From Dennis’ Desk

I was fortunate to be at the BEA (Book Expo America) the other week, fortunate in that if you are eager for knowledge it is the best place to go to acquire same. The buzz of BEA is to watch the throngs of booksellers seeking to be part of the author engagement; authors are still the heartbeat of our industry. My main purpose at BEA is to attend the IDPF (International Digital Publishers Forum) as well as set meetings with Ingram management. The IDFP this year ran concurrently with the Mike Shatzkin Publishers Launch conference which is a pity as I like to do both. The IDPF is the basis on which most of the digital strategies are considered, proven or declined. I wonder if they would consider doing an Australian chapter of meetings. If you are interested in books, reading and digital you really need to go the distance to these events which are not promoted as championing the factions of our industry.
Back to Australia; I missed my first ABA in years as my US tour clashed with the ABA dates. Because we work in a small market some views tend to dominate so our leadership is driven not by majority or a unique voice, but rather by those that tend to specialise in vocality.

“Innovate to Survive”. Lea and I went to the Ford Motor Company in Dearborn and heard these words from Bill Ford  thought of the Barry Dorr story (JoJo Publishing). Barry has had some changes to his physical book distribution over the school book supplier in the 1970’s. Anyway , JoJo came to DJA from MDS and lasted with us for twelve months, then Jo developed a very long tail of ebook and POD books which we now distribute under what we call “codeshare”. Under this device we are the aggregator for. It means we don’t have a physical book just the custody over all those files which get uplifted to our many global ebook distributors and our global POD network. On the level of “Innovate to Succeed” we are having discussion where some of our future products will only be available as ebooks, or POD. The view is to hang them out there and then consider offset
publishing as the last link in the chain of content to consumer. Fascinating to hear Bill Ford talk about vertical integration and the like; it is what we are now doing with our publishers across ebook/offset & POD.

I guess the opposing view to the preceding is the latest initiative of the Federal Government and part of our industry to have a Book Industry Collaboration Council funded by the Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education. Well I guess you should always try. Reminds me of a phrase which I don’t think anyone has used to date “An iceberg of Collaboration”.

I could not help myself with the wording used on our front page of this month’s list. Yes these books got consumers on the East Coast and has sold Royal Mistresses into a reprint due toward the end of August. Jim Pratt holds a record for us in terms of author appearances and thank you to all those stores that have hosted him. Jim’s book Telekom has had some great reviews and we are selling plenty as an ebook as well. We all hope Jim picks up an agent and then a major publisher for his next work. The ebook bestseller list is real and across many countries, most recent countries include Iceland & Pakistan. The real surprise each month is the ebook Mt Kilimanjaro & Me which just sells every month in many countries, the author also wrote “Tea in the Library”. An ebook like this outsells its print counterpart every month. Space is limited in bookshops so backlist sometimes does not get a just positioning. With digital we have unlimited space for these best sellers.

July will mark a change in how some of our backlist will be delivered to you. In particular Blue Ribbons Bitter Bread 9780980621600. This book went into RPND and to do the usual offset run of 1500 to 2000 copies is nonsense given that we can only sell 30 copies per month. So this book has become our first POD backlist book. This difference is that we can now meet a global demand for the book as it sits on the Ingram database as well as in our warehouse in print to demand quantities. The book like all of our POD titles will be delivered to you on a firm sale basis as the digital age does not permit speculative ordering. We have 49 back orders and have ordered 50 copies. If you don’t want to order from us you can place your order with your Ingram order from the US as well. This part of our business may help you if you know of some out of print Australian publications where you have consumer demand. Can’t promise anything, however we only survive by consumers requesting our books via booksellers.

Best book read for the month was a Wakefield press title – They Hosed Them Out; a fictionalised military memoir first published in 1960 and now augmented. I also read the Bob Katter book. One other was the Bert Wrout “Kill the Morans” which we are negotiating for at this time. Bert was a
Melbourne bookseller in the days of Chris Randle.

Good selling and better reading
DJ

Congratulations Peter Carnavas

The Great Expedition has been shortlisted in the Speech Pathology Australia
Book of the Year Awards for 2012 (Lower Primary Section).

Cyril’s Story

Back in August 2010 we had several phone conversations with Cyril Peupion about his book “Work Smarter Live Better”.

We all get calls about how many can you sell? why is your business different to some other business? will I be on the bestseller list? how many should be printed? and so on.

Cyril’s book “Work Smarter Live Better” really demonstrates to me a shift of market focus as well as the dynamic of what a book distributor does in this part of its business life cycle.

The book was published in February 2011 and is now into its third printing with the author and ourselves sharing the stock. Cyril sells the book both from his own website and via his professional business. It means that whatever is on Bookscan is only half the unit sales story, and this one book publisher is not on Titlepage. The book’s performance is an illustration of how our market place is now global and the process of getting content to consumer is via many platforms and countries.

Smarter Live Better” was one of our first ebooks as well as one of our first Print On Demand (POD) titles as well.  We were given a global green light from the author and now have the book being sold as an ebook across the platforms of Amazon, Bookish, ibookstore (Apple), Kobo, Overdrive, ebooks.com, Wheelers, and via Ingram “Coresource” This means we have sold in so many countries outside of Australia (as we do with all of the ebooks) and it gives us a chance to provide further aspiration for the author’s work.

Just shifting off the main story, our April ebook sales cover the following known countries; South Africa, USA, Singapore, Australia, Canada, France, Great Britain, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand and Malaysia; these are the reported countries.

We now have the print book available globally via the Lightning Source (LSI) facilities in UK and US; so any bookseller in the world can order via Ingram and a copy will be printed at the LSI facility closest to that market.

One of the basics we apply to those ebooks under our global control is to assert a near global parity price, we do this with the POD product as well. Having seen the loss of trade caused by only having pricing control across a region in a global game of distribution we have attempted to give all booksellers globally a level playing field with our global parity pricing attitude.

The aspiration with this book is to ultimately allow for a translation into French as the author is a native and we could eventually sell French rights (in French) for this book. We know we are selling English language copies into France currently via Amazon and our ebooks have started to sell via FNAC in France. The intended French translation would be available in both ebook and print as well. When this occurs it will allow for a likely author tour in France and many copies to potentially be sold in the author’s home country.

We see the future for our Australian authors’ works (where practical) on this global scale.

In Australia the book was promoted by Katie McMurray and has featured in Dymocks’ Top 10 Business Book bestsellers as well as achieving excellent sales across a broad range of booksellers in Australia.

If anyone would like an ebook reading copy just email me and I can sample you via our Bookish relationship.

The third reprint docks in two weeks time.

10% of the sales are ebook and after three weeks of being in the POD range 1% of sales are via the global reach of POD.

So this book demonstrates what this book distributor does to enable its content to get to a consumer.

I thank Cyril for his support and interest in all of these ambitions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Have a good month and keep good book stocks all the way to the end of the fiscal.  I am off to the US for the Book Expo America and the varied conferencing opportunities that are offered.

Dennis

Welcome!

WELCOME  to our blog…………

This is a story of three events that occurred this month from our independent Australian publishers.

First is David Tenenbaum (Melbourne Books), whose Cold Chisel: Wild Colonial Boys book was due to be in stores at the beginning of the month. David had a print order with the Chinese printers for some 8000 copies due to the successful sell-in and emerging tour information, a new CD and the jacket imagery reflecting the group’s website.

You can imagine the energy in our business when we get such good sell-in figures and have the book acknowledged as going to be a major Father’s Day title. Our last book like this was the Jimmy Barnes Icons of Australian Music book, which sold and sold and sold.

What we did not plan on was to have the entire shipment pulped due to printing errors.

What this means in reality is the print cost, the shipping cost, the pre-press and (yes) our sales expense is virtually sunk money—not hurt money, because the whole project could have been terminated at that stage.

Now David does not have a head office, nor is he listed on any stock exchange. He is—like you [booksellers] and us—a privately owned business working in this (at times) perilous market. David had the guts to go again on the print run and told us of his decision and how important the success of the book was going to be on both our businesses.

To his credit, David then took the chance to actually enhance the publication with some more colour, some sharper images and a partial redesign of the back jacket. So, when the book arrives we will have a superior product and we hope an eager market place to take this book to the ultimate consumers. I have now seen one of the copies and am certain it will go into early reprint in time for Father’s Day.

The second story involves David Neilson (Snowgum Press) and his book, Southern Light: Images from Antarctica. There was a gestation period whereby the book was ‘in play’ with a large publisher for many months. So, the build and anticipation to a book like this is actually years. The work is mammoth and bulky, weighing almost 3kg (the slipcased edition is 3.5kg).

David made his selection of printer in Singapore based on the search for quality and track record. The price of a publication like this should include all input costs. Well, this does not really happen. The hurt money includes the two weeks it took David to oversee and approve the printing and his signing off on every quality page.

When you only publish a book every five years, you have to make that book a statement, so I was excited when David told me that the book had made the port in Melbourne on Sunday and we would get the 14,000 kg of stock the following week; and David would be at our warehouse to witness the arrival and unpacking of the containers.

Now this is where you start to shake your head—for some reason, the book took up more than a full 20-foot shipping container but not enough to fill a 40 foot container, so there were extra charges: more money which does not get put into the actual costing of the book. Still, it was a nice chilly Melbourne morning (I don’t really like chilly Melbourne mornings) and the process started.

Now, David looked with stewardship at the air freighted copies and noticed one or two sections where the colour was slightly different to what he had sign off on. What happened next was that David physically inspected enough copies to guarantee that the stock we will ship are the ones that have escaped this colour change. You see: this book is $98.00 ($135.00 in the slipcased edition) and consumers need the highest quality the publisher can deliver.

So, the uncosted part of the book is difficult to assess, as the emotion that is part of the build up to these book monuments is so big and testing. At least, part way through the sorting, we got the news from publicist Alan Davidson that both the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age will be putting some major PR behind the book. And the Readings Monthly came out as an Age supplement this week.

The next story with this book is to target sales of the first 1000 copies, which I hope will occur this year. David will take the book to the Frankfurt Book Fair and I will take the book to Book Expo America in the US next month.

Finally, I want to talk about the Davide Cali tour and the new title, 10 Little Insects. The publisher is Wilkins Farago and the owners are Andrew and Anna Wilkins.

I have known Andrew for going on 20 years, initially when he was at Hyland House and I was the street hustler for their books. Andrew, in case you don’t know, is a Frankfurt regular as well, either giving key note addresses or as a reporter for the media.

Davide’s works were discovered by Andrew some years ago and his translations are important to get his works into English markets. The penny drops with me when I realise the people who are funding the author tour are also the translators, tour promoter and publishers. All from a street in Albert Park in a house around the corner from The Avenue Bookstore.

In a true sense, you should not confuse innovation with entrepreneurship—well, I just did. What our publishers have given the Australian market is a world exclusive in the form of the first English translation—booksellers will only be able to buy the book from our business. The work is a big work, in colour and in graphic novel style.

Please share in the author tour and say yes when someone asks you for a Davide Cali authored book; chances are I know the publishers/entrepreneurs, translator, publicist and those people who will even pack the book.

I was going to write about how tough it was to collect money, but I chose to be excited instead with the people who trust and enjoy.