R U DigiReady?

“Just ask yourself, what will publishing look like one hundred years from now? For Thomas Nelson to thrive then and now, digitally-ready content is the centerpiece of good business, good stewardship, and good strategy.” Bryan Norman, Senior Editor Nonfiction Trade Group

Thomas Nelson is about to start a very important initiative called DigiReady. DigiReady is a new process we will be implementing in editorial and Book and Graphic Design that allows for all titles to be published simultaneously in print and any electronic format.

Here’s why DigiReady is important:

Increased Sales – Today 17% of our Amazon sales are in e-book format, when we have both versions available on Amazon simultaneously. This percentage has been increasing monthly. Currently a new title is not generally ready for digital-release on the Kindle for weeks costing the company valuable sales. Today a new title has to go through a completely separate conversion process. DigiReady will allow us to make more digital sales more quickly starting the day a title is launched in its print format.

Reduced Cycle Time – The DigiReady process will cut between 2–12 weeks off of the time-to-market for a book. The quicker we can get a book to market, the sooner we can start selling it, and the faster we can recover our investment.

Improved Productivity – The DigiReady process will allow us to reduce a title’s digital conversion costs. It will also allow us to create derivative and bundled products much less expensively.

Better Marketing – DigiReady allows our marketing people to quickly send snippets or chapters of books to partners that can promote our book, such as online communities, web sites, and retailers. This will be very important for getting our books noticed quickly on Google and Amazon.

Our editorial staff will be going though initial DigiReady training on August 20 with a follow up session in early October. Basically, our editorial folks will be learning to apply styles to their MS Word manuscripts prior to sending them to BGD, allowing these many benefits to the company.

The company has done 14 DigiReady pilots so far. Like any new process there is a learning curve; the more you do it the better you get at it. For an average trade book, it takes an additional 3–4 hours over the life of the project for the editorial staff to make a book DigiReady; longer for more complicated books and shorter for simpler books.

The training will be conducted by Debbie Eicholtz and these brave editorial folks who did the pilots:

• Jennifer McNeil
• MacKenzie Howard
• Bryan Norman
• Michael Stephens

They will also be our subject matter experts. I want to thank these folks for leading necessary change at Thomas Nelson so that we can quickly capture the digital opportunities available today for our content. The team has plans for making this training fun.

Like any new process or technology, there will be problems. The important thing is to make those problems learning opportunities, and share them with others so we can all be DigiReady as soon as possible. We have set up a page on Sharepoint where folks can share their learnings.

Thanks in advance to our editorial and BGD folks who will be at the center of making Thomas Nelson DigiReady. I would ask that the rest of the company support our editorial staffs as they learn DigiReady.

Finally, none of this would be possible without the deep research and solutions from Bob Edington and the Internet team. I appreciate their hard work and service.

You will see and hear much more about DigiReady in the next 30 days. Please send me your questions. We can all learn together.

Why XML Is Important

This blog is probably most interesting to the editorial folks at Thomas Nelson, because it will affect their jobs more than others’ jobs. Marketing will be the next most affected; XML will be an important tool to help them market our books. Finally, sales will love it, because XML will drive greater volume across multiple formats.

But you ask, “What is XML?” It’s Extensible Markup Language, of course. And then you ask a bit more irritated, “What is Extensible Markup Language and why do I care?” Here is why you care: XML allows us to create content once, and then nearly simultaneously turn that content into many different formats. We are more consumer-friendly. By launching all those formats, we sell more of our content more quickly.

Yep, we will be able to “tag” the content once, and then make a printed book, e-book, Iphone app, Ijournals and other formats that might be interesting to our changing consumer much more quickly. While there are many advantages to XML, here are three big advantages:

Multi-formats - Ability to produce multiple formats quickly, as indicated above.

Marketing – As online marketing continues to drive book awareness, XML allows for fast retrieval and delivery of relevant content to promote the book in a variety on online communities and marketing tools.

Productivity – Productivity gains come in several ways. For traditional books, Debbie Eicholtz finds that she cuts her department’s processing time on a typical trade book. It is too early to tell how much productivity can be gained, but it could be as much as 40-50% in some functions. Most companies consider an annual 4% productivity gain a good year, so even if the savings is a fraction of the 40-50% throughout the process it’s a good thing. That, however, is just the start. With XML, it is also much less expensive to create other formats.

So, how does XML provide all of these benefits? XML identifies all the content components in a manuscript. XML is “format agnostic”. That means it identifies the content’s components, and then can feed those components to the various tools that create other formats much more easily. Or, maybe we want to publish a custom or new book on Christian parenting. If our books are in XML, we could quickly create a new product based on searching the exsiting titles in Thomas Nelson's catalog for related content. There will be much we can do with XML. If you want to learn even more click on this blog for additional information.

Note that we have to “tag” the content to gain the advantages of XML. And, this is where there is some extra work for our editorial folks. Editors have to spend more time initially to prepare a title’s content. This is accomplished by simply working in the editor’s currently preferred native format of Microsoft Word. The editors apply more structure to the document. The additional structure allows the publishing process to easily separate the content from its presentation. This separation is important for simultaneously accommodating the different displays, for example, for various e-book formats.

We have had several successful pilots preparing our content in format-agnostic XML. Bryan Norman, Michael Stephens, Jennifer McNeil and McKenzie Howard have all participated in pilots for the company. It is additional work for them, but we are beginning to see the benefits. Many thanks to these pioneers for leading this important initiative.

The day is coming when we will be 100% XML on new titles. In addition, we have a company in India converting many of our backlist titles to XML as well. Why do this? Because more and more our consumers want our content in other formats besides the 600 year-old book. The consumer is always right.

Two Publishing Companies

“You have to run two publishing companies today; what publishing was and what publishing will be.”

That came from Dominique Raccah, CEO of Sourcebooks. I think she was quoting someone else; wish I knew so I could given them due credit. Others also discussed how their publishing companies are changing:

Marcus Leaver - President, Sterling Publishers
Josh Marwell - President of Sales, Harper Collins
Dave Thompson - VP of Sales Analysis, Random House

A key take-a-way from the publishers and Mike Shatzkin: Publishing’s future is about owning very distinct narrow verticals, which can be described as very specific BISACs. If you do craft books, for example, you may be able to own the crochet vertical but someone else may own the beaded jewelry vertical.

To “own” the vertical you must own the community; the place where the crochet community can meet to share ideas, interact with the crochet leaders and acquire the leaders’ content in what ever format the consumer wants it: e-book, iapps, online, audio, software, podcast and books.

The successful “authors” will be those that can relate to the community, regardless of format. In many cases, it will be the authors that know how and have the desire to utilize social networking.

If you stop and think about that for a moment, the implications of “going vertical” are huge relative to today’s business model. I think, however, Thomas Nelson is already starting to adapt in some ways to this emerging business model.

To make it most relevant to my Nelson colleagues, consider how the presenters outlined how this might change your “traditional” publishing jobs.

Editorial

1. Product development cycles are going from 12-18 months to 2-6 months. In today’s world, it’s much easier to become irrelevant quickly; can’t wait 12 months for a book.


2. Acquisition editors need to look for authors that not only have great content, but an affinity for building a community with their audience; especially online.


3. Editors are not making books; but building content in format neutral XML. Sourcebooks has gone 100% XML.


4. More data analysis on what to publish; balancing it with the art of publishing.


5. Publishing fewer books; about 25% seems to be the reduction this year.


6. Editors are more engaged in the social networking aspect of the content, blurring the lines between marketing and editorial.

Marketing & Sales
I suspect marketing and sales becomes much more vertical specific. Nelson has already started to do that by grouping publishing, marketing and sales around groups of BISACs.

Marketing and sales are adjusting resource allocation. The change in focus can be seen in where these publishers say they are and are not spending their money.

Generally, this is where they are not spending money or spending much less:

1. Catalogs – Going to web-based e-catalogs with much more functionality and flexibility. This makes sense when the product development cycle is now just a few months. Print catalogs have been error-filled for decades, and it will only be worse with a shorter product development cycle time. It is interesting what HarperCollins is doing with e-catalogs to help buyers.
   
2. Trade shows – You just don’t need them with today’s consolidated, shrinking market and communication possibilities. Only foreign rights may need them, and most publishers are even questioning that.


3. Sales Conferences – Most going to Web Ex. Just too costly to fly everyone in from the far reaches. If publishers are flying reps in, they are only doing it once per year.


4. Author tours – Biggest waste of money. We all knew it, and now the community is online any way. Author tours are being replaced with webinars that can be measured to a direct sales impact. Webinars work, especially when the vertical community knows about them.


5. Traditional print, radio and TV media – These are dead. Random House’s survey confirmed other organizations’ surveys that these are ineffective medias for creating book awareness.


6. Print galleys

So, where is money being spent?

1. Holistic TITLE/CONTENT SPECIFIC vertical marketing plans that focus on social networks, community building and store placement. Sterling increased per title marketing spend by 66% in the past two years by doing away with so much stuff that no longer matters.
2. Digital and online medias
3. Increasing travel budgets in two ways: (a) Editors spending more time out with consumers, again blurring the marketing line. Editors have been too insular for two long and their historical format is becoming less relevant. (b) Sales people visiting accounts more often.
4. Strategically providing more free content
5. Partnering with related vertical sites and online communities
6. Lot’s of young people tweeting on key brands
7. e-galleys

Will all of this change happen over night? Nope. As Dominique Raccah said, we will be running two different companies at the same time. My hunch is that owning narrow verticals will change how publishers are structured; some employees will adapt and others will have a much harder time. Perhaps more on that in a future blog.

What do you think?