Evolving Business Models for Content Producers

This is the sixth and likely final post in a continuing series from a technology seminar by Creative Strategies at Thomas Nelson on October 23, 2009.

The connected world is driving new business models. Here’s a few we publishers need to consider:

Free/Freemium
The consumer tests a chapter or two of our product. If they like it, they buy the whole thing. Amazon has pioneered this through its Look-Inside-The-Book feature.

Ala Carte Micro Transactions
This involves taking our content, breaking it into smaller bits and selling to the consumer just what they want. Apple pioneered this with iTunes; just buy the song you want for $0.99 instead of the whole album at $13.99 for a bunch songs you are never going to listen to anyway.

Many have argued against this as unhealthy for the music industry, but it will continue to be successful because it is a better solution for the consumer. Yes, it is convenient for the very small percentage of the US population that’s employed by the music industry, but many more benefit from this new model and thus it can’t be stopped.

We need to pioneer this in publishing. It is especially relevant to our reference and self-help books. Could we piece meal fiction with cliff hangers so the consumer can’t wait to buy the next scene?

Subscription
This business model has been talked about so much, and has been around for so long, I think some don’t give it enough credit as a viable model in the connected world. Subscriptions are most likely for the “Tribe” that is really passionate about your content and just wants to keep the facet flowing.

The beauty of the model is that it’s an annuity. It is the opposite of the Ala Carte Micro Transactions model where you only pay for exactly what you want. This is for the person who can’t get enough of our content and this is a better deal. We will take that annuity all day, but we have to keep offering enough new interesting content that they want to keep paying us that subscription.

I can see this working for nearly all of our clearly defined specific genres, including Bible, Reference, Self-Help and Fiction.

These models will take on more relevance as our online communities grow. What do you think?

3 Billion People – From Listeners to Readers to Writers

This is the fifth post in a continuing series from a technology seminar by Creative Strategies at Thomas Nelson on October 23, 2009.

The printing press turned listeners to readers. Will the Internet turn readers to writers and/or participants? (Creative Strategies Technology Seminar - October 23, 2009)

As I posted earlier, we will have 3 billion consumers connected through smart phones, computers and web-enabled TV in 2010. This creates an unprecedented opportunity in history for people to quickly and inexpensively communicate. If you doubt this will happen, consider the numbers of bloggers today:

• Over 100,000,000 blogs
• 85% of 18-35 year-olds are active posters, commentators and uploaders

The critics will cite the Despair.com wall poster:

BLOGGING: Never before have so many people with so little to say said so much to so few.

This blog may indeed fit that description. But still, never before has it been so easy for so many to say what’s on their mind and quickly send it around the world. We can’t ignore the power of the people, because they will be heard more than ever before; no way around it. It’s now a two-way relationship; not just publishers pushing out content.

The opportunity is to harness that powerful network. My next blog will discuss how we as content producers can harness that network.

Scary Book Facts - We Must Reinvent

This is the second post in a continuing series from a technology seminar by Creative Strategies at Thomas Nelson on October 23, 2009.

Consider these facts presented by Creative Strategies:

• 80% of US households did not buy or read a book last year


• 70% of US households did not enter a bookstore last year


• 42% of college graduates never read a book after college


• 33% of high school graduates never read a book again


• 52% of books are not read to completion
  

The last point I get. I probably finish a book about 70% of the time, because I usually get it about halfway through. In fact, I am more likely to read a full book with Seth Godin’s formatting in Tribes than I am to read a whole traditional chapter format book.

For us book publishers, those facts if indeed true, are downright scary. The solution, as regular readers of my blog know, is for book publishers to become content producers to provide product in any format a consumer wants to consume our education, message and entertainment.

This is why our DigiReady efforts at Thomas Nelson are so important. Our company is embracing DigiReady. DigiReady is one of many things we will need to do differently in the coming years to stay relevant. I am certain we will make the transition, despite the unavoidable pain that will come with it.

We have great content. We must reinvent it; not just repurpose content.

Nelson Leadership Seminar - Post 1

This blog will start a series of posts highlighting key take-a-ways from Thomas Nelson's Leadership Technology Seminar Series. We had the first seminar last Friday. The presenters were Tim Bajarin and Ben Bajarin, the principals at Creative Strategies.

Let's start with these two intersting facts presented at the technology seminar:

1. Processing power is continuing to increase at an amazing pace, while the processors driving that power continue to get smaller
2. The Internet is allowing anyone to connect on anything to any digital content any where in the world

These two converging facts are making our cell phones into what is called smart phones, or basically functional computers that fit easily in our pockets and purses. The iPhone is the most popular smart phone today.


Consider these facts:

• In the United States, 80% of the population has PCs; 77% have mobile phone
• Globally, only 13% of the world's population has computers, but 42% have cell phones
• About 23% of all cell phone purchases today are smart phones

It is estimated by 2012, 50-60% of the world will have smart phones. This raises a series of threats and opportunities to our business. Imagine if half the world's 6.8 billion population can now have access to our content with a device the size of a cell phone. How does that change our publishing strategy from how we acquire rights to print runs on books we sell in a traditional print format?

This is likley a threat to our print volume in the future, but huge opportunity for digital delivery of our content. Read what Michael Shatzkin has to say of the future of e-books in his post Sunday. It will definitely make you think. It might even scare you.

Stay tuned. There is a whole lot of interetsing stuff to come from our first Leadership Technology Seminar.

DigiReady Update

Two weeks ago we completed the first two DigiReady training seminars. We trained 16 freelancers and 11 additional internal editors for a total of 15 trained internal editors. We surveyed them, and the results are overall positive. The general findings are:

1. Being 100% DigiReady is critical to our future
2. We are far ahead of our competition
3. DigiReady will increase our sales
4. DigiReady will streamline our processes
5. DigiReady will improve our quality
6. Need to train other freelancers working with editors
7. DigiReady is going to put additional pressure on editor's limited time

The final point #7 is not a surprise. It does put additional time pressure on our editors. Through the numerous DigiReady pilots, however, we have learned that DigiReady gets noticeably easy after about three titles. Like most things in life, there is a learning curve. And, the DigiReady team is looking for ways to always improve the process.

#6 we will be addressing with an additional training seminar in November for freelancers. We are finding most freelancers see the DigiReady training as a way for them to be more valuable to Thomas Nelson and other publishers, which they are!

Nelson editors...don't forget about the follow up internal training on November 10. Not only is it a chance for us to get together and discuss issues, but you can win prizes!! We will have $50 gift cards for the winners of certain categories and a grand prize of a new Kindle 2 for the editor that we feel best utilizes the DigiReady process. The categories are:

• Most MSS
• Most Accurate MSS
• Most Complex MSS
• Best Success Story
• Worst Nightmare Story
  

Again, a big thanks to our hardworking editors and freelancers for making Nelson a publishing leader.

Mobile Device-Agnostic Marketing

Like thousands of others, we are racing down the iPhone app freeway trying to figure out if Iphone apps make sense for us. We have several pilots underway. And the iPhone is just one device; there is the issue of the other PDAs. Will we eventually make apps for all of the other PDAs too?

I like my iPhone. I have been bothered, however, about making apps for a device that has a relatively small market share compared to all the other PDAs that have Internet access; never mind the total cell phone population. Jennifer Deshler, Senior Director of Marketing for our fiction books, may have come up with an interesting solution.

On September 1st Thomas Nelson will launch Green by Ted Dekker. Jennifer will be launching a mobile site that will work on all Internet-capable devices, such as the iPhone, Blackberry, iPod Touch, tablets, computers, etc. Fiction will be driving traffic to the site through radio/advertising efforts. The week of September 7th, our Fiction division will be offering a full free download of Black (all epub formats or a pdf) to anyone who enters the mobile site and provides their email address.
Jennifer appears to have done a lot of things right:

1. Clearly defined customer need – Dekker Tribe wants to be first in the know
2. Why the customer would visit our site – Learn about Green; get a free copy of Black
3. How to drive site traffic – radio and other advertising

In addition, Jennifer has put in place a series of metrics to monitor the results of this effort, including Google Analytics.

We should know if the next month or so just how well this works. My hats off to Jennifer and the Fiction business unit for their creativity.

Digital Leadership

On July 23rd I posted a blog titled R U DigiReady? The blog discussed what DigiReady means, and why we are implementing the DigiReady process at Thomas Nelson. As the post indicates, this is why we are training our folks on DigiReady:

1. Increase Sales
2. Reduce Cycle Time
3. Improve Productivity
4. Better Marketing
   

DigiReady will allow us to simultaneously launch product in multiple formats, print and digital. If you have any questions about the explosive growth of e-books, check out Michael Shatzkin's latest blog. In some cases over 35% of Amazon sales of a book are the e-book format. Apple, among others, is about to enter the market with their own device. We can't be DigiReady fast enough.

Next week we begin training our freelancers and editors on how to create DigiReady products at Thomas Nelson. We are training 16 outside freelancers and 14 internal editors. (That’s in addition to the four internal editors already trained.) Please support them as they learn this new process. Like any change, it takes some time to become the new standard operating procedure. There will be bumps along the way, and we will work through them.

We have completed 14 DigiReady pilots to date. This is what our editors are saying about DigiReady:

“This DigiReady process is the best thing we could do to protect the life of a book. We want these words to reach as many people as possible; this is a simple, easy way to make sure that happens.” Jennifer McNeil, Editor, Nonfiction Trade Group

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

“One of the biggest benefits of making our documents DigiReady is that it enables the elements of the manuscripts to be thought out more thoroughly before they go to Book and Graphic. This structure should really enhance our communication with Debbie and her team on the front end of our process and cut down on style issues with our proofs.” MacKenzie Howard, Editor, Children's Books and Education

“Electronic publishing is an important part of the Bible reference market today, and it will only become larger in the future. Creating really useful electronic versions of our backlist books and Bibles—files with active links for Bible references for instance—currently requires a lot of work for each electronic platform we want to use. The DigiReady process will minimize the duplicated work and produce files that work on a variety of devices with little additional editorial effort.” Michael Stephens, Ph.D. Acquisitions Editor - Bible, Reference, and Curriculum

Thanks in advance to all the Thomas Nelson editors and freelancers that will be learning DigiReady. Your efforts will place Thomas Nelson on the leading edge of publishing today.

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.

Future of Book Publishing

I attended BEA a couple weeks ago basically to engage in research for our online and digital strategies. It was the most interesting BEA I have attended, and I have been going to them off an on for 20 years. The anticipation around the imminent changes in our business creates a unique atmosphere.

One of the more interesting speakers was Michael Shatzkin. I have found Michael’s blog, The Shatzkin Files insightful and interesting. In a recent blog, Michael posted his BEA speech:

“Stay Ahead of the Shift: How Content-Centric Publishers Can Flourish in a Community-Centric Web World”

I spend most of day listening to so called “experts” on where our industry is going. If you want to be a leader in publishing in the future, Michael’s views are at least worth considering. It takes 30 minutes to listen to the link, but it is definitely worth it. Michael makes special mention of Thomas Nelson as a publisher that may be on the right path in at least one area.

Dear fellow Thomas Nelson employees,

I need your help. First, however, I have a confession.

I’ve been a digital arm chair quarterback with a flurry of ideas about what we need to do digitally as a company. It’s nice being an arm chair quarterback. You only have 10% of the information, but in your mind make the right call nearly every time. There are no stats to prove you wrong.

Then, I was yanked out of my very comfortable Lazy Boy and placed on the field. I have 300 pound tackles and jumpy linebackers starring me down and no remote control to change the channel. I need your help!!

Thomas Nelson recently provided me with a new responsibility for our company’s digital strategy. Along with Bob Edington, his digital team, Mike Hyatt and my colleagues at Thomas Nelson, we will define and execute our digital strategy going forward. What an important and exciting challenge. I am honored to be a part of it.

So, how can you help? I want to hear your thoughts on digital.

I know that there are a lot of ideas out there from experienced quarterbacks and maybe even other arm chair quarterbacks like myself. If you want to share your thoughts or ideas with me, please send an e-mail to my assistant, Janet Sanders, at jsanders@thomasnelson.com.

Janet will set up a time for us to meet. All I ask is that you outline your thoughts and send them in an e-mail to Janet and me prior to our meeting. I will listen.

This is how our digital strategy will unfold:

Step 1: Listen to the digital team. My first step was to hear the digital team’s thoughts and learn from them. I will be spending much more time with them. This is a very dedicated team that has tremendous passion for their work and contribution they are making to Nelson’s mission. It is amazing to see all they do; they inspire me.

Step 2: Listen to others internally. That’s where you come in and why I am writing this.

Step 3: Listen to the world class leaders and companies outside of Nelson. We will find the best thinkers and build on their knowledge for our strategy.

Step 4: Build an executable strategy.

Step 5: Execute the strategy and continually experiment and tweak the strategy. Change will be constant. We will celebrate and build on the successes. We will learn from the failures.

I will be blogging on what I learn and the strategy as it forms. This will clarify my thinking, communicate what is being learned and provide a forum for others’ feedback. Feel free to challenge my learnings and thinkings.

I invite you to be a part of the conversation.

Why Blog? (how to get a free lunch)

I am certain many have asked the question "Why blog?" In fact, I am asking myself this question. Who wants to hear anything from a guy who is involved in several different things but an expert of none? - Perhaps the Jack-of-All-Trades and Master-of-None Club? (Googled it and no such club exists.)

The CEO of Thomas Nelson, Mike Hyatt, is a prolific and eloquent blogger. I think Mike has blogged since 1998, before there was blogging as we know it today. If it was the Stone Age, Mike could chisel out a stone tablet with fresh, interesting thoughts every few days. I thought Mike blogged one time on all the reasons one should blog. I could not find the "why blog" entry, if there ever was one, but I did find one on "Why Twitter". Let's not, however, get technologically ahead of ourselves. I also found an entry on "How to Blog" which I probably need to read.

Being the CEO has its advantages when it comes to blogging. Many folks want to actually hear what the leader of the largest Christian book publisher has to say, and Mike has some pretty interesting things to say.

Then there is the blog from Larry Downs who has responsibility for our Iberian publishing group at Thomas Nelson; Spanish and Portuguese. Larry has been in Spanish-language book publishing for over two decades, and runs the largest Spanish Christian book publisher. He knows what he is doing. Like Mike, folks want to hear what Larry has to say.

Larry thinks I ought to blog about the book publishing business from the perspective of the relative outsider which I am. He says I should use humor to discuss perceived nuances and issues within the world of book publishing, even though I am not a terribly funny guy. No doubt I would upset someone in the process, but I reckon that's not all bad. Hmmmm???

Maybe I should blog about baseball. Along with some friends, 18 months ago we started what has turned out to be a fairly successful youth travel baseball team, the Hendersonville Heat. We have many players that want to join the team. Other individuals and teams are interested in or already doing the same. We are thinking about starting our own travel league, The Sumner County Baseball Association. Here's the problem: like book publishing, I don't really know that much about baseball. I am just the general manager and oversee the organization; the coaches know baseball.

Then, there is our family flooring business Textures, which my wife runs with a partner, Andrew Denny. I sit on Texture's board, but again I know very little about the flooring business and how it works.

I like to hunt and each year a group of us makes an annual pilgrimage to the Snake Den Lodge in Presho, South Dakota to engage in what my friend Jack calls "poltricide". We take down a lot of pheasants in three days of hunting. It's a blast, but I am certainly not the pheasant hunting expert; the guides are.

So, I require your help. And, you have a chance to win a free lunch, maybe even two lunches, because I have two problems - blog ideas and my blog tag line.

Blog Ideas - Like the Discovery Channel's Dirty Jobs host Mike Rowe, I am asking you, my friends, family and co-workers, to provide me with ideas. (Not for Dirty Jobs, but blogging subjects.) The best blog idea wins a free lunch with me, the guy who really does not know much about anything. And, you will get your name in lights on my blog.

My Blog's Tag Line - I made up my blog tag line in two nanoseconds with very little thought, "Observations Once Removed". I suspect it is not representative of what the best tag line would be for my blog. You might have a better idea.

A Thomas Nelson employee suggested this tag line, "From Where I Sit on the Commode". For those of you who are employees at Thomas Nelson, I think you know why that one will not win the free lunch.

Just post your ideas and comments below. I may have an online poll to decide on the best ideas.

Well, I am glad I got my first blog out of the way. And, thank you in advance for assistance with my two dilemmas above.