In this bi-weekly 1-hour WEBcast, the Roundtable offers insight into the greater book publishing ecosystem with actionable case studies from practitioners in publishing.

In this special presentation from the Roundtable, author and ebook consultant Carolyn McCray will follow up on her successful Optimizing Your Titles For Online Bookselling Part 1, and share her experience with online bookselling with a focus on the largest retailer for ebooks, Amazon. She’ll look at how publishers and authors can use pricing tactics, groups of titles, and the Amazon recommendation queues to promote both front and backlist titles.

Bonus: If you are a publisher or author with ebook titles on Amazon that you would like Carolyn to review and comment on during the WEBcast, post a comment below with a link.

ON THE AGENDA:

• Amazon’s Internal Recommendation Queues – Some Educated Guesses
• The Life Span of a Great Sale
• The See-Saw of Royalties versus Rankings
• “Price Pulsing”
• Rotating your “Pulse” for Maximum Sales
• “Sales Nodes” – The Functional Unit of Backlists
• Getting your “Node” On
• Putting it all together: Recommendation Queue Lifespans, Price Pulsing within a Sales Node

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Trade publishers, authors, marketers, and online merchandisers interested in the Amazon Kindle marketplace.

The Roundtable will be broadcast on October 20th at 1 PM EST / 10 AM PST.

Register For the Roundtable!

THE ROUNDTABLE

Carolyn McCray, Author and Ebook Consultant

THE MODERATOR

Matt Mullin, Community Relations Manager, Digital Book World

Join the Roundtable for provocative discussions every two weeks that set the tone for another exciting year in the publishing industry!

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

AUDIO

A free WEBcast from Digital Book World and sponsored by Ingram.

Thanks to Ingram’s sponsorship, this WEBcast has been made available as an archive for a limited time.

Click here for the PC version and here for the Mac version.

This WEBcast aired on October 25th at 1 PM ET / 10 AM PT for the latest trends in online book marketing.

When your titles move off of book store tabletops, publishers are increasingly challenged to keep their titles top of mind. Luckily, smart ebook marketers are finding ways to build buzz, gain marketing traction, and ensure that books remain discoverable well beyond pub date. In this free WEBcast, “Ebook Marketing: New Skills and Fresh Opportunities” we will explore the opportunities that ebooks present for marketing your titles and how to optimize your titles for discovery.  These tactics often fall into two silos: the “active” efforts done by publicists and marketers to make sure their titles hook an online browser through reviews and other media and the more “passive” effects of sound metadata strategy. Taken together, these approaches make great titles both desirable and findable.

We’ve assembled experts in marketing and metadata to show you how to get your ebooks in front of readers across all major retail channels and into the hands of fans.

ATTENDEES WILL LEARN

• Tips and case studies in successful online marketing campaigns
• How to connect with non-traditional markets during your publicity campaign, and how some publishers are breaking out of niche communities to reach a broad audience
• Using facebook demographic data to find the right audience for your titles
• Creating an authentic connection with readers through your marketing
• How to optimize your title metadata to make sure readers can find it from the web and devices
• What retailers are really looking for in your metadata
• Top mistakes in publisher metadata that are costing them sales
• How you can enhance your metadata to get picked up in search engines and storefronts

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

• Publishers interested in increasing the discoverability of their titles in their frontlist and backlist.
• Marketers looking for new audiences for their best titles.
• Agents and authors exploring digital possibilities for their work.

PANELISTS

• Miriam Parker, Marketing Director, Mulholland Books
• Buffy Bales, Manager, Digital Products, Ingram Content Group
• David Bernheisel, Client Integration Specialist, Ingram Content Group

MODERATOR

• Matt Mullin, Community Relations Manager, Digital Book World

If you’re on Twitter, why not tell your followers about this WEBcast?

I’m attending “Ebook Marketing: New Skills and Fresh Opportunities” on 10/25 @ 1pm ET http://bit.ly/p72Ao9 #DBW

SPONSOR

As a leader in distribution, print-on-demand and digital solutions, Ingram provides librarians and booksellers with immediate access to the largest selection of trade books, e-books, interactive textbooks, audio, magazines, and other book-related products in the industry. Publishers rely on Ingram as a key provider of demand-driven printing, digital, and marketing solutions. We provide secure, cutting-edge, and profitable answers to the questions our publisher partners have about the changing opportunities in the book industry.

By Matthew Diener, Manager, Digital Formats, Loyola Press |

As I have been preparing my presentation for Digital Asset Management Chicago 2011, I have been thinking quite a bit about metadata and how publishers manage it. Carolyn McCray has posted some intriguing articles at the Digital Book World site examining how metadata can be used to increase sales: Best Practices for Amazon eBook Sales, Maximizing Digital Book Sales, Part 1; and Maximizing Digital Book Sales, Part 2. Carolyn also participated in a great DBW Roundtable with Matt Mullin on how to Optimize Your Titles for Online Bookselling.

The key on Amazon is to reduce each customer’s resistance to buying the book. There are two main ways to do this according to Carolyn. The first is optimizing your product description along the lines of this formula: an endorsement from an authoritative source, a short product description, and a strong call to action (buy this book if you love . . .). The second is to use the book category to place the book in less competitive company. This will allow your book to more easily reach the top 100 for the category, and once this ranking in the top 100 shows up on your product page, there is even less resistance to customers to buy the book.

The book description is part of the metadata. Carolyn suggests that publishers should to A/B testing week to week until they find a description that sells the book. If sales begin to drop at some point, start testing again, and change the description.

The categories on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing that publishers/authors can choose are actually BISAC codes. While it is best practice to choose a BISAC code the most fully defines the book, Carolyn is suggesting going even further than this. She suggests that publishers look at different possible BISAC categories and choose one that is least competitive. This is similar to checking Good AdWords to determine which keywords you use on your product description on your own homepage.

Michael Bhaskar, Digital Publishing Director, Profile Books, makes some similar points on his post on metadata in publishing. The two most important paragraphs in this short post are:

Metadata influences search, it influences territoriality and categorisation – metadata is the advert, the sales pitch, the sell in and the advance promotion; metadata is the random book left on the table, the fervent recommendation of a friend, the arresting blurb, the good review, serving the random browser and the determined buyer alike.

Bad metadata means your book is invisible and un-purchasable. Yet compared to many industries either totally or increasingly focused on digital commerce, publishing lags in its understanding of SEO practices, metadata standards implementation, data collection and analysis and systems investment.

I think that most publishers have embraced SEO to some degree on their Web sites. I think the next place the industry needs to go is to MDO—Metadata Optimization. Many publishers treat metadata as something to be completed and left alone. I believe there are huge opportunities if publishers instead begin to optimize metadata, taking advantage of the ability of ONIX feeds to update metadata at all trading partners. This will allow publishers to match product descriptions to marketing and PR campaigns, update them when there are major media appearances, and tie products to current events.

I am sure that a book should have a different description as it moves from pre-publication, to new release, to the heart of the marketing campaign, to backlist. How should they be different? I honestly don’t know at this point.

With discoverability on the Web becoming such a crucial issue with books—especially ebooks—I don’t think publishers can afford to post the metadata for their books and leave it as is for the life of the book. They need to treat metadata as a tool to be managed to maximize the life-time sales of each book. Will it be easy? No. Will it take time? Yes. But how can you afford not to pursue MDO?

What do you think? Are you optimizing your metadata? How?

This post was originally published at Post-Apocalyptic Sunrise and has been reprinted here with Mr. Diener’s permission.

Matthew Diener is the manager of digital formats at Loyola Press. He is currently responsible for the conversion of Loyola Press trade books to eBooks and for managing the company’s product metadata. He has twenty years experience in the book and publishing business, including bookstore retailing, library management, editorial acquisition and development in both trade and curriculum, online book reviews, and eBook conversion and digital strategy.

The DBW Roundtable

In this bi-weekly 1-hour WEBcast, the Roundtable offers insight into the greater book publishing ecosystem with actionable case studies from practitioners in publishing.

Following the enormously successful Roundtable Review of Ebook Design and Formatting with Peter Meyers and Anne Kostick, this edition of the Roundtable will look at ebooks once they’ve arrived in the retailing environment. While many publishers have long mastered the art of selling titles in bookstores, proper merchandising in places like the Kindle store require new skill sets and practices.

In this special exclusive presentation from the Roundtable, author and ebook consultant Carolyn McCray will share her experience with online bookselling with a focus on the largest retailer for ebooks, Amazon. She’ll look at publishers who are highlighting their books effectively in their consumer facing metadata: product descriptions, blurbs, and more.

Bonus: If you are a publisher or author with ebook titles on Amazon that you would like Carolyn to review and comment on during the WEBcast, post a comment below with a link.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:

• Best practices for optimizing your product descriptions, editorial reviews, and more.
• Getting your books into the right categories and bestseller lists for maximum exposure.
• How people make purchase decisions in an online environment.
• What to do to make sure that readers are discovering your titles internally and externally.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Trade publishers, authors, marketers, and online merchandisers interested in the Amazon Kindle marketplace.

The Roundtable will be broadcast on August 25th at 1 PM EST / 10 AM PST.

Register For the Roundtable!

THE ROUNDTABLE

Carolyn McCray, Author and Ebook Consultant

THE MODERATOR

Matt Mullin, Community Relations Manager, Digital Book World

Join the Roundtable for provocative discussions every two weeks that set the tone for another exciting year in the publishing industry!

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

AUDIO

The DBW Roundtable

In this recurring bi-weekly 1-hour WEBcast, the Roundtable offers insight into the greater book publishing ecosystem with actionable case studies from practitioners in publishing.

Among the questions we examined:

With shrinking shelf area and the continued rise of online bookselling, both print and in e, how do publishers ensure that readers find their books? Is there a legitimate replacement for lost co-op in bookstores? In the ebook space, how can publishers address recent trends that show greater concentration in ebook sales around big bestsellers? What are the key pieces of metadata that every book must include to be discovered?

Register Now!

THE ROUNDTABLE

• Brett Sandusky, Director of Product Innovation, Kaplan
• Laura Dawson, Content Chief, Firebrand Technologies
• Pablo Defendini, Interactive Producer, Open Road Integrated Media
• Kate Rados, Group Marketing Director, F+W Media

THE MODERATOR

• Matt Mullin, Community Relations Manager, Digital Book World

Join the Roundtable for provocative discussions that will set the tone for what promises to be another exciting year in the publishing industry!

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

AUDIO

This episode of The Roundtable was webcast live on Thursday, April 7th @ 1pm ET / 10am PT.

LINKS

Do ebook consumers love bestsellers, or does it just look that way?
Mike Shatzkin, Idea Logical Company

In theory, the more books are sold online the more sales should move to the long tail. Online bookstores have the advantage of “unlimited shelf space”…But it doesn’t seem to be working out that way. While overall ebook sales in the US are still calculated in the 8-10% range of publishers’ revenues, so we’d reckon perhaps 10-12% of unit sales (ebooks generally, though not always, yield slightly less revenue per copy than print) or maybe even 15% for a publisher still drawing big print sales on books not available as or suitable for ebooks for whatever reason, we’re hearing frequent reports of big books selling 50% or more of their units as ebooks, particularly in the early weeks of their life. So it would appear that ebook sales are even more concentrated across a smaller title band than print.

As E-book Sales Explode, Consumption Patterns Change
Cyndy Aleo, Business Week

Readers tend toward a favorite author, category, personal recommendations, or flap text. Thirty percent of books are still discovered in the brick-and-mortar bookstore, but many are then purchased in e-book format. The discovery model for publishers on e-readers is shifting; people buy a narrower set of books, because they have no idea what’s out there. They need a new way to discover books, but brick-and-mortar stores are still the best advertising.

A Self-Publisher’s Guide to Metadata for Books
Carla King, MediaShift

Metadata used to be a wallflower, hiding out at the library with the Dewey Decimal system. Now it’s at every party, flitting about gathering and sorting books on mobile devices, e-readers, and websites. Metadata is a core component of digital information and news; so good book metadata is good book marketing. It’s an essential tool for all self-publishers.

Freemium Boosts e-Book Sales for F+W
Judith Rosen, Publishers Weekly

On January 27 F+W launched its first major freemium campaign across four e-book platforms: the Kindle, the Nook, Apple iBookstore, and Google. Within 24 hours, A Child al Confino had not only moved into the #1 position on Amazon’s free e-book bestseller list, but it stayed there for several days. “Traditionally in marketing, it peaks,” says Rados. “The fact that it held the position is exciting and encouraging.”

Best Practices For Amazon Ebook Sales
Carolyn McCray, Digital Book World

Rather than thinking of it as a webpage, I recommend that you think of your book’s Amazon.com page as a ¼ page ad in a glossy magazine. You want to build excitement, hype, and the urge to buy rather than dutifully explaining your product.

By Emily Williams, Co-Chair, BISG Rights Subcommittee

Anyone who writes about ebook rights and territorial issues hears sooner or later from the Australians.They are mad, and they want answers.

The ebook, with its digital power to leap oceans in milliseconds, seems perfectly suited to this market, geographically but not culturally isolated from its English-speaking cousins. So, although the Australian market has been the slowest of the major English-language markets to adopt ebooks (there is no local flavor of Amazon; Kobo launched in May and iBooks arrived last month), early adopters down under were quick to explore the advantages of shopping for their reads on the borderless interwebs.

In those heady early days, the selection was nowhere near as good as it is today, but Australian readers could buy just about any ebook they found on offer. Ebooks were a new thing, and sales were still tiny, and publishers didn’t necessarily see that implementing the changes in their systems needed to enforce territorial controls was a financially worthwhile proposition.

Bob LiVolsi, founder of the independent ebookstore BooksOnBoard, remembers: “In response to a proactive inquiry in November 2008, personnel from two publishers (now agency publishers) actually told me NOT to bother when we talked to them about implementing territory controls. But when volume started hitting over the subsequent months, all hell broke loose and there was a rush to implement territory controls.”

This was the first moment of disillusionment for Australian readers. US publishers, spurred by Amazon,​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ were the first to ramp up​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ ebook publishing, but they didn’t always control world English language rights to their books. UK publishers or local Australian publishers, who did control rights for Australia, were working in markets where ebooks were growing much more slowly, and in many cases hadn’t gotten around to publishing ebook versions of the same titles. This led to an exasperating situation where Australian readers could find US ebooks online, but when they went to buy some titles they would be rejected with a cryptic note about territorial controls – essentially, go away, we don’t want your money.

(Okay, in fact the US publisher was not legally allowed to sell the book in Australia, but some highly motivated readers were nonetheless understandably upset.)

Agency Full Stop

Then came agency, and things got worse. (At least for a time.)

I’ve talked​​​​​ with a few ​​​​​​people inside big houses​​​​​, and here’s what I think happened. Not quite a year ago, Apple launched its iPad – a big new product out to dominate its category and, as always in the tech world of lucrative devices​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​, cloaked in secrecy​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ until the last possible moment. I have no idea how far ahead of the launch publishers were talking to Apple, but the agency model that five majors rushed to adopt in order join the iBooks store necessitated a massive change in the way they had always operated and implementation was nowhere near smooth.

Apple offered these five publishers the leverage to get out from under Amazon’s monopoly of the ebook market, but the changes this required had to happen on Apple’s schedule – which is to say, right away. Publishers scrambled to get legal issues worked out, new contracts in place with retailers and distributors, and new systems in place to handle the accounting and data. As the seller of record, publishers now had complete control over pricing, but also had to collect sales tax and take on a different legal role with their supply chain partners and their customers.

Getting agency in place for US readers was messy in a big way (for gory details see our earlier post, Indies to Agency Five: Where’s the Love?). Publishers needed more time to get their footing in international markets and as a result the agency houses temporarily cut off all sales of their ebooks abroad.

Australian readers were already mad, you can imagine how they felt about that.

Indie ebookseller Diesel got so many complaints they wrote an apologetic blog post asking ”What’s Up with Down Under?” Kelley Allen, the store’s director, explains, “Over 40% of our customers are outside of the US. We hear a lot of complaints from some very vocal and annoyed customers from the English-speaking countries such as Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand.”

Publishers did eventually restore sales to customers abroad, first in Canada, then the UK, and then (or in some cases: soon) in Australia. But all of this behind the scenes scrambling was opaque not only to foreign customers but to the retailers who are supposed to be publishers’ business partners. “Territory changes have been challenging,” ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​says Bob LiVolsi, “in that the publishers seem to have been thinking this through as they implemented at the tactical level, allowing retailers no runway for planning and inadequate data to anticipate the impact on customers.”

Readers Get Mad

With communication lacking, new territorial limitations just showed up in the data that retailers get from publishers, and the booksellers’ systems then implemented the territorial controls without the booksellers themselves having any idea what had happened…until they started hearing from pissed off customers.

“Communication of territory rights are by title and they are in the metadata feeds (the book’s ISBN, pricing, title, author, annotations, territory rights, etc.),” explains LiVolsi. “For example, if we receive 100,000 ebooks in a given day’s metadata feed, which happens often, the only way we can know what territory changes there are would be to go through and build a comparison table title by title, an unwieldy task that would be very costly. So, our systems automatically restrict territories based on the territory assignments by title in the metadata feed. Then, we have a funnel that confirms the customer’s territory of residence that gets two to three country verifications before allowing a checkout.”

The consequences were predictable. “About 55% of our customer base is non-US, representing about 47% of revenue,” says LiVolsi. “Australia and South Africa were probably most affected in the English-​​speaking world by territory adjustments. That appears to be getting fixed now for Australia. It’s unclear what the course is for South Africa.”

And of course, now the other shoe is dropping, as Apple and Amazon ramp up their ebookstores in the UK, major British publishers are now completing the switch to the agency model. “The UK is now transitioning to agency and our supply from a couple agency publishers there is again getting cut off temporarily as publishers and wholesalers negotiate,” says LiVolsi. “So the impact of that is yet to be assessed. On the other hand, agency publishers aren’t nearly as important to our UK customer base and the impact is likely to be relatively minor.”

The Internet Doesn’t Solve All Problems

To be fair, rolling out a new global sales model is devilishly complicated. The simple transaction – here’s my product, give me your money – that the internet seems to enable is not simple at all when it comes to navigating different commercial, legal, and taxation requirements in multiple countries. For evidence, one bookseller pointed to the U.S.-only launch of the Google ebook platform, noting that not even Google, up to its eyebrows in money and technical know-how, could pull off a launch in more than one country at a time.

In one sense, the problem is simple. Ebooks are in a messy transition period, during which access is not yet universal – all readers in all markets cannot all buy the same books. Readers in smaller markets with fewer local ebooksellers are at a disadvantage until the publishers and retailers get the international e-commerce thing sorted out.

(As for the question of why territorial controls need to exist at all, that’s a bigger conversation. Here’s a start.)

There is one thing the internet enables, however, that would go a long way toward minimizing the backlash from early (and loyal! and engaged!) ebook customers: transparent communication. LiVolsi holds up digital leader Harlequin as an example of how publishers should be working with their readers and retail partners.

“Harlequin’s team gets directly involved with us, sharing between us important information about strategy, customer demographics and trends,” he says. “That then integrates into marketing strategy and the result is superior. Nuance upon nuance over time build big success.”

Emily Williams is co-chair of the BISG Rights Subcommittee and a former literary scout who currently works as an independent publishing consultant.

Workflows in production departments are already complex and tightly scheduled. Adding the production of digital publications increases that complexity greatly, especially as documents must be prepared in a number of formats and for a variety of reading devices.

Being able to discuss these issues with colleagues from a variety of publishers can offer invaluable insights, but the opportunity to do so is often limited to networking at expensive conferences and those fortunate enough to be able to attend them.

Twitter has become a great platform for these types of discussions, though, enabling a broad group of participants to come together via a unique hashtag and organize an ongoing dialogue, eg: Laura Dawson‘s weekly #ISBNhour discussion (every Friday @ Noon EST).

The goal of the new #ePrdctn hashtag is to discuss practical design and production of digital publications, focusing on workflows (especially where print production is carried on simultaneously), tools, standards and formats, metadata, costs, and other issues facing in-house production departments and free-lancers doing production work for publishers. We’ll also be looking at coordination of the production department’s new workflows with editorial, sales, marketing, and management.

Of course, anyone producing digital publications is welcome to follow along and join in.

The topic for our first session on Wednesday, May 5th will be how the order of the parts of digital publications should differ from their order in a printed publication. Also on the list are best practices for handling graphics, cover images, and thumbnails in ePub format, and the advantages of and procedures for having books published on the iPad as applications.

The first #ePrdctn hour will be on Wednesday, May 5th, and it will run from 8-9am PDST (11am-Noon EDST), so our European colleagues can join in the discussion. It will be coordinated by Lindsey Thomas Martin; please mention suggestions for future topics to @crych.

NOTE: We will skip May 12th so as not to conflict with InDesign Secrets Live! and Digital Book World’s next eBook 201 WEBcast; sessions will resume Wednesday, May 19th@ 11am EDST.

Colleen Cunningham is the Senior Book Designer for Adams Media, a division of F+W Media.

Laura Dawson has been in the publishing business since she was “a little baby intern in 1986,” and even before then, she worked at her local public library.

“I always wanted to be in the book world.”

And now that her love for books and love for technology have collided, she couldn’t be happier.

“That happened in 1995,” Dawson explained, “when I began working with Muze. We licensed Bowker’s Books in Print and began hanging all these cool features on the spine of that metadata. We created an amazing search interface that was never fully implemented, but it taught me an awful lot about how technology works to lead people to books. I then went to BarnesandNoble.com and did similar metadata projects, before landing at a library software developer, where I worked on powering user interfaces for public and academic libraries.”

“I’ve been consulting since 2003. I really love consulting because it brings me in front of a lot of different sorts of problems, so I am never bored and always learning.”

Today, her clients consist of publishers and the service providers who need help talking to them, “mostly technology firms who are very aware that they want to penetrate an insular industry, and they need help navigating that.”

But as we all know, the publishing industry is rapidly changing, and someone can have a quarter century of experience and still be completely out of the loop. Not Dawson, though. She recognizes those changes — both the obvious, like the increasing integration of technology in the publishing process, and the less obvious, like fear.

Fear?

“Publishing didn’t used to be afraid,” said Dawson.

“They told everyone what to read (what they were going to publish), and people consumed it the way they were told to (via book reviews, ads). Now, publishing has gone from a business-to-business operation (publisher-to-distributor-to-bookstore-to-consumer) to a business-to-consumer operation, and so very many publishers have no idea why they are suddenly being portrayed as out of touch, clueless, etc. They’re doing what they’ve always done!”

“But the market has shifted; consumers now have greater power than they ever did, and much more book finding is happening on the web. Publishers have been, in my experience, unnerved by that. I spend a lot of my time explaining things to publishers that I, as a consumer, take for granted. So that requires a lot of patience and empathy. And periodic forays into hobbies which have nothing whatever to do with publishing.”

Among the things she hates are “jargon, snobbery, and the assumption that social media is going to ‘save publishing’,” and she sees the biggest challenge being “the myth busting and political wrangling. The only thing that’s going to save publishing is getting books (in whatever format) to readers (in the format they want).”

Not all these changes are bad though, and for many, fear isn’t necessarily the most appropriate response. Dawson loves the opportunity for innovation (there’s that word again); she loves the new tools that are out there that “help bring books to market more effectively. I’m loving the recognition that identifiers and metadata are important marketing tools – the fact that all this wonky stuff I’ve been so passionate about is finally seeing the light of day!”

Anyone in publishing who you really admire? Who’s creativity you want to emulate?

I am a HUGE Brian O’Leary fangirl. He’s so incredibly smart, thoughtful, and I love how methodical he is. And, of course, I also admire Richard Nash and his Cursor project.

But I also have so much respect for those in production and IT; the folks who are not, by and large, considered creative by their companies. Anyone who can turn out a good ONIX feed, or design a functional eBook conversion process, or package books together in a database and license it — these are the people I have the most admiration for. They are grappling with data and structure issues every day, and are on the front lines of the stuff that consultants like me pontificate about. I rely on them to tell me when I’m full of it.

How are you staying up-to-date with industry news? How do you stay on the ball?

Publishers Lunch, of course. And Twitter; I am getting most of my industry news from Twitter these days. @jafurtado is a one-man news bureau. There are also some blogs I follow closely: Brian O’Leary’s, Jane Litte’s and Kassia Krozier’s. And I belong to a listserv that is a never-ending source of news and opinion – very valuable.

Future of publishing – half full or half empty?

The future of publishing is packed full! No halvsies.

Laura Dawson is a 20+ year veteran of the book industry, specializing in its technology issues. She has worked at Doubleday, Muze, Barnes & Noble.com, SirsiDynix, and as an independent consultant whose clients have included R. R. Bowker, Chuckwalla, McGraw-Hill, the Book Industry Study Group, Ingram Library Services, Audible, IBS/Bookmaster North America, Harvard University Press, Yale University Press, Lexis-Nexis, Cosimo Books, and Dial-A-Book.

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

Topic: eBook Hide-and-Seek

This episode of The Roundtable was webcast live at 1pm EDT on Thursday, April 8, 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, Producer/Showrunner, Tor.com
Kate Rados, Dir. of Digital Initiatives, Chelsea Green
Bridget Warren, Former Co-Owner, Vertigo Books

Moderated by:

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

Links:

What the iPad Told Me, LJNDawson.com

Search is not easy to understand. Most of us type something into the Google box, and expect that what comes up will be appropriate, correct, the best resources out there on the subject. Librarians will tell you that this is a fallacy – there are plenty of things Google doesn’t pick up. Just because a searcher doesn’t find it, doesn’t mean it’s not there.

Much of that “findability” (and I know I beat this drum a lot, but it still, apparently, needs beating) has to do with a book’s metadata. Not simply title and author, but the BISAC codes, the description, the table of contents – anything that describes what the book is about. If a publisher is not paying attention to metadata, it will be much harder for readers to find that publisher’s books.

iBooks on iPad: Home Field Advantage, The New Sleekness

You can buy books directly from within iBooks by flipping your bookshelf—secret passageway style—over to the iBookstore, the new section of the iTunes store and the focus of all the recent agency model drama in the publishing industry. The initial selection is slim, and the bookstore suffers from the same lack of easy discoverability/browseability that plagues the rest of the iTunes stores—a situation that is not helped by the absolutely craptacular state of book metadata coming from publishers. Have I mentioned that publishers really need to step up their metadata game? No, really. Seriously, publishers. You’re shooting yourselves—and your authors—in the foot by not making sure all your books are properly tagged.

Hands On: Apple iBooks, Gizmodo

Truthfully, I don’t want a computer algorithm to recommend me music. But where do I really, really want group-think to point me in the way to a tailored preference list? Books. I want to type in my favorite authors and books, then I want to know what I should read. Amazon is great at suggesting purchases based upon my browsing and search histories. Go ahead, take my privacy. I just want a list of some decent cyberpunk.

iPad is the Google Killer, Mele’s Musings

And then it dawned on me.  I had just spent hours consuming content, connecting with brands I like, and discovering new and wonderful things to do with my iPad.  And I never opened my browser.

I didn’t need Google.

The iPad, Transmedia, and the Future of Publishers, Digital Book World

Why pay $9.99+ for a single eBook, when there are far more compelling apps available for much less money, all based on familiar brands, that take full advantage of the $500+ investment in the device? At $9.99, eBooks are competing with everything from Netflix, which allows you to stream unlimited movies for $8.99/month, to well-known games like Scrabble, Need for Speed, Command and Conquer, and Civilization Revolution, all of which are $9.99 – $14.99.

Twitter (as RTd BY @DigiBookWorld):

@DigiBookWorld: “Most Web Users Rely on Cross-Channel Shopping: Browse online more often than in stores” @eMarketer http://bit.ly/aRqkCm cc: @ljndawson #dbw

@eBookNoir: #dbw – metadata just needs to be there period, libraries, retail and all markets need the data to discover content.

@MissAdventuring: Book Industry Study Group’s product metadata best practices: http://bit.ly/cVyiU1 #dbw

@Knownhuman: Best #DBW yet, love geeking out about metadata. (Twas fun!)

@DigiBookWorld: “The ePub eBooks Metadata Mess” @mikecane http://bit.ly/aM30SF (The “haggis” post referred to on #DBW Roundtable.)

@DigiBookWorld: “It’s About Search, Stupid” Devereux Chatillon on #GBS http://huff.to/b8v92b #dbw

Over 25 years, Apple has earned the privilege of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to their tribe. They can get the word out about a new product without a lot of money because one by one, they’ve signed people up. They didn’t sell 300,000 iPads in one day, they sold them over a few decades.

–“Secrets of the biggest selling launch ever”, Seth Godin

The iPad reviews are in, and whether positive, negative or on the fence loaded with caveats, the most common underlying thread is that Apple has created a device that could eventually change the way we acquire, consume and interact with digital content.

This potential change is important to publishers of all kinds, but particularly to those of books as the eBook experience on the iPad is arguably one of its weakest features.

While iBooks, Kindle and Kobo (the three eBook apps I tested) are all solid readers with varying appeal, replicating the reading experience of a print book via static EPUB files (on a device that weighs twice as much an average book!) is like driving a Porsche to the corner store for a six-pack of Old Milwaukee. While test-driving eBooks on the iPad, I limited myself to free books, samples, and in the case of Kindle, ebooks my wife and I have already purchased for her Gen 1 device (which she loves, BTW, despite the limited inventory of books she actually wants to read), and I wasn’t terribly impressed by any of them.

I also downloaded a variety of other apps, all free, and NPR, Epicurious and Disney’s Toy Story each demonstrated the real potential for delivering a truly engaging, innovative reading experience that leverages the iPad’s strengths and comes close to aligning with Apple’s marketing of it as a “magical and revolutionary” device. The Marvel Comics app (powered by ComiXology, whose multi-publisher inventory is impressive) is also a notable step towards realizing Jim Fallone’s compelling vision for digital comics, and if Graphic.ly delivers on the promise suggested by its private beta, the iPad could truly be a game-changer for comics.

As Eric Freese noted in his iPad review, there is the very real possibility that the higher eBook prices some publishers have fought for, using Apple’s entry into the market as leverage, could backfire on them, and soon:

Next to its screen size and capacity, herein is perhaps the biggest benefit of the iPad as an eReading device − its ability to purchase and download eBooks from any retailer (assuming Barnes and Noble releases their app soon).

This might actually drive prices down since the iPad enables direct head-to-head competition between eBook retailers.

And therein lies the problem for regular eBooks, and by extension, their traditional publishers.

Why pay $9.99+ for a single eBook, when there are far more compelling apps available for much less money, all based on familiar brands, that take full advantage of the $500+ investment in the device? At $9.99, eBooks are competing with everything from Netflix, which allows you to stream unlimited movies for $8.99/month, to well-known games like Scrabble, Need for Speed, Command and Conquer, and Civilization Revolution, all of which are $9.99 – $14.99.

An interesting, and seemingly unrelated announcement came out this week via Deadline Hollywood that should give everyone in the publishing food chain something to think about:

I’ve learned that a significant All-Boards meeting for the Producers Guild of America took place tonight. Sources tell me that the members voted on a series of amendments that qualify individuals as professional producers. More importantly, for the first time in the guild’s history, they voted on and ratified a new credit — that of the Transmedia Producer — which had been shepherded by such Hollywood names as Mark Gordon, Gael Anne Hurd, Jeff Gomez, Alison Savage, and Chris Pfaff.

This Guild-wide adoption is unprecedented as it will allow executives who expand storylines of franchises onto multiple platforms to receive official credit on these projects as “Transmedia Producers”. These producers develop cross platform storylines on Film, Television, Short Film, Broadband, Publishing, Comics, Animation, and Mobile — and now, they’ll be credited with an official title. I’m told this is a historic move for the PGA because the guild rarely backs new credits. “These amendments demonstrate how the guild supports producers making and changing the game,” a source told me tonight.

The definition of transmedia is up for debate, but the one I prefer focuses on the storyworld first, distribution channels second, with the latter determined via a collaborative process that puts the author’s creative vision at the center. Most so-called transmedia projects are really just cross-media marketing initiatives and/or brand extensions, driven by licensing deals and a parceling out of rights in a manner that often includes loss of creative control by the author. Star Wars is the go-to example of a transmedia property, and while it has definitely evolved into a legitimate one, it didn’t start out that way.

The recognition of “Transmedia Producer” by the PGA is important as it potentially shifts power away from literary agents and publishers whose sole focus is on the book, print or electronic, instead of the underlying story, its creator and the varied platforms now available to storytellers, whether fictional or truth.

If the iPad fulfills its promise of changing the way we interact with digital content, the question of territorial rights for eBooks and the temptation to split eBook rights from print deals could become even thornier as the book becomes just one of a variety of platforms available to authors in a transmedia world, and “Transmedia Producers” become the preferred gatekeepers.

While there are some in the publishing world who appear to have seen this shift coming — including Open Road Integrated Media, Movable Type Literary Group, and Random House — developing new business models to take advantage of cross-media opportunities, can any of them compete with a truly collaborative approach that’s a far more natural fit for film producers?

Where does the book, and the publishing supply chain devoted to it, fit in a transmedia world?

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez is the Chief Executive Optimist for Digital Book World.

Interested in learning more about using transmedia storytelling and cross-media strategies? Join us at StoryWorld, the only major gathering of industry leaders, decision makers, and transmedia specialists, to explore new business models, innovative partnerships, and fresh revenue streams.