What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [73]
Miller’s proposed solution: He is offering smaller advances—maximum about $100,000—and in return, authors split a book’s profit, 50-50, with the publisher (for comparison, I receive a 10–15 percent commission of the retail price in hardcover and 7.5 percent in paperback and we split fees from international sales). The idea is that author and publisher share the risk and the reward.
Then there is the problem of returns. Publishing is a consignment business. Bookstores can send unsold books back to publishers—a practice for which Simon & Schuster gets the blame—so it’s the publishers who bear the risk, not to mention the huge cost of printing, shipping, storing, and pulping all those unwanted books. Books are atoms of perishable value. Miller wants to offer booksellers, too, a higher cut of profits if they will take the risk of owning the books they order. The resultant risk to publisher and author could be that bookstores won’t order enough to meet demand, but Miller said publishers are increasingly good at printing more copies quickly.
Miller’s goal is to make the existing print business more profitable. That’s fine as far as it goes. He acknowledges that there are other models that need to be tried. Perhaps you could buy a book chapter by chapter as a Dickensian subscription: Buy enough chapters and you’ve bought the book (if it’s bad, stop and you’ve spent less; BookPublishing.com says 57 percent of new books are not read to completion). Or buy the book in print and get access to it as an audio book and on an e-reader such as Amazon’s Kindle. Some hold high hopes for print-on-demand, which would enable a store to sell you any book quickly, beating Amazon’s delivery delays. But that’s still expensive and it produces only paperbacks. Still, we know that readers will pay a premium for immediate gratification; that’s why they still go to stores. Perhaps publishers could offer their own discounts if you’re willing to wait a week or two, enabling them to collect orders until there are enough to print. They could charge less, still, if the reader is willing to take a book in the clumsy PDF format, which enables publishers to sell books to readers with no manufacturing cost. Or perhaps readers could subscribe to an author or series, guaranteeing the publisher and writer cash flow and a reason to publish the next book. Maybe authors could even tell readers that they’ll write a book only if so many readers buy it in advance.
Peter Osnos, another publishing visionary on a mission to save the business, founded the Caravan Project to enable publishers to sell books in any form: in their traditional format, via print-on-demand, digitally in full or by chapter, and in audio. “When a reader asks for a book, the seller’s answer should always be, ‘how do you want it?’” he wrote at The Century Foundation. Osnos told me that the fundamental problems for publishing are availability and inventory management. If he can drive 20 percent of book selling to on-demand and digital, he believes he will save so much in printing unsold copies that he will be able to afford the marketing needed to make the business model work. He read a quote from The New York Times on the day that Google introduced its new Chrome browser arguing that Google needed to control its own destiny. That is the sense in which publishers should do what Google does, he said: control their own destiny.
Rick Smolan—best known for producing America 24/7, which chronicled one week in the life of the United States with 1,000 top photojournalists—has found another way to support his gorgeous and expensive photography books: sponsorship. “Why?” Smolan asked and then explained: “Because no publisher would publish our first book, A Day in the Life of Australia, we went to the business community in Australia and self-published the book—it went on to become the No. 1 book in Australia and sold 200,000 copies (in a market where 10,000 was a best seller).” More recently, he produced America at Home and a U.K. counterpart,