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30 Oct 2006: Taking up space
I'm feeling a bit jealous of Em. She's the main contributor to the SnowBlog and so the Guardian thing (see previous) must be mainly down to her. It seems my chance for fame has passed me by, while Em gets to roll around in all the glory like I imagine very rich people do in their baths full of money. It's time I tried to catch up.
But what to post about? Well, one conversation I have a lot lately revolves around the question: 'Why is Publishers?'. Or, slightly more grammatically: what are publishers for? Why might you want one? And are these publishers of which you speak earning their keep?
Continue reading "Taking up space" »
posted on October 30, 2006 04:40 PM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
30 Oct 2006: Oh blimey
So this is what happens when you decide you're not going to turn on your computer all weekend. You only get selected as Site of the Week by the Guardian! Quick, write something sensible so people will think we're clever. Er... (grinding noise, splutter)...no. Not only did I decide to have a Weekend Off The Computer (except second life which I can't live without, and buying a new pair of boots on M&S, and looking something up on wikipedia, but nothing work related which has got to count for summat, right?) I have also given up coffee which means I'm a little slower getting going in the morning (even though it's really 9.30, not 8.30, because of the clocks.) So no witticisms or sparks of brilliance for you, young reader-m'lad.
Anyway. Since they say we're a 'literary blog' I should mention something to do with books. Our Christmas range went into stores last week, and what do you know? We have absolutely NO idea how it's selling. This is thus a very good time to talk about something I've been meaning to post about for ages, which is access to epos. Sounds like a part-time course - but no.
Nielsen BookScan (-m?) are the company that holds the monopoly of retail sales monitoring in this industry (a monopoly only because no other company bothers). They collect information from around 8000 retailers (which is not comprehensive, but whatever - sampling is a given), validate it and aggregate the data into reports which they sell back to publishers, so they can see how their sales are doing, and retailers, so they can calculate their market share.
So far, so good. However, we have never been able to avail ourselves of this service. Why? Because "any 5 nominated ISBN's [sic] (titles) [sic] tracked over 4 consecutive weeks costs £525." Subsequent months are £75. It's £270 per title per year on this ratecard! £10000 a year for 35 titles! So we can either have a profitable title and not know about it or spend our profit on finding that out. Now I'm sure they'd do a deal if you subscribed, or bought more data than just a month's worth, but we're still talking thousands.
Why so expensive? Are their epos collecting processes so awfully inefficient that it genuinely costs this much? Are they using people to sort the data rather than computers? Or are they charging this much because firms really do need this data, and they're the sole gatekeepers.
Economics 101, innit? Better get us some competition. Anyone? Anyone?
posted on October 30, 2006 08:35 AM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
26 Oct 2006: If I was a good person...
...this is what I would have achieved. Welcome, friends, to a section of my To Do list:
- Figure out way to get AIs and reading copies to all retailers electronically (save postage, save time, save trees) in a form that's easy for them to read
- Learn advanced XML: crucial for a publisher who wants to sort out her content management
- Learn java
- Schedule printing for 2008; consolidate schedule where possible to save money
- Figure out new way to upload images etc to various partners' FTP sites automatically
- Revisit e-book terms
- Finish all ERRPs (Emergency Reprint Readiness Packs, of course. We like to amend our files as soon as we see an error, which can happen, so that the reprint is error, free. Plus we like stupid acronyms)
- Analysis of total cost of distribution. Contract says x%; last time I did this analysis it was x+5%.
- Learn SQL
- Revise online selling strategy
- Create PR packs, in case one of our books flies, or we're in the papers and need a bunch of beautifully-formatted info about the company STAT
- Update list of prizes suitable for our books and enter them
- Photoshop 1280 photos (next year's martial arts books). Each photo takes about 20 mins.
- Find better way to photoshop things.
- Edit everything that needs editing
- Scan all contracts and archive (there's one task that will never get done)
- Run payroll
- Pay bills
- Bookkeeping
- Fix thing
- Do other thing
- Write to that person about that thing
[trails off...]
posted on October 26, 2006 04:22 PM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
24 Oct 2006: Tasty treats
//Urgent Addendum: Kind and wise South London spies inform me of a grave error. This is a pudding, not a tart. No icing! Sorry for my ignorance.//
Now this is the kind of delivery we like! None of that invoice nonsense; this morning we got a Bakewell Tart Pudding!
When I say 'we', that's not strictly true. It was a present to Anna from our lovely co-author of Plotting for Beginners, Sue Hepworth. She was sending a present because rather excitingly Anna is venturing back into the big ol' world of America where she will be based from now on. We're calling it The Greatest Working From Home Project In The World! ™. She will be down the road from our new US distributors Consortium, which may come in handy, but mainly nothing will change. And that's the exciting networked world we live in, where a tiny company can have contributors all around the world and it's business as usual. Except we get tarts puddings in the post.
Very sadly for Anna it was her last day in the UK office yesterday, so she missed the delivery of the tartpudding. That's ok, though, Anna. We'll take care of it for you. mmmmm...
posted on October 24, 2006 12:06 PM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
22 Oct 2006: extra, extra
I LOVE not working for anyone. I've just finished reading an exceptional submission (in one sitting. The greatest luxury in the world) which has as one of its many themes the problems of employers and the corporatisation of the world. In a corporation this post would be impossible, which is extraordinary because it is a very simple one. It's merely to mention that we have a few mini-sites which you might not be aware of and which you might enjoy. They are:
www.snowbooks.com/Fighting - a page that includes links to some extracts from the book.
www.snowbooks.com/papercut - the homepage to our gory movie trailer for The Death Artist
www.snowbooks.com/thecrafterscompanion - details about our gorgeous crafty book.
Now, if snowbooks was a corporate hierarchy, not only would the proposal for the development of these sites have had to go through a capex review, and been executed by a costly project management team (as opposed to being knocked up in a few hours by the self-same, uber-multi-talented people (including me, that means. So modest) who bought the titles, and edited them, and designed them, and market them), but I would have had to have been invited to post about them using marketingspeak. But seeing as we don't have to be on-message, or worry about what this post will do to our position within the corporate hierarchy (will Sales be cross at me for stepping on their toes? Did we get signoff from Ops?) I am free to post this from the comfort of my sofa without asking anyone's permission. I am also free to be honest, which you wouldn't think could be as much of a luxury as it is: so for god's sake don't download the papercut movie if you are squeamish; don't visit the Fighting website if you have no interest in martial arts and don't look at the crafting website if you don't like handicrafts.
See, that's common sense - don't read about something if you have no interest in it. But marketingspeak doesn't do common sense - plus as a lowly middle manager you get into trouble if you're seen as badmouthing the brand. Moreover, it's so much effort for marketing departments to think about people as individuals; so much easier to think of them as a mass body and it leads to bland, hyperbolic marketing messages: 'This book is perfect for everyone!' Which, we know, is rarely the case.
There's a lot to say on this subject, and even more to do. I might ask Rob (source of all wiseness) to write something on it... but in the meantime I have another submission to start on. Hooray for the rain, and warm cats, and cups of hot black tea, and the soft glow of the laptop...
posted on October 22, 2006 03:33 PM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
20 Oct 2006: First in an occasional series
An occasional series on winning Snowbooks Buzzword Bingo phrases.
#1 'Next month when it's calmed down a bit, we'll do ...'
#2 'Well they promised it was going to be delivered today.'
#3 'The printer is out of toner'
#4 'Have we got any Scotch tape left?' (I don't know why but we just can't seem to get through enough of that stuff)
#5 'Aggghheee!! Yes!' (use your imagination)
posted on October 20, 2006 06:50 PM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
19 Oct 2006: Our friend, destruction
So yesterday saw me attend a seminar about digitisation. I sit near the door at these things, just in case. Should've bolted. We've spent quite a lot of time thinking through our strategy so I wasn't coming to this with a blank canvas, and what do you know? I came away with exactly no additional information to add into our planning. Actually, that's not quite true: I came away with a sense of exactly which companies will be around in years to come, and which ones will fail without knowing what hit them.
How much longer can this industry continue to be on the defensive? Or to be so obtuse? Amazon WILL disintermediate the supply chain and offer publication services to authors; authors WILL take advantage of this because it is currently almost impossible to get published. A decent e-reader WILL come along and the mass market WILL engage in time. And why aren't publishers more worried about their role in life? As we've said before, publishers do so little. They outsource almost every function, from typesetting and printing to distribution, sales and sourcing content (to agents and authors) and even editorial and proofreading work. Ah yes, dear, they say, but publishers are a badge of quality. Their careful eye selects the needles from the haystack. Well if our main role is as a filter, we are doing a pretty shocking job. The back of every book screams 'this is the best book' - blurbs and endorsements provide no real differentiation. Books that editors pay vast sums for fail to earn back their advances, so how good are those editors as the arbiters of the reading public's taste? Peer to peer networks WILL provide the best recommendations and will act as a perfectly good filter of quality even as the number of books available increases.
The businesses that survive over the long term will be those that are willing to destroy themselves, phoenix-stylee. Those who cling on for their pound of flesh or their 10% or who work hard to protect their job description are delusional if they think the market will tolerate them. That makes me excited for Snowbooks, because we're good at knocking stuff down, and a lot of businesses aren't. It stands to reason: the skills that get a 55 year old man to be the md of his organisation are pretty much defunct in the organisation of the future - why would he bring about his own redundancy?
We have a healthy respect for the market. We know that readers already don't need us; we know that in the future authors won't need us unless we do something useful to improve their content. So we keep most of our processes in-house; we add value to books through editorial work and design. And more than anything, we don't think of digitisation as a thing that needs to be tackled. It's the world, and a big shiny exciting one at that.
So: rant over. No more looking at what everyone else is doing wrong - there's no talking to them, so stuff 'em. Subsequent posts will be about exciting, forward-looking developments. To the future!
posted on October 19, 2006 11:04 AM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
17 Oct 2006: Levels of incompetence
When I worked in retail (I know, boring, but bear with me) the world was awash with anecdotes (the basic building block of strategic planning in the retailers I worked for) about what could be done with loyalty card data. Frinstance, the old "beer and nappies" story* was hauled out time and again to demonstrate that people shop in interesting ways and therefore the layout of all stores should be changed - for the sixth time that year.
Bitter invective about my former employers aside, loyalty card data and basket analysis, done properly, are fundamentally useful, statistically significant sources of information about the actual behaviour of your customers - much more robust data than focus groups, for example.
But in the book world, we're just at the start of this adventure. Waterstone's have been trialling a loyalty card, and the signs are promising - great uptake, interesting data coming through and what appears to be real insight into their customers' behaviour. Amazon, of course, have similarly interesting data and EPOS means all retailers can effectively monitor their customers' habits, preferences and behaviour.
So maybe now is the time to use this tremendous body of data to revise the ghastly product classification hierarchy that our industry is lumbered with. You can take a look at it here. Reading it is like reading the minutes of the meeting where every man and his dog must have got together to argue about what should appear. Now I'm an archaeology graduate myself - nothing wrong with it - but how can this one subject merit the following uber-extensive categorisation when general and literary fiction get just three time-based groupings:
HD Archaeology
HDA Archaeological theory
HDD Archaeology by period / region
HDDA Prehistoric archaeology
HDDC Middle & Near Eastern archaeology
HDDF European archaeology
HDDJ Asian archaeology
HDDL African archaeology
HDDN North American archaeology
HDDP Central American & Caribbean archaeology
HDDS South American archaeology
HDDV Australasian & Pacific archaeology
HDP Environmental archaeology
HDR Underwater archaeology
HDT Industrial archaeology
HDW Archaeological methodology & techniques
I think this should be an industry, not a consultant-led exercise - maybe a cross-retailer team could be set up to revise the classifications. Who better? They know how people shop, and with shopper behaviour getting more and more visible it could make a huge difference to the industry.
*You don't know the 'beer and nappies story'? Oh, man. Pull up a chair. Some bright spark in the loyalty card data department noticed that a lot of baskets contained just two items - beer and nappies. The analyst poked around a bit, asked some questions and discovered that it appeared women were sending their husbands to the supermarket for nappies. Whilst they were there, the men were making a quick detour to the beer aisle to pick up a little something to anaesthetise their poor baby-addled brains. The marketing department decided to act on this insight and ran a trial where they merchandised nappies and beer on the same aisle and lo! Sales tripled. Or quadrupled, or went up by an order of magnitude, or went up by a million percent, depending on when you heard this anecdote and whether it had been sufficiently exaggerated by then.
posted on October 17, 2006 05:26 PM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
17 Oct 2006: Feed your head
Don't say we never listen to you. Following a request from one of our readers, we've beefed up our feeds and stuck a gorblimey actual link in the sidebar ( ← thataway) to make keeping up with the Snows that little bit easier. Ms Row, this one's for you.
If you don't know about RSS, Atom and the like, there's an excellent guide here. The BBC has a good one too. Oh, and if you'd been using Firefox the feed would have been there all along mumble grumble (sound of publisher dragging feet down long stone-flagged corridor, shaking head at world, consoled by pipe).
posted on October 17, 2006 11:14 AM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
13 Oct 2006: Advertising sux
I'm a bit cross. I have to pay a bill for some advertising. Fair dos: I agreed to it (read: fell for it) when the salesperson called, and even went through with it after sleeping on it. We designed a nice advert. The piece of advertising appeared. Nothing happened: no one called, no one noticed, no one cared. Then the (eyewateringly large) bill arrived. That is the natural order of things in the world of advertising - unless you spend above a certain amount.
There are those who would tell you that advertising is about building brand presence; that it's very difficult to measure the success of an individual piece and that 50% of advertising works, you just don't know which half. Me, I say it's a load of cobblers. Advertising is a waste of money and I'm kicking myself for falling for it.
However, I'm off to Wales for the weekend to see my lovely mum and dad (hello!) where everything gets put into perspective and the air clears all the cobwebs away. Plus I get extra big hair from the soft water, which is good for comedy purposes. Happy weekend, one and all.
posted on October 13, 2006 04:55 PM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
10 Oct 2006: Email: The Return
Ok, now this might be tempting fate but we think our email is back up and running. We think this because we have received some emails, and our hosting company has deleted our support emails. So... that's, er, fixed, then...
Could you please resend any emails that you've tried to send us today? Thanks so much!
posted on October 10, 2006 04:43 PM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
10 Oct 2006: Button, button, who's got the button
Oh, it's just a post a minute here today. Here are a couple of buttons upon which you can click to pre-order these two particularly fine, albeit somewhat unrelated, books. PERFECT CHRISTMAS PRESENTS for the crafting martial artist in your life. Who needs an editorial strategy? Er, we recommend that you click on one or t'other depending on taste (although the more I think about it... knitting needles do look kinda deadly...)
Postage and packing free to anywhere in the world! That's "free"! Don't say we're not the nicest bunch of folks ever. And if you want to put one of these buttons on your own blog, get in touch and I'll send you the code - and give you 25% off!
posted on October 10, 2006 02:39 PM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
10 Oct 2006: Email redux
And I'd like to point out that we spend an inordinate amount of time and effort and brainpower to make our IT infrastructure just so, and then we get let down by our hosting company. Honestly, you bust a gut to make sure the company is all slick'n'all and the one thing you don't keep in-house goes wrong. If you want a job doing properly, etc.
Like James says, the hosters are trying to fix it right now... and we're standing right behind them, holding their own spanners threateningly over their heads...
If you have an urgent email to get to us, please send it to snowbooksextra@googlemail.com. Sorry again for the annoyance.
posted on October 10, 2006 12:19 PM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
10 Oct 2006: Email
Apologies to anyone trying to send us email and having it bounce back. We're aware of the problem and men with spanners are currently doing their thing. Normal service will be resumed like Ronnie Corbett - that is, shortly.
posted on October 10, 2006 11:30 AM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
10 Oct 2006: Flat-tops, Death porn and pranking Gorby...
We're looking forward very much to publishing Mark Ames' excellent and incisive analysis of workplace and school shootings, Going Postal, in the New Year. For those with an interest in Mark's background in journalism, you could do worse than check out this piece in the UK Independent, although it hardly does justice to the monument to fearless investigation and horrendously bad taste that is The eXile.
Mark is also a regular pundit over at the Guardian's Comment Is Free website. You can find his columns here - many of them riffing on the same subjects he covers in the upcoming book. Rumours of a documentary based on the book were also circulating at Frankfurt, but we'll have to wait and see on that one...
posted on October 10, 2006 10:53 AM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
09 Oct 2006: Back
Back, back to my safe office and own bed and good coffee and unhobbled web connection and email and more coffee and everything. Sure, seeing the world is nice an'all, but Frankfurt hardly counts as a holiday and I'm very glad to be back... to the teetering piles of invoices which seem to be flooding my desk. Hmm. Remember I told you about that whole 'ooh Christmas is scary because lots of bookstores have bought lots of books but let's hope readers buy them too' thing? Well phase one of the scariness has started because I now have the print bills to pay. Gulp.
But the signs are good. Frinstance, we are having tremendous success with pre-orders of The Crafter's Companion. Last week Anna put a pre-order Paypal button on her website which I haven't even bothered to put on Snowbooks' yet... since then we have sold more than $5000 worth! And you should pre-order it too.
And that's not all. Frankfurt was a stormer - our best ever, probably. We only did one actual shake-hands-sign-contract-take-photo deal (on foreign rights for Ex Machina) but we:
- met with foreign wholesalers and our export partners from Europe, Australia, Asia and the US (hello!) and agreed to send them a lot of books to sell
- had excellent foreign rights interest in all our books but highlights included Deep Hanging Out (which will have its own blog post soon. Sorry this is in the wrong order), Crafters, Lint (huge interest. Steve Aylett is everyone's favourite author, turns out), Ex Machina, Plotting, Taking the Plunge, How Very Interesting, Sand Daughter (huge again), Sob Story (massive interest) and Needle in the Blood.
- caught up with our peers. Summersdale have always looked after us and tell us wise things. Such nice boys. Mark from Quercus is similarly charming and really lovely to talk to. And The Friday Project were looking gorgeous - right-thinking publishers unite.
Lots to do this week - huge amount of follow ups to do and let's not forget those bloody bills to pay. So I'll leave you with this to ponder. Here is a photo of the Frankfurter Hof - the most popular hotel for publishers to stay.
If you are an editorial assistant in a large publishing house on £18,000 and your manager tells you the company can't possibly afford to give you a £500 pay rise, show them this photo and ask how many of your senior management stayed there. In BookFair week, room rates are €500 a night with a minimum four night booking - €2000 per person. Compare that to our wonderful accomodation: total bill for four people for five nights was €700. We were in BUNK BEDS, for god's sake - but we have a lot more money to be spent on things other than jacuzzis as a result. "Snowbooks: spending money wisely since 2003."
And here is our little stand:
Right, to the email! I've answered three this morning - 1200 in the inbox still to go... Dontcha just love spam.
posted on October 9, 2006 09:41 AM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
02 Oct 2006: Snowbooks to the rescue!
As promised, here's a photo of the CD cover James has made for Frankfurt.
Xtreme close up:
I lof the goldfish bowl hat thing.
Then you put it in your computer and presto: rights info and reading copies at your fingertips - and none of that nasty chopping down trees business to make hundreds of proofs. It's the way of the future, kids.
posted on October 2, 2006 09:50 AM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment