Thomas Edison might not appreciate my application of his famous quote about invention, but I do think that invention and innovation are very similar concepts.
For the past two years, dozens of conferences like today’s BISG Making Information Pay (MIP) event and the ECPA Leadership Summit earlier this week, and our own event a month ago, have been focusing on the interesting changes being made in the publishing industry by a few key companies. Looking back now, it seems that those few have been very impressive on multiple fronts. Not only did they focus on an innovative idea, they acted on it, and made it real. The simple fact that they planned and executed the development of an idea seems to be the real victory. Virtually all of the speakers at MIP today were speaking about things that they had DONE, not things that they were planning to do.
And execution seems to be what separates the successful from the unsuccessful. In my estimation, successful companies have a culture of execution. They don’t just talk about doing things, they actually do them. And then, they review the results and improve the process. In today’s MIP event, Carolyn Pittis explained that this was certainly the case at HarperCollins.
Size doesn’t matter in this either. O’Reilly Media, self considered the third largest computer book publisher, is widely viewed as the most innovative publisher in the business. The reason isn’t because they simply talk about their ideas; it is because they demonstrate them! Michael Cader of Publisher’s Lunch and Publisher’s Marketplace showed in today’s MIP that very few resources are really necessary to create very innovative services.
Other publishers we work with like Island Press, The University of Chicago Distribution Center, the University of Nebraska Press, and Southern Illinois University Press, also have cultures of execution, even though they have limited resources. These companies continue to drive themselves forward, not worrying about whether others are or not. This type of self reliance is refreshing and exhilarating to be around, and I applaud these companies for their efforts. They are truly Firebrands!
What I think is so impressive about these companies is that execution of a new idea can be a nerve wracking and risky move. When we launched Firebrand, I was privately wondering right up until the night before the launch whether it was a good idea. Fortunately, by that time the plan had so much momentum that my private worries were overwhelmed. Now looking back, I’m very pleased that was the case!
Showing posts with label Chicago Distribution Center. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chicago Distribution Center. Show all posts
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Cleaning up the Backlist - Finding Gold
When I was at the Southern Presses Conference last week, Don Collins, President of the University of Chicago Distribution Center (CDC) shared an anecdote with me that was pretty profound. CDC offers our Title Management software to its distribution clients as a tool to manage upcoming titles, and distributes that information to the trade via our eloquence service.
Don told me that one of his presses made a considerable effort at cleaning up the information in Title Management for their backlist titles. They went in and added BISAC Categories and Descriptions to as many as they could. They did this, essentially, to improve the listings on the major retail sites, in hopes of inspiring new sales. But what they got back from this effort exceeded their wildest expectations.
What they saw was a 300% increase in backlist sales through Baker & Taylor and Yankee Book Peddler. Incredulous, they called the rep from Yankee to find out why. They were told that they had some category orders from several libraries with open slots. When the rep did a search on their database by category, these titles came up, they looked like a fit, and they slotted them into the order.
The moral of this story is that your books need to be able to be found by customers in order to be sold. It's a pretty simple message, but so often overlooked by publishers that feel that it is simply an administrative pain-in-the-butt to go back and clean up all those old titles. But when you think about it, since the tools were there to take this data (input in only one place) and update databases throughout the trade, this is a pretty compelling argument to manage the backlist a little more closely.
This is the first step in helping 'Fight Obscurity' for your titles. Make your titles easily found. In the future, I'll expound on other ways to fight obscurity.
Don told me that one of his presses made a considerable effort at cleaning up the information in Title Management for their backlist titles. They went in and added BISAC Categories and Descriptions to as many as they could. They did this, essentially, to improve the listings on the major retail sites, in hopes of inspiring new sales. But what they got back from this effort exceeded their wildest expectations.
What they saw was a 300% increase in backlist sales through Baker & Taylor and Yankee Book Peddler. Incredulous, they called the rep from Yankee to find out why. They were told that they had some category orders from several libraries with open slots. When the rep did a search on their database by category, these titles came up, they looked like a fit, and they slotted them into the order.
The moral of this story is that your books need to be able to be found by customers in order to be sold. It's a pretty simple message, but so often overlooked by publishers that feel that it is simply an administrative pain-in-the-butt to go back and clean up all those old titles. But when you think about it, since the tools were there to take this data (input in only one place) and update databases throughout the trade, this is a pretty compelling argument to manage the backlist a little more closely.
This is the first step in helping 'Fight Obscurity' for your titles. Make your titles easily found. In the future, I'll expound on other ways to fight obscurity.
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