Self-Publishing Boot Camp

Moderated by:

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, Dir. of Programming & Business Development, Digital Book World

Links:

Harlequin Horizons Now DellArte Press

In the wake of widespread criticism over its self-publishing imprint, Harlequin has changed the imprint’s name from Harlequin Horizons to DellArte Press. As Harlequin publisher and CEO Donna Hayes said it would, the company renamed the imprint to a designation “that [does] not refer to Harlequin in any way.” There is no mention of Harlequin on DellArte’s Web site.

Late last week, Romance Writers of America and other writers’ associations spoke out against the November 17 announcement that Author Solutions had teamed with Harlequin to form Harlequin Horizons, an imprint for self-published romance authors. RWA deemed Harlequin no longer eligible for RWA-provided conference resources–meaning the publisher would not be entitled to enter any award competitions. Harlequin publisher and CEO Donna Hayes said the company was “surprised and dismayed” at RWA’s actions and said it would change the imprint’s name.

Self-Publishing, Author Services Open Floodgates for Writers

In 2001, the Wild Writing Women, a San Francisco Bay Area travel writing group of which I was a member, decided to self-publish a book of stories. Why? Because none of us could find a traditional publisher for what we thought was our best writing.

We had skilled publishing professionals among us, so we never considered using a vanity press. Instead, each of the twelve of us tossed in $500 and formed a small business. One of us went to San Francisco City Hall to process our business name, Wild Writing Women Press. Another bought the ISBN and bar code; others hired a book designer, edited, proofread, created a website, and chose a printer. Promotion was easy because we had 12 professional adventure travel writers talking up the book in the course of marketing our other books and projects.

Wild Writing Women: Stories of World Travel was an instant hit. We sold all 1,000 copies in the first week of publication and made back more than double our investment. Eighteen traditional publishers were suddenly interested in purchasing the book. The group decided — by a skinny 7 to 5 vote — to sell it to Globe-Pequot. Self-publishing success? Well, it’s 2010 and we’ve yet to see any royalties.

An Exciting Future for Authors (That Can Succeed Without Publishers or Agents)

What’s an author to do when there are fewer vehicles for gaining that rubber stamp of approval and credibility, getting published, and getting noticed in a world of enormous supply, but diminishing demand?

As many have argued, it’s time to focus on the reader (or the community).

Kickstarter holds within it a model of authorship that empowers you to build a future based on your fans and supporters and colleagues, without the need for “traditional” approval of a publisher or an agent.

But Kickstarter isn’t necessarily a breakthrough model as much as a re-discovering of an ancient support system for artists and creative ventures: patrons!

Why Robin Sloan is the Future of Publishing (and Science Fiction)

“To me,” says Sloan, “the point isn’t always to get a story out into the world by any means necessary. Just as often, it’s to try out new technologies and new platforms; sometimes it’s to experiment, play and learn.”

To this end, Sloan has experimented with various strategies of releasing his stories, none of which involve sending them out to publishing “gate-keepers.” He made a story available for sale on the Kindle with the caveat that after 100 sales he would put it on his website for free. He wrote a story in exchange for a pair of pants. He wrote a story from start-to-finish on an airplane ride. He wrote a story and then offered the rough draft to his Twitter followers for editing. He asks his readers to remix and rewrite his stories. He has made a game of making canny use of the Internet and social media without ever doing anything that remotely resembles the traditional publishing model.

One Fan Per Day

I work with a lot of writers on their digital strategy, and I very often hear that they don’t feel their hard work and engagement online is making a difference. @garyvee would say HAVE PATIENCE.  And he’s right.  If you’re a writer (and I would encourage you to do ANYTHING else if you can, because it’s really really hard to be successful as a writer), you are building a long-term relationship.  It’s not just about THIS book; it’s about your career.

The take-away from the post that I’m always left with, is:  ”If you added one fan a day, it would take only three years.”  One fan per day just seems so doable, right?

Twitter (as RTd by @DigiBookWorld):

RT @tstcpublishing: #dbw so is lack of support for authors by big pubs due to outsourcing/freelancing of many editorial/marketing functions?

RT @pablod: …and scale. most legacy pubs are operating at 30k feet, when some authors may need support at 15k-feet #dbw

RT @MatthewDiener: Getting a manuscript into print and/or eBook = easy part. Marketing, promotion, sales, discoverability = hard part. #dbw

RT @babetteross: #dbw Being published by one of big 6 is not a magic potion for sales. For Self or Trad, the author needs to help market it.

RT @eBookNoir: #dbw – self-pub seems to fit into those areas where a traditional pub isn’t willing to take the risk

RT @MissAdventuring: #dbw So if the publishers can’t handle it then why all the shouting when the tech industry takes up the slack?

RT @StrachanLit: The self-published authors who are successful have found ways to connect with their readers. #dbw

RT @bakersmark: ” Author took the time to cultivate an audience” I love it… #dbw

RT @eBookNoir: #dbw – so a lot of this comes back to previous conversations of pubs needing to engage readers and authors

RT @MatthewDiener: Much easier for pubs to scale up existing platform/community/following than build one for author. #dbw

RT @MissAdventuring: #dbw self-publishing is necessary for writers who want to break through – advantage to extroverts who know social media

RT @MissAdventuring: #dbw writers thinking about self-pub to get noticed, still so much work! EaSY to produce but not to mktg (killer app)

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.

Topic: Community vs. Commerce

This episode of The Roundtable was webcast live at 1pm EDT on Thursday, June 24, 2010.

Subscribe to the audio podcast here. DBW Members can access the interactive video archive of The Roundtable here.

Featuring:

Pablo Defendini, Interactive Producer, Open Road Integrated Media
Bridget Warren, Former Co-Owner, Vertigo Books

Special Guests:

Elana Roth, Literary Agent, Caren Johnson Literary Agency
Kevin Smokler, CEO, BookTour.com

Moderated by:

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, Dir. of Programming & Business Development, Digital Book World

Links:

The Curator and the Docent

Recently, as I wandered around a museum with overwhelming breadth and depth of content, I was lucky to be guided in my travels by a professional. When she introduced herself to me, she used the term ‘docent’ to describe her function. A docent is a ‘knowledgeable guide’ and the function seems to me to perfectly complement the process of curation. In an online world, where more and more content appears to “carry the same weight,” we will look to and pay for the combination of curator and docent – sometimes the same person or entity – who can organize and manage a range of content and also engage with the user so they gain insight and meaning from the material

Book Publishing Websites: The Best And Worst (PHOTOS, POLL)

Everyone in book publishing has a website. We know Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound and Borders among others sell books on the web. Authors have web sites that tell you about their writing. But what do book publisher websites do? We wanted to know, so we looked at what’s out there to see if we could figure it out.

There’s a mix of blog content, video, book purchasing options and news. Some sites seemed neglected and with no personality, others were brimming with enthusiasm. Some had us clicking through for more, while others had us navigating away quickly. While many publishers have found ways to integrate blog content and social media, others remain essentially book-buying portals.

So You Have a Platform; Now What?

It’s been a while since I ranted about social media gurus and the “Blogs! Facebook! Twitter! GET ON IT!” mentality that most of publishing is still annoyingly mired in. It’s partly because I’m bored by the topic, and partly because I think the backlash finally started to set in late last year and not as many people are blindly drinking the Kool-Aid any more.

Or maybe they are and I’ve moved on? (Sadly, I know many still are.)

One thing’s clear, though: writers are being encouraged expected to be their own marketing and PR departments nowadays, building an audience BEFORE even thinking about a traditional publishing deal, and arguably needing one in order to have any real hope of DIY success. Sure, anyone can sell eBooks via Kindle just by uploading them with a decent cover and compelling description, but like blogs, the competition for attention is only going to increase, and the early adopter edge is fading fast.

MANIFESTO

I am not saying that it is a bad or dishonest thing to try to sell your work. It is not. What I am saying is that I am tired of the rush to commodify  everything, to turn everything into products, including people. I don’t want a brand, because a brand limits me. A brand says I will churn out the same thing over and over. Which I won’t, because I am weird.

Markets Are Conversations

The first markets were filled with talk. Some of it was about goods and products. Some of it was news, opinion, and gossip. Little of it mattered to everyone; all of it engaged someone. There were often conversations about the work of hands: “Feel this knife. See how it fits your palm.” “The cotton in this shirt, where did it come from?” “Taste this apple. We won’t have them next week. If you like it you should take some today.” Some of these conversations ended in a sale, but don’t let that fool you. The sale was merely the exclamation mark at the end of the sentence.

Twitter (as RTd by @DigiBookWorld)

RT @Stacy_Boyd: Book bloggers are the docents of the literary world. #dbw

RT @tstcpublishing: #dbw Groundswell by Charlene Li is  good primer for efforts along these lines.

RT @Stacy_Boyd: Niche publishers are best positioned to move quickly to B2C model. Yay for romance! #dbw

RT @pa4culture: Thank God for librarians because they really do get the books into the hands of the kids. #dbw

RT @Stacy_Boyd: Interesting Q: Are writers’ websites, outreach geared toward readers or peers? #dbw

RT @pa4culture: Booksmith (SF) monthly book swap as community builder + interaction, gathering around books is brilliant. I want to go. #dbw

RT @kellymcclymer: #dbw Awkward authors and disinterested staff can kill a book signing/reading. Amen to that!

RT @Stacy_Boyd: Is it authors or publishers (or librarians or booksellers or agents) who should turn readers into fans? #dbw

RT @jfallone: Tor is curator + genre advocate building community, brand, fans. Genre first and the fan trust migrates to book sales #dbw

RT @jennybullough: Big pubs + self-pub arm: “lame”, “weird”, “shady” (@elenaroth) or “smart”, “forward-looking” (@glecharles)? Discuss! #dbw

RT @pa4culture: Pubs have been accused of not listening, no community building – self pub a response of a sort – @glecharles #dbw

RT @Stacy_Boyd: Thanks to @glecharles @ElanaRoth @weegee @vertigobooks for a great #DBW session. now, lunch time is officially over. (TY!)

Topic: The eBook Sales Dip

This episode of The Roundtable was webcast live at 1pm EDT on Thursday, June 17, 2010.

Subscribe to the audio podcast here. DBW Members can access the interactive video archive of The Roundtable here.

Featuring:

Laura Dawson, Publishing Industry Consultant
Pablo Defendini, Interactive Producer, Open Road Integrated Media

Special Guests:

Bradley Robb, Author
Sarah Weinman, Publishing Reporter, AOL’s DailyFinance

Moderated by:

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, Dir. of Programming & Business Development, Digital Book World

Links:

AAP Reports 11.8% Increase in Book Sales through April

Book sales tracked by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) for the month of April increased by 24.8% percent in April to $629.8 million and were up by 11.8 percent for the year through April.

Adult Paperback sales increased 19.6 percent for the month ($128.2 million) and increased by 19.4 percent for the year. Adult Mass Market sales decreased 17.7 percent for April with sales totaling $49.1 million; sales were down by 6.3 percent through April. E-book sales jumped up 127.4 percent for the month ($27.4 million), reflecting an increase of 217.3 percent for the year-to-date.

New Benchmark for eBook Sales, and New Questions

eBook sales “soared to $31.9 million” in January — presumably spurred by Amazon’s claims of “record-breaking” Kindle sales in December, and “more Kindle books than physical books” being purchased on Christmas Day — but they declined slightly in February and March, with estimated sales of $28.9 million and $28.5 million.

By comparison, Adult Paperback sales ($103.2m, $106.3m, $123.2m) had monthly increases and are up +23.5% over last year, and Adult Mass Market sales ($56m, $49.8m, $53.6m) saw monthly fluctuations and are down -6.6% vs. last year.

BN’s E-Book Market Share Grows Under New CEO

Barnes & Noble’s new CEO William Lynch is making rapid headway for Barnes & Noble in the e-book market. According to Crains New York, Williams has increased BN.com’s share in e-books by nearly 20%, making it a distant second to dominant player Amazon.com…

Barnes & Noble’s relationships with publishers, which were not always so friendly, have become the company’s secret weapon in its fight to survive the digital transition and avoid becoming the book industry’s Tower Records.

“Publishers absolutely want us to succeed,” Mr. Lynch told Crains New York. “That’s driving their cooperation with us in the digital world.”

Whatever happened to the e-reader tsunami of 2010?

Along with the rise of 3D TV, E-Ink-based e-readers were one of the biggest tech trends in evidence at CES 2010 in January. Everywhere you turned on the show floor, there was either a 3D TV or a wall of e-readers, to the point that the markets for both seemed saturated before they even got off the ground.

Now, six months out from CES, Panasonic is cleaning up with 3D TV and the tidal wave of e-readers that was supposed to wash up on US shores is… well, that part hasn’t worked out.

Twitter (as RTd by @DigiBookWorld):

RT @jennybullough: ebooks are growing despite, not because of, publishers’ efforts #dbw

RT @MatthewDiener: #dbw If the #s are reported in the same way by the same pubs month to month, then there is significance in the decline.

RT @MatthewDiener: #dbw The significance may simply be that publishers are making less money off each sale, but that is significant.

RT @eBookNoir: #DBW – this makes me think of isbns & wonder if pubs aren’t assigning these, r they tracking correctly or guesstimates?

RT @crych: Blio based on Microsoft’s XPS & WPF; additional support via Silverlight. Quark + Blio = 0 + 0 = 0 #DBW

RT @eBookNoir: #DBW – i see future where physical eReader will matter less as software advances, features r more s/ware related then h/ware

RT @crych: Quark made big push for autopublish to XML, ‘99/’00. Never went anywhere. Not all Q’s fault as front-end XML pub foundered. #DBW

RT @MissAdventuring: #dbw I would like to see Bowker keep tabs on everybody, reporting the #s. Maybe some way to allow anon input of stats?

RT @babetteross: #dbw the onus lies on publishers to be transparent on their figures @pablod (not saying this will happen)

RT @jfallone: #dbw Most detailed data may end up coming from Google Editions using Google Analytics.

RT @jvondeling: E-book sales dip? Looking hard to read the tea leaves. Thanks for great chat today by everyone in #DBW community.

Topic: Browser Wars 2.0

This episode of The Roundtable was webcast live at 1pm EDT on Thursday, June 3, 2010.

Subscribe to the audio podcast here. DBW Members can access the interactive video archive of The Roundtable here.

Featuring:

Laura Dawson, Publishing Industry Consultant, LJNDawson.com
Kate Rados, Dir. of Digital Initiatives, Chelsea Green

Special Guests:

Colleen Cunningham, Senior Book Designer, ADAMSmedia
Joshua Tallent, CEO, eBook Architects

Moderated by:

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, Dir. of Programming & Business Development, Digital Book World

Links:

Avoiding the eReader Wars – A Call for ePub Standards – Liz Castro

Every eReader I’ve seen to date would rather reformat your carefully crafted ePub document than trust you to have designed your book on purpose.

I truly believe that one of the reasons that the Web took off like it did was because there were no authorities on high dictating elitist rules of design. If you were bent on making a hideous page, there was no browser that was going to stand in your way, or choose more “appropriate” fonts or colors to save you from embarrassment.

And although there may have been a number of ugly pages at the beginning, this lack of censorship also lay the groundwork for a most beautiful explosion of democracy. Anyone could create a web site. And everyone did.

Book publishers agree change coming; details murky – Reuters

Both want their devices — the iPad and the Kindle — to be the one consumers use to read e-books, and each wants to be the biggest virtual store were such content is sold.

For Michael Serbinis, chief executive of Kobo, a company that allows users to buy e-books and read them on most devices, that battle is a distraction to the real changes coming.

“Today you can buy a book at Barnes and Noble and you can buy a book at Walmart and you don’t have to keep them in separate rooms in your house,” he said. “You buy a book from Apple and Amazon and you have got to keep it tied up with your Apple universe or your Kindle universe.”

Publishers want universal e-books; won’t cooperate to get them – Ars Technica

There are already several open e-book formats out there—ePub and MobiPocket are just a couple. The major e-book devices even support them; with a little bit of effort, you can get an ePub version of a book onto your Kindle or iPad in no time. The problem is the “effort” part—e-book sellers like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple heavily market their own stores and make it even easier for customers to simply buy the proprietary formats.

The downside, of course, is that customers are then locked into specific formats and devices. As noted in a recent Reuters piece, a Kindle book may be readable on a Kindle app on the iPad, but it’s still limited to the Kindle “universe”—other devices that lack Kindle apps won’t be able to handle those formats, and vice versa.

Apple is the new AOL and new Microsoft, and whoa that can’t be a good thing – BetaNews

1. AOL’s success wasn’t just about an easier online experience. AOL also wooed content providers to its closed network, in part because so many consumers signed up for the service. Once AOL reached a critical mass of subscribers, content providers and application developers were sure to follow — and they did, but doing things AOL’s way. It was AOL’s way or the Information Superhighway. Many partners chose the former. Apple’s situation is quite similar, when looking at iTunes, which is the content and applications hub for iPhone OS devices.

2. Microsoft didn’t just win the browser wars, it won developers. Microsoft feared that Netscape would establish the browser as an alternative platform to Windows. But the real threat was the Web. Microsoft delayed the Web threat, but couldn’t prevent it. Apple may be the creator of WebKit and may talk HTML5, but ultimately an open Web threatens its mobile platform much the way it did (and does) Windows. Apple is pushing an application stack that it solely controls. Such a model can’t coexist with an open Web, particularly one where, say, Google can bypass the iTunes App Store by releasing browser-based HTML5 apps.

Global E-books and The Agency Model at IDPF’s Digital Book 2010 – Publishers Weekly

Indeed, the session before the agency model panel focused on success stories from “The Global Digital Community” featuring presentations from LibreDigital’s Tyler Ruse, Daihei Shiohama from e-book developer Voyager Japan and Michael Tamblyn of e-book retailer Kobo. Ruse outlined the well known successes of romance publishers Harlequin and its Mills & Boon imprint and the effective use of embeddable book widgets that allowed readers to preview M&B titles.

Shiohama outlined a Japanese e-book market with 300,000 titles that had $600 million in sales in 2009. Eighty percent of the Japanese e-book market, Shiohama said, was via mobile phones and aimed at young women in their twenties. And Shiohama said he believes that digital manga, Japanese comics of all kinds, “offer a larger potential as e-books than text books. Text is limited but its possible to make manga available globally.” Tamblyn had a long list of international e-book accomplishments (one day Kobo sold books in 174 different countries) and a wish list for the category going forward: simpler territorial rights, simultaneous global release of print and e-books, more ePub in more places and global metadata with multi-territorial pricing and rights data.

Twitter (as RTd by @digibookworld):

RT @susanmpls: Today’s #DBW webinar is about the various ebook formats & the impact on book design. Fascinating topic.

RT @babetteross: #dbw slide showing the large array of logos/devices currently competing for ebook attention. Its confusing pre detail dive

RT @lizcastro: #dbw roundtable paraphrase “we don’t embed fonts or do complicated formatting because ereaders overwrite” @BookDesignGirl

RT @babetteross: #dbw ePub is not one size fits all. It doesn’t work for manga or reading right to left @jtallent

RT @girlsofair: ePub as a standard has a lot of potential – on the design side, too – i.e. http://epubzengarden.com #dbw

RT @babetteross: #dbw costs of conversion are high, pubs converting backlist slowly. huh, thought e=nearly free <- read that w/ scarasm.

RT @susanmpls: High conversion costs to epub all point to xml workflow. Can save costs if can create epub at composition phase #dbw

RT @babetteross: #dbw need standards for components in book, like bisac is a standard for shelving, proper identifiers affect SEO @ljndawson

RT @babetteross: The most important thing is for publishers to talk to one another and work out standards. @ljndawson #DBW <—-YES FTW

Topic: Live from BEA 2010

This episode of The Roundtable was webcast live from the NetGalley Booth (#3905) at BEA at 1:30pm EDT on Thursday, May 27, 2010.

Subscribe to the audio podcast here. DBW Members can access the interactive video archive of The Roundtable here.

Featuring:

Laura Dawson, Publishing Industry Consultant, LJNDawson.com
Pablo Defendini, Interactive Producer, Open Road Integrated Media
Kate Rados, Dir. of Digital Initiatives, Chelsea Green
Bridget Warren, Former Co-Owner, Vertigo Books

Special Guests:

Bethanne Patrick, Blogger, book reviewer, author interviewer, author –but above all, a reader
Susan Ruszala, Director of Marketing, NetGalley

Moderated by:

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, Dir. of Programming & Business Development, Digital Book World

Links:

Publishing and Perishing: The Book Industry Struggles With the Future – Sarah Weinman

Watching the panel brought to mind the feeling of passengers trapped on a speeding train headed for a wall that might be made of solid brick or soothing transparent liquid. Nobody knows what that wall will be, and the fear of brick is doing battle with the possibility of the more permeable stuff. Whatever happens, that train is going to crash, creating a kind of chaos, either for good or for ill. In the end, Newberg proved the most pointed — and funny — about publishing’s future. “I’m scared to death,” she said at one point. “One of the only good things about being old is that I’m not going to have to deal with this for long.”

BookExpo America 2010: Publishing in the Age of Abundance – Andrew Albanese

Copyright may not be dead, but it is irrelevant, noted Cursor’s Richard Nash at a Wednesday morning panel entitled Rights, Royalties & Retailers: What Works. In his opening remarks, Nash spoke about publishing in the “age of abundance,” telling attendees that success in the digital age is no longer about securing lifetime monopolies associated with copyright, or controlling the content pipe, but about “your moxie.” Nash, who announced his upstart Cursor model in PW last year, showcased the centerpiece of his business: three-year deals. “That doesn’t mean after three years, you lose your author,” Nash noted. “You renegotiate.”

BEA: are ebooks good for authors? – Paul Biba

Publishers have experienced an explosion in the amount of work they have to do. It seems likely that publishers are facing higher costs for less revenue. Three new kinds of digital opportunity: ebooks, apps and web based. For an author they represent a huge opportunity for an author, but it also represents a complete retooling of what a publishing company does. Need to become much more involved in consumer marketing and it will become part of every job function.

Topic: The Amazon Effect

This episode of The Roundtable was webcast live at 1pm EDT on Thursday, May 20, 2010.

Subscribe to the audio podcast here. DBW Members can access the interactive video archive of The Roundtable here.

Featuring:

Pablo Defendini, Interactive Producer, Open Road Integrated Media
Kate Rados, Dir. of Digital Initiatives, Chelsea Green
Bridget Warren, Former Co-Owner, Vertigo Books

Special Guests:

Jason Allen Ashlock, Founder, Movable Type Literary Group
Jason Pinter, Best-selling Author and Former Editor

Moderated by:

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, Dir. of Programming & Business Development, Digital Book World

Links:

Is Konrath’s SHAKEN Change You Can Believe In? – Guy LeCharles Gonzalez

Konrath makes several interesting points in explaining his decision that every publisher should take note of:

1) “I signed a print deal with a company that can email every single person who has every bought one of my books through their website, plus millions of potential new customers.” Publishers with direct connections to their readers are better equipped to compete in a digital book world than those who only sell through intermediaries.

2) “Amazon is smart, savvy, and pays attention to my suggestions. The Kindle version of Shaken is going to be released for $2.99.” Not $9.99 or $14.99, but closer to the $1.99 he had so much success with on his own.

SHAKEN Shakes Things Up – Lee Goldberg

I woke up this morning to a bunch of emails asking me why this is a significant development in publishing. How is this any different, they ask, than what Joe is already doing self-publishing  his unpublished work on the Kindle?

In essence, Amazon Encore is a publisher that has picked up Joe’s mid-list series from Hyperion. They are publishing the book first as an ebook then later as a trade paperback. The difference here is that the publisher is also the largest bookstore on earth and will put their considerable promotional and marketing might behind his book. But there’s a bit more to it than that.

Amazon as Book Publisher May Change the Game for the Industry – Sarah Weinman

In other words, if James Patterson wakes up and realizes he can get even richer by dealing directly with Amazon (or Apple, or Google, or Barnes & Noble, or all of them), and cuts out his longtime publisher Little, Brown, then and only then will the game change drastically — and it will also be game over for publishing as we know it.

The Konrath Effect: Will New Technology Ruin Talented Authors? - Jason Pinter

Amazon and other online retailers have made it incredibly easy to publish books on their servers. They give each author the ability to format books price them how the authors themselves see fit. There is certain freemarket sensibility here that is inspiring, and in a way each author becomes the proprietor of their own small business. However, I feel that the example of Konrath will inspire other, less successful and even less talented authors to publish their works online. They might see the Kindle as a bypass, a way to showcase their works that the Evil, Stupid Publishing Overlords in New York were too blind to realize are, in fact, literary masterpieces.

Barnes & Noble Announces PubIt!™, an Easy-to-Use Digital Publishing and Distribution Platform for Independent and Self-Publishers

The announcement marks Barnes & Noble’s latest move to continue to build one of the world’s largest digital catalogs, spanning eBooks, journals, periodicals and other types of reading material. PubIt! titles will be distributed through BN.COM and Barnes & Noble’s eBookstore, which currently offers more than one million digital titles to millions of dedicated customers in-store and online.

Face It – In Music, Devaluation Is The New Reality – PaidContent: UK

Actually, Rhapsody and Napster – and labels – have been asking this very question since the early part of last decade.  When digital music conferences were packed and billions were at stake, subscription success was almost viewed as a future truism by some.  A matter of time.  So many songs, so much access, how could it not make sense?

Maybe the new rule is that, if it looks good on paper, it’ll never work.  If it seems like an obvious winner, maybe it’s destined to lose.  But the seemingly-illogical consumer reaction can be dissected.

Twitter (as RTd by @digibookworld)

RT @jasonashlock: Konrath deal w/ AMZN is not a gamechanger, but it is a harbinger. @pablod #dbw

RT @babetteross: major authors are likely to stay with pubs to take advantage of the larger distribution/rights benefits @jasonpinter #dbw

RT @pa4culture: #DBW Pubs letting go of midlist authors – Amazon has positioned itself to scoop those authors up, utilize backlist for Kindle

RT @deegospel: Patterson’s web presence is about satisfying the reader, creating a community, which keeps him in current and wanted #dbw

RT @MissAdventuring: #dbw Healthy competition among tech and publishing will create some very interesting solutions tbd.

RT @tstcpublishing: and, as well, you have to wonder/worry about a vertical monopoly with Amazon #dbw

RT @pa4culture: #DBW In last moments @jasonpinter: 1st mention of bricks/mortar. Not liking the sustainability of B&N. @glecharles: B&N.

RT @muttinmall: Can’t count out a brand w/ 750 stores that are performing just fine. I think @glecharles is right; sales will be up. #DBW

RT @pa4culture: #DBW Good luck with figuring out who will be out in front by Jan 1. Oy. Managing the mishmash indeed.

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.