From the interview:

To the extent that there are now 51 books in the Workman backlist that have each sold more than a million copies–these are all books that started very small. So, it’s just relentless belief in a book, taking the time to make it the best book in the category, and then not treating it as a movie opening, treating it as a years and years long project…

The backlist is not really the bread and butter of Workman; it’s the entree.

A joint production of Digital Book World and Astral Road Brand Media: http://www.astralroad.com/. Founded by Rich Fahle, Astral Road Media is a full-service digital media agency, providing content strategy, design, video production, and other creative forms of social outreach for authors and content creators of all types.

The Digital Book World 2011 conference lived up to its billing. Each hour was filled with stimulating speakers and panels focused on every aspect of the emerging world of e-books.

Every aspect except one, that is.

As the three day event progressed I realized that one subject was being overlooked. I pored over the conference schedule seeking programming about print on demand. I found none.

Why should I have expected any? It was an e-book conference, not a print conference, right? Well yes, unless you think of PODs as e-books that are printed and bound. And I happen to think that’s what they are.

It’s not surprising that few think of print on demand as a form of electronic publishing. Because POD produces a tangible object – a printed book – we lump it together with other machine-made goods. Of course, all printed books are machine-made, whether offset in large quantities or printed on demand in small ones. But that’s where the resemblance stops.

Offset printing is designed to serve a traditional bookstore distribution model. After publishers make educated guesses about how many copies they can sell, they print copies to distribute in bookstores. Because they cannot predict how many copies will be sold, a great many will be returned to publishers for full credit. In the last few decades the return rate for trade books has soared to 50% and even higher, and if the decline of the publishing industry can be attributed to any single business practice, the consignment model of printing and distribution is it.

Contrast that with print on demand, in which copies are not printed until customers have ordered them on the Internet and paid for them in advance. Although books printed on demand are occasionally returned, the return rate in POD is negligible.

Unlike offset printing, POD is ideally suited for a book industry based on preordering – what might be called the Amazon model, a model that is transforming the retail landscape. (See A World without Inventory, Part 1 and Part 2)

The offset and on-demand business models could scarcely be more different from each other. On the other hand, POD and e-books are twins – fraternal twins perhaps, but twins nevertheless. (They were even born the same year, 1998.) The way you order a POD book is identical to the way you order an e-book. The only difference is that the printed volume is “uploaded” into your mailbox instead of your e-reading device.

When we founded E-Reads in 2000 we made POD one of our foundation stones. We were certain that until a viable popular e-reader was created, the reading device of choice would remain the printed book. This turned out to be correct. Until very recently, when the Kindle revolution took hold, POD sales represented about 50% of our revenues. It remains a significant contributor to our – and our authors’ – revenue stream. And of course it provides printed copies to those readers who prefer them to e-books. And there are still a lot of them.

It is also becoming a significant option for small presses and big publishers alike. David Taylor, President of Lightning Source Inc., arguably the largest POD press in the world, reported last spring that business was growing at a rate of 20% to 30% annually. Lightning prints, binds and ships 2 million copies a month on machines that run around the clock, a statistic all the more remarkable in view of the average number of copies per title they print on any given press run: two! And that’s just one POD company. There are others including one owned by a little outfit called Amazon. Many independent publishers are shifting to a purely POD model, and bigger houses use POD to keep books in print after inventories diminish and the cost of doing new print runs is prohibitive.

If we may therefore presume to make a suggestion to the program directors of Digital Book World, some attention to POD in 2012 would be welcome by many attendees. How do I know? Well, about 20,000 people have signed up for the On Demand Expo in Washington DC in March 2011.

Are PODs e-books? Without a doubt.

This post was originally published at E-Reads.com and has been reprinted with Mr. Curtis’ permission.

Richard Curtis, president of Richard Curtis Associates, Inc., is a leading New York literary agent; founder of E-Reads, an electronic book publisher; and a well-known author advocate. He is also the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction including several books about the publishing industry and is a former president of the Association of Authors’ Representatives.

“It’s true that teens are twice as likely, compared to the general public, to hold brand conversations online. Still, just 13% of teens’ brand discussions take place online (including email, texting/IM and social networking), versus 7% of the general public’s.”

85% Of Teen Brand Word-Of-Mouth Occurs Offline

The MediaPost blog, Engage:Teens has some interesting data on the latest findings from TalkTrack, an ongoing study conducted by market research firm Keller Fay Group, which specializes in word-of-mouth (WOM), and counters some of the conventional wisdom regarding teens, word-of-mouth, and analog vs. digital marketing.

Besides noting that the vast majority of teenagers’ word-of-mouth recommendations occur offline as opposed to only “3% through social networking sites,” the results were also surprisingly similar to that of consumers overall, with one notable exception: “the school environment is a close second (28%), whereas for the general public, the work environment is a distant second (12%).”

While several publishers are investing heavily in building teen-centric social networking sites, it would seem a more integrated approach that includes a healthy analog component will be critical to their long-term success.

In the article, Keller Fay Group CEO Ed Keller observes that “visual cues” are important word-of-mouth triggers, and those cues are primarily analog:

He cites recent research from Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger confirming that the products that tend to have the most sustained WOM over time are ones for which we most frequently see visual cues in our daily lives – frequently in the form of actual product usage, as well as advertising and marketing. This, says Keller, underlines the importance of taking a holistic, sustained approach to WOM that includes product usage, advertising, point-of-sale activity and promotional strategies. For marketers looking to engage teens, in particular, a key value in teen versus general public brand WOM behavior comparisons may lie in using them as a jumping-off point to analyze what controllable factors tend to drive WOM among teens — specifically, whether the channels and messages being employed by their brands facilitate sparking conversations about them, Keller says.

Keller’s point also raises some interesting questions about print books vs. ereaders:

• If books are “social objects” and book covers are effective word-of-mouth triggers, what happens when ereaders take the spotlight away from individual books and instead become the center of attention themselves?
• In light of ebook sales steadily increasing, and reports that they might now be cannibalizing print sales in science fiction and romance, how might that affect word-of-mouth, arguably one of the most valuable forms of marketing for any book, regardless of format or sales channel?
• Does a publishers’ brand and the communities they’re engaged with become even more critical areas of focus when ebooks are the dominant format?

What do you think?

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez is the Director of Programming & Business Development for Digital Book World, and a published poet, writer, and active blogger since 2003. An old and new media pragmatist, social media realist, and marketing strategist, he views publishing as a community service, and is optimistic about its future.

Publishers routinely outfit their backlist titles—the books that have been kicking around for years but still sell—with new jackets, hoping that an updated design will keep a classic book afloat in an easily distracted market. But Vintage Books has done something altogether different with the works of Vladimir Nabokov, timed to coincide with the posthumous release of his last, unfinished book, The Original of Laura.

Vintage art director John Gall asked a roster of jacket designers to create new covers for the twenty-one Nabokov titles that the company publishes, including such masterworks as Lolita, Pale Fire, and Pnin. (The existing Nabokov design scheme dates back to the late 1980s.) Gall gave the designers one stipulation: each cover would be a photograph of a specimen box, a nod to Nabokov’s passion for butterfly collecting. Within the framework of the box, and using layers of paper and insect pins, the designers were free to create more or less what they wished.

The new versions have been rolled out as existing back stock of old editions are depleted. “I thought that using the different designers would be a way to keep people interested in what was coming,” Gall says. “People stop paying attention after the major books are issued. I wanted them all to be important. So many backlist redesigns just slip themselves onto the bookshelves barely noticed.”

We asked seven of Gall’s selected designers to discuss Nabokov’s books, their cover art, and just how tricky it was to work within the confines of a butterfly box.

Michael Bierut on Speak, Memory:
“Most of the books on the list are novels. Speak, Memory, however, is a memoir. And it’s illustrated with photographs, mostly of Nabokov’s family and from his childhood. I brought my copy (a beat-up first edition) to the office, and we scanned the pictures. My idea from the start was to make the box look like a repository of old photos. Then I decided that the photos were too literal and we needed something to sort of filter them, to make them feel a bit more nostalgic, so we tried them with a piece of yellowed vellum on top. I liked this effect, and we started preparing the final version. While the assembly was underway, Katie Barcelona, the designer in our office who was helping me put it together, took a picture of the box with only the vellum in place, no old photos underneath. This version was surprisingly effective, and John agreed.”

Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin on Despair:
“We had a few ideas and were playing around with cut paper, and then it just came together. There’s a line in the book where the narrator sees a paint company’s truck go by. There is a rainbow on the side of the truck, and the colors are in the wrong order: RGOYBIV. The narrator meets a tramp who appears to be a mirror image of himself. I don’t want to give away the story, so let’s just say that our double flawed rainbows slide down into the black. … Sometimes restrictions make things easier. I read this quote the other day by Kierkegaard: ‘The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes. A solitary prisoner for life is extremely resourceful; to him a spider can be a source of great amusement.’”

Click here to see and read about the other redesigns by Peter Mendelsund (King, Queen, Knave); Sam Potts (The Real Life of Sebastian Knight); Paul Sahre (The Luzhin Defense); Martin Venezky (Glory); and Megan Wilson (The Enchanter).

[This article was originally published by Print and has been excerpted here with their permission.]

Peter Terzian is a Print contributing editor. His most recent book is Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers on the Albums that Changed their Lives. His Print article “Kill Your Darlings” featured book designers talking about their favorite cover designs that never made it to the shelf. He also recently interviewed David Pearson as part of his ongoing series on book cover design for printmag.com.

By Matthew LeBlanc, Mgr of Production and Prepress, Adams Media

The following tips are offered in conjunction with Matthew LeBlanc’s “Modifying and optimizing a traditional print workflow” presentation during the eBook 101: Designing for Kindle and ePub WEBcast.

[Download the PDF handout.]

• Do not use soft returns – they will register as hard returns in an ePub file
• All text must be styled with paragraph and character styles – create as many style sheets as needed in your InDesign file
• Replace multiple returns with space attached to a paragraph styles – multiple returns register as no additional space in an ePub file
• Text must be threaded in the correct order and art must be anchored – unthreaded text and unanchored objects are pushed to the end of the file
• Convert tables to lists – tables are not supported in all portable reading devices at this time
• Do not include the index from the printed book – page numbers will change across portable reading devices
• Include as much in the ePub TOC menu as possible – chapter numbers and titles and subheads all help the reader navigate quickly
• Delete page references from the galleys and replace with hyperlinks to chapters
• Break up the InDesign file according to section starts – this reduces the ePub file size and enables sections to start on new pages
• Metadata should include keywords that make your title easily accessible to reader searches
• Download and read eBooks yourself – learn from the quality and format of eBooks already on the market
• If a title is design-driven and art-heavy, consider releasing a PDF eBook instead
• Keep researching and learning – the technology is changing fast and will hopefully only make it easier to produce ePub files
• Test your eBook on as many devices as possible

View the full presentation, with audio, here.

Matthew LeBlanc is Manager of Production and Prepress, Adams Media. For over 20 years, Adams Media has built its reputation on providing practical and meaningful content that purposefully inspires, informs and impacts the lives of its readers, in accessible and innovatively designed formats, from authors who are recognized experts in their fields. Their imprints include Everything, Cup of Comfort and Platinum Press, and a variety best-selling self-help titles including Why Men Love Bitches; Mean Chicks, Cliques and Dirty Tricks; Knock ‘Em Dead; and Closing Techniques.

by Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, Director of Audience Development, Digital Book World

If you didn’t know any better, you might be inclined to believe that eBooks had already hit the tipping point, representing far more than their estimated “3% of total trade sales”. Even allowing for the possibility that actual eBook sales might be twice as high as reported, the attention they receive can sometimes seem to be a bit disconnected from reality.

At last week’s eBook Summit, Kneerim & Williams’ Steve Wasserman noted: “I suppose we could sum up this entire two-day conference under the headline ‘too early to tell’.” Of course, eBooks are an important part of Digital Book World’s program — we’ll cover everything from optimization to pricing to their effect on contracts, old and new — but as Wasserman suggested, where they will ultimately fit in the overall picture has yet to be determined.

As such, Digital Book World’s focus is on the big picture — transforming the underlying publishing business model to leverage the advantages, and overcome the challenges, offered by digitization, while recognizing that the model is still predominantly driven by print sales.

Our Supporting Sponsor, SBS Worldwide, has been an integral part of the publishing industry’s supply chain for 26 years as the driving force behind freight management. Their chairman, Steve Walker, will speak at Digital Book World on how the digital transition has affected the supply chain and the opportunities it’s created.

In their latest bulletin, they published a fun interview with me about Digital Book World, reprinted here with their permission:

Registrations for January’s Digital Book World conference in New York, organized by New York-based F&W Media, are in line with expectations – and that’s good news for Guy Gonzalez since his business card reads ‘Director, Audience Development, F&W Media’.“We know potential attendees have to justify the expense of attending and the programme our conference chair Mike Shatzkin (of the Idea Logical Company) and his advisory board have come up with is absolutely on point,” says Gonzalez.  “Reaction to Digital Book World’s underlying premise of ‘less talk, more action’ has been overwhelmingly positive.”

Gonzalez adds that registrants to date represent a broad range of publishers, from Random House and National Geographic to smaller houses such as romance and ‘new worlds’ publisher Samhain of Macon, Georgia.  Gonzalez has a feeling that the talk by Brian Napack of Macmillan on ebooks and piracy “will get some people heated up”, while, as an advocate of publishers moving to “a community-oriented model”, he’s especially looking forward to the presentations by Sourcebooks’ Dominique Raccah and Hay House’s Reid Tracy.

There is much talk about iPod moments in the digital arena these days, but Gonzalez thinks we are not even close yet.  “Books are not like music, at least when it comes to fiction. The album was a commercial construct that digitization made irrelevant.  The ability to purchase only the singles you wanted couldn’t be controlled by record labels once they were available digitally. No one wants to buy Chapter 15 of The Lost Symbol!

“There’s a huge opportunity to revive short stories and poetry, though. And in non-fiction, especially areas like textbooks, cookbooks, and how-to, the iPod moment is already here.  Many publishers, including F+ W Media, slice and dice their content for purchase by chapters or projects.”

There is also much speculation on what the size of the digital market is currently, and how much it will grow.  Gonzalez says: “I’ve seen estimates that put eBooks around 2-5% of total sales, roughly similar to that of audiobooks. They certainly have the potential to expand the market and represent a bigger share down the road, especially as awareness has spiked, but I think projecting anything higher than 25% in the next 5 years is being irrationally exuberant. Certain niches, though, will be much higher than that.”

Born and raised in New York City, “although I’ve tried to move away several times”, Gonzalez now lives across the river in New Jersey with his wife and two children.  He’s worked in publishing since leaving the army in 1993, chiefly on the magazine side of the industry which explains his enthusiasm for the niche approach and engaging directly with readers.  “There are a lot of lessons for book publishers in the current state of the magazine industry, perhaps the most critical being that the closer you are to your readers, the more likely you’ll be to weather the storm of events beyond your control.”

What does he like to do when he’s not immersed in the digital world?  “If you ask my wife she’ll say ‘not enough!’ – but I’m a writer too, so the fate of the publishing industry has personal relevance beyond my day job.”

And finally, it has to asked: “Mets or Yankies?”  “Sadly, the Mets.  I’ve always had a thing for the underdog.  Might explain my love for print…”

Considering print still represents 94-97% of total sales, it’s a bit crazy to think of it as the underdog, no?

The publishing industry is notorious for jumping on new trends and milking them dry — making as many bad calls as good ones in the process — but despite the over-the-top hype around eReaders this holiday season, the reality is the digital transition is much more evolution than revoluti0n. Publishers who take the time to develop an integrated and viable long-term digital strategy are far more likely to survive than those who panic and jump on the fledgling bandwagon.

A love for print is neither nostalgic, nor impractical; for most established publishers, it’s the lifeblood that will fuel their transformation, and if done right, could potentially expand the market for books, not cannibalize it.