Have you ever got in the middle of one of those Mac versus PC arguments, where fierce partisans of each platform express contempt and loathing for the other? You can get stuck in that argument and lose sight of the fact that it's not the computer that matters, it's what you do with it.

Some people are the same way about print and electronic media. At one extreme, print partisans say they they would never read anything on a screen, and may even pride themselves on their ignorance of electronic media. At the other extreme, some new-media advocates contend print is archaic and useless, and will soon become extinct.

The reality is that there is a place for both traditional and new media. Just because a publisher is working in print doesn't mean it can afford to neglect the Internet. All print publishers should master the basics of Internet marketing, because it offers potentially higher returns than can be obtained from traditional methods. Let's look at why that is and how to make it work.

The first and most obvious factor in favor of online marketing is the sheer numbers it offers. I maintain several blogs on different subjects. The one that gets the most traffic is a blog that is generally devoted to publishing issues. Together with its associated html site, it gets around 150,000 visits in a year—a relatively small number compared to the most popular blogs. According to eBizMBA, the blog Gizmodo receives several million visitors a year—probably 20 times or more than I get.

Now compare those numbers to print publishing. When I was at North Point Press, we made the New York Times national best-seller list with a title that had only 30,000 copies in print—about the number of readers my site gets in a few months. (Granted, I'm comparing book sales to web visits, which are not directly equivalent, but the different order of magnitude is still staggering.) A book that I co-translated, Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, ranks as one of the twentieth century's best-selling titles. But its initial printing was said to be 11,500 copies (publishers commonly inflate these numbers)—fewer than the readers my blog gets in a month—and even its peak annual sales of perhaps 675,000 copies could not compete with the top online numbers.

Okay, so there are a lot of people online. But how can they be turned into customers?

Before answering that question, let's take a broad look (omitting all but the largest factors) at some of the different ways books can be sold. We'll compare traditional bookstore distribution with sales through online retailers such as Amazon or Powell's and with direct sales through a publisher's own website.

Sales to bookstores through a distributor

Let's assume we have a book that retails for $20. Traditionally, a network of sales reps would be employed to present the publisher's list (along with those of many other publishers) to buyers at key bookstores around the country (maintaining sales reps who actively sell to stores is what distinguishes a distributor from a wholesaler or fulfillment service). At each store the rep might devote 20 or 30 seconds to those of your main titles that seem the best match for the store. In exchange, the distributor will probably charge the publisher somewhere between 25 and 50 percent of net sales. How good a deal the publisher can cut with the distributor might be affected by the prestige its list brings, its growth potential, the desirability of its niche to the distributor, or other factors, but mainly it's a function of volume of sales (the greater the volume the better the publisher's percentage is likely to be). For our analysis we'll figure the distributor takes 40 percent.

Bookstores buy the book at a significant discount off the retail price. The exact discount is supposed to depend on the size of the order, but the store can probably gang your titles with those of other publishers represented by your distributor to get a better discount. We'll figure the bookstore discount averages 48 percent.

So, for a $20 retail book sold through traditional bookstore channels—leaving aside shipping and other fees —the bookstore will pay $10.40, of which the distributor will take $4.16, leaving the publisher $6.24. (The real world number would be smaller, because I am leaving several expenses out of consideration here.)

A further complicating factor is that books are sold to stores on a returnable basis. Selling into the stores is called the "sell-in." Those books still have to be purchased by a reader—that's called the "sell-through." Industry-wide, sell-through is probably around 65 percent of sell-in. That means that in order to sell 65 books you have to print and get 100 into stores, only to see 35 of them come back to you as returns. In 2002, 37 percent of all bookstore sales were returned, and some 80 percent of returned books ended up being destroyed. This is a significant factor that new publishers sometimes forget to figure into their calculations.

Sales through online retailers

Online retailers offer a bewildering number of publishing arrangements. Basically, however, their business is built on underpricing brick and mortar stores by offering books at a discount. I haven't been able to find an authoritative source for Amazon's average book discount, but I would guess it's about 25-30 percent off retail. In order to offer prices like these, they buy from publishers or wholesalers at steep discounts, perhaps 60 percent.

That means if the publisher can sell direct to Amazon it would keep $8 dollars on a $20 book—better than the $6.24 it would see through a distributor/bookstore sale. Moreover, I don't think you are likely to see many returns from Amazon, and these, as we have seen, are a significant factor on the publisher's bottom line. So, while there are many compelling reasons to support independent booksellers, on a pure short-term profit-and-loss basis online retailers offer a better return than traditional bookstore sales through a distributor.

Direct sales from publisher to reader

But why routinely give that big discount to Amazon? You're still going to be paying shipping costs. If a publisher could sell direct from its own website it would see a much better margin. What would this require? In my opinion, it requires two things: an e-commerce function and an effective web marketing program that will bring consumers to your site where they can make the purchase.

Without an e-commerce function the publisher is reduced to asking the consumer to call or fax orders, which are then fulfilled manually. In today's online world, many consumers are reluctant to initiate this comparatively cumbersome process. They want a secure website where they can make an immediate purchase with a credit card or a paypal account. There are several e-commerce options for small publishers. One of the simplest is Yahoo Store (I offer Yahoo not as an endorsement, but as an example). The publisher pays a small ($50) one-time set-up fee and then a monthly fee of $39.95 or more depending on volume, as well as a 1.5 percent transaction fee. The Yahoo name is reassuring to consumers, and the secure sale is handled through its site and then forwarded to the publisher for fulfillment.

That means that the publisher retains $19.70 out of the $20 retail price. That's $13.46 more per book than with the distributor/bookstore model and $11.70 better than with the Amazon model. Therefore (leaving aside the initial set-up fee), to come out even with the other methods of selling you would only have to sell three or four books books a month. At that point you've covered your monthly fee, and thereafter one direct sale is worth two or three sales made through the other channels. All three approaches might be worth doing, but clearly direct sales are gold if you can get them. So it would be logical to try to maximize such sales as a percentage of the total.

But can you bring enough visitors to your website for it to produce a meaningful volume of sales? That's the subject for my next post. Stay tuned!

Posted by: Tom Christensen

You know that book publishing is in a moment of crisis when the big New York publishers start talking about cutting back on their glam literary lunches. Yet just the other day Jonathan Burnham, publisher of Harper, was quoted in the New York Times musing about"whether it's absolutely essential to have a lunch here or there."

Sure enough, recently Houghton Mifflin suspended acquisitions, laid off staff, and saw its publisher resign. Thomas Nelson cut 20 percent of its workforce. Random House announced a major reorganization. Penguin imposed a salary freeze on many of its workers. Borders cut hundreds of corporate jobs. Barnes & Noble reported multimillion dollar losses. And the president and CEO of Simon & Schuster warned that worse could lie ahead.

Digital media advocate Steve Rubel went so far as to declare that print itself is in its death throes, and he predicted that print media will be extinct by 2014.

That's not going to happen. Printed books are a proven technology. A commercial book trade has existed at least since the first century of the common era. The earliest existing dated book, from 868, is still usable, while digital documents from just twenty years ago can barely be deciphered today.

Still, it is clear that the book publishing industry needs to make adjustments to respond to the rise and digital media and the fall of the economy. In many ways, independent publishers are better prepared for this transition than are the large corporate houses. So let's look at five lessons smaller publishers can offer their bloated rivals.

1. Streamline your operation for maximum efficiency

Small publishers have always played on an unlevel field. The corporations that control most of publishing also own means of distributing and publicizing their titles. (The largest book publishing companies are owned by Bertlesman, News Corp, Time Warner, Disney, and Viacom, who also own countless newspapers, radio stations, and magazines.) As a result, the smaller publishers have become lean and efficient, eliminating many of the redundancies of the larger organizations.

Right now I am reading a book by David Silverman called Typo: The Last American Typesetter; Or, How I Made and Lost $4 Million (An Entrepreneur's Education) (Soft Skull, 2007). In it Silverman describes the way a huge typesetting organization handled a job: "Each book required a job estimator, a customer-service person, a setup person, a keyboarding manager, outside keyboarders, one or more typesetters, and art specialist, a 'proofer' (it took me a while to figure out this was the person who ran the laser print), one or more quality-control people, a system-setup person (a whole position to set up file folders on the system), a technology specialist for when things went wrong (they always went wrong), a production supervistor, a plant manager, a shipping clerk, and a billet.... There had to be a better way."

There is a better way. Using software like Quark and InDesign, a small team of employees with flexible job descriptions can produce books for a fraction of what it costs large organizations with entrenched redundancies of operation. But beware -- such software enables an ignorant designer or typesetter to do serious damage. Small publishers should consult books like Robert Brindghurst's The Elements of Typographic Style in order to learn the basics of sound book design.)

2. Publish books you believe in

I'm currently a reader for the Northern California Book Reviewers 2008 Translation Award. There is a strong group of excellent translations contending for this award. Who are the publishers of these books? They are City Lights, Dalkey Archive, Green Integer, Kaya, Melville House, Milkweed, New Directions, North Atlantic, Omnidawn, Wesleyan, Whereabouts, and Yale. They are all independents and university presses -- not a single corporate publisher is represented!

It wasn't always that way. Alfred A. Knopf built the publishing house that bears his name by publishing books in translation. But today Knopf has turned its back on that tradition and publishes fewer translations than some publishers whose employees number in single digits. High-quality literary translations might not offer the quick profits than a little picture book about cats might bring in (I know an editor at a larger house who calls himself their token editor "for books with words"), but once independent publishers find the market for their unique type of publishing, so long as they are putting out excellent books they are likely to develop a solid base that will see them through the ups and downs of the marketplace.

3. Develop the backlist

Books like this are seldom designed to capitalize on a passing fad or a blip of celebrity gossip -- they are books that are likely to remain pertinent for many years. Because bookstore-oriented publishing is so frontlist-loaded, it is difficult to get big numbers out of the backlist using traditional channels of marketing and distribution. Collectively, however, backlist books can produce a steady stream of sales that can level out the up-and-down curves created by orders and returns of frontlist titles.

With frontlist publishing you are only as good as your current book, and for the most part you are not building a foundation for the future. Backlist publishing, on the other hand, helps to sustain a press when new titles fail to meet expectations. New techniques of small-run printing make building a backlist more economically feasible than it was in the past, when larger numbers needed to be printed in order to reduce unit costs. Some backlist books can even be kept on a publisher's list through print on demand.

4. Build your personal network

One of the reasons that book publishing has been particularly vulnerable to the economic downturn is that it has been slow to let go of antiquated models of operation. In the past, a title was announced and bound galleys were sent to hundreds of book reviewers. The reviews created demand for books, which were picked up by a large network of independent bookstores. To encourage the stores to give shelf space to the books, publishers offered them more or less on consignment. Early readers further built demand through word of mouth. Bookstore buyers noted the interest and reordered the title, and healthy sales resulted.

Hardly any of this structure still exists in the same way. Newspapers have been folding and cutting book reviews -- there are only a few major book review sections left. Independent bookstores are a much smaller segment of the market than they used to be. Books stay on shelves for shorter periods of time, so that word-of-mouth has less opportunity to be effective. Book reorders are less likely to be made by knowledgable staff who have interacted with customers than by automated computer inventories that may fail to pick up on reader enthusiasm. Books are often sent to the wrong stores, only to be sent back to publishers as returns or hurts -- it's said that today only UPS makes much money from book publishing.

Most smaller publishers have identified a particular niche, an area of publishing in which they are passionate and knowledgable. This enables them to find alternative ways of finding and introducing themselves to the primary market for their area. The internet offers many opportunities for social networking that publishers would be wise to take advantage of.

Consider the success of the Obama presidential campaign, with its focused approach to marketing. Robert Niles of the Knight Digital Media Center has observed that "Republicans mocked Obama's experience as a community organizer on the south side of Chicago. But Obama's community organizing skills defined his campaign. ... [T]his will be the new roadmap for election campaigns: do not rely on ads and news coverage to convince people to vote your way on election day. Instead, recruit volunteers throughout your community and use the power of their personal relationships to build a network of loyal supporters that expresses its support through publishing, demonstrating, organizing, recruiting and, ultimately, voting. Then send those volunteers into new communities, to build new personal relationships that can extend your campaign into fresh territory."

Publishers should consider this model and see if similar opportunities for building networks of support exist in their areas of publication.

5. Think about the book as an object

Finally, it is important to remember than digital publishing is faster and in some respects more flexible and convenient than print publishing, and it routinely reaches much larger audiences. Purely as a means of delivering words to readers, print cannot compete with online alternatives. Larger publishers have been trying to reduce the expense side of their finances by lowering the quality of production, for example by printing on paper that is barely distinguishable from newsprint and probably has about the same life expectancy.

I believe this is a mistake. One great thing the book has going for it is its aesthetic quality, which far surpasses that of digital publishing. A well made book is a treat for the hand and the eye.

Independent publishing is never going to be an easy business. But as long as independent publishers do not lose sight of the goal of making the best books they can in the best way that they can, their books will continue to find readers.

Posted by: Tom Christensen

My mother knows how to text message. She also recently learned how to send picture messages. This is the woman who used to make me type letters for her because she said it would take twenty seconds for me to do something that would take her an hour. Now, she types her own letters. This is technological evolution. It exists in the Dobie family, and it exists in publishing.

That's why I just don't get it when authors aren't tech-savvy-when they don't even put effort into becoming tech-savvy. We aren't a society of typewriters and snail mail anymore. The internet is king, and we must bow at its feet. Yes, you may feel fear at first, like John Conner in Terminator 2, running from the robots. But you have to realize that without this evil online empire, you-and your book-will fail.

So, you ask, how do I make friends with the information super highway?

Well, listen, dear readers, and learn.

1)    Website AND Blog: Oh, the dreaded BLOG. Wait, don't skim ahead yet. I'll start with websites. You-and your book-need a website. This website is for both of you. It introduces you to fans. It puts a face by the name, and a cover image to the book. It makes you a person, not just a name on that fancy book's cover. You will be more likely to schedule events, garner media appearances, and increase sales if you are more than just a name. You, just like your readers, have a life outside of your work, and fans like to hear about it. Onto the blog. Blogs, for those of you who live in caves, are like online journals where you can write your daily thoughts and post news and upcoming events. Again, the idea here is to make you into a person-to make you of interest. You're selling your book, but you're also selling YOU. Get a website! Do it! It's the first step to tech-savvy.

2)    Google Alerts: I love Google alerts. Sure, hypothetically, they could be used as a fancy stalker method, tracing the activities and Facebook postings of ex-boyfriends. (Not that I know anything about it….) However, more importantly, they let you know when you make news. All you have to do is go to www.google.com/alerts. This takes you to a website where you can type in words and phrases you'd like to monitor. In other words, you should type in your name and the name of your book. That way, whenever you are mentioned on the web, you'll be sent an alert. I suggest posting any received media coverage on the website (that you created already, RIGHT?) so that other people can see how important and popular you are. You can also make friends with the media by sending them thank you emails whenever they write about you. People like the words "Thank You." Use them often. Being tech-savvy means being aware of what's out there, and Google Alerts will get you there.

3)    Free Press Release Distribution Services: If your first question is "What's a press release," we have bigger issues. Press releases help keep you in the limelight. (There are about a million websites with tips on writing these. Just search "press release" online, and you'll have more info than you ever could have wanted.) Anytime something good happens, you should be writing and distributing a press release to your local media and posting the press release on your website. Then, comes the tech-savvy part. Post your press releases on free press release distribution websites. Examples would be PR.com, PRlog.com, Pressexposure.com, and many, many others. These sites allow you to post your news for free. Here's the key-let's say Joe Shmo from Idaho wants to look up something about you. He types your name into a search engine, and things pop up: your WEBSITE, your BLOG, and then, press releases. He's taken to a press release distribution site, and he reads about your recent award won, conference appearance, etc. It's an online presence. It's your online presence, and it didn't cost you a thing. The fact is, the easier you are to find online, the better your chances are of success in this new publishing world of internet and text messages. So get out there and become tech-savvy…we'll all thank you for it.

Posted by: Sara Dobie

Last week, my final thoughts were about community. If you'd asked me a year ago, I would have said, "Absolutely, reading is a solitary activity. Just me and my book. And maybe a glass of wine." Today, as I'm thinking about reading, I'm realizing that it's not the "me" activity one would imagine.

When I was in the third grade, my teacher would read us a chapter from a book every day. My favorite was Island of the Blue Dolphins. The entire story played out miles from my home—I could see the island from the highway. My mom, the librarian, read to the family during dinner. My favorites from her were the King Arthur stories. Man, I have a weak spot for knights in shining armor.

For a few years, my husband and I had this thing where we'd play the audio version of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash while on road trips (we don't take many and it's a long book). We'd both read this one separately, of course—how can you be an early Internet geek without a little Stephenson on your reading resume?—but it was just as much fun to hear it together. We'd listen, we'd pause, we'd discuss, we'd remember.

Back when it was first released, we were also playing online with friends in San Francisco. Nobody did anything but play in those days. This was when a graphic, web-browsery thing called NetCruiser was all the rage. Back when it was the height of cool to play chess via email. Back when you could see what was new on the Internet—the entire Internet—and still have time to experiment with the early version of chat.

And we talked about books with those friends. Talked about Snow Crash. Wow, we thought, imagine a virtual world. If you've been to Second Life, you're thinking, "Maybe next virtual world." But no matter, it's a book that came to life. Imagine that...someone imagined a reality, and then someone made that imagination real.

Fast forward to 2008. I've been a member of my book club for about ten years. I'm one of the newer members, though not the newest. I joined after they'd done the Jane Austens and some Russians (saving, however, The Brothers Karamazov for me). That was when we had the "old" list. We've integrated a new list because there were titles on the old list that nobody wanted to read, though a few die-hards insist we have to give it a shot. So once a month, we get together to talk about one book, though we talk about a lot more (there's a reason it's also known as "wine club").

Think about it. You read, however you read. I know people who, for various reasons, are audiobook-only readers. I know people who are blind readers. I know people who read slowly, excrutiatingly slow for someone like me. I know people who rival me in speed (I can't help it, even when I want to linger...). The one thing we all have in common is that reading is just part of the experience.

The best often comes when we talk about the story, the words, the vision, the ideas. Every person comes away from the book with something different. No two people have the same experience when they read a book. It's all about putting impressions together. Books, and I'm talking fiction in particular, are about community. We read, but that's only a piece of the experience. Our relationship with a book doesn't end when we read the final sentence. For some of us, our relationship with certain books never ends at all. And we want to share our thoughts about that book with everyone we meet.

A lot of people worry about the future of the novel. I don't. I do worry about the business of publishing because the industry depends on ad hoc groups to build community and sustain community and maintain the passion necessary to keep the world excited about book—and I'm going to tell you, the kind of community that this industry needs requires more resources (yeah, that's code for money) than the current business model permits.

We live in this crazy new world that throws old rules over for new rules without a passing thought. Old rules in the book biz were top down, you told me what I wanted to read. Now I'm telling you what I want to read—I want dialogue with authors, booksellers (really, I wish  more booksellers were working together to, I don't know, create consortiums of passion for books), publishers, everybody.

Community only works if everyone contributes. For this first decade and a half of what is our online revolution, readers, especially, have brought the passion and the innovation while the publishers have remained on the sidelines. But if I'm building my half of the bridge and you're waiting for marketing to devise a project plan, then I have other worlds to explore. If we don't want to talk about the publishing industry in the past tense, then the publishing industry needs to change how it relates to books and readers.

I am not 100% sure of how one goes about building a perfect reading community online (and offline, because it ain't about one medium), but I do know that leaving it up to the readers and authors isn't enough. We need serious industry investment into building serious community. Serious communities require sustained involvement, or if not sustained, then a loom big enough to handle the warps and wefts of individual involvement.

There are communities out there—Shelfari, LibraryThing, Goodreads, among others—and it's a joy to see how these groups are growing and changing. How word spreads from one reader to the next about tools and resources and fun. Like so much of what is happening online when it comes to books, these communities thrive despite the publishing industry. Imagine the possibilities if the industry side of the business threw as much passion into these communities as readers do.

When it comes to building a community of book people, so much of the burden is placed on those who read books (also known as consumers). Maybe once the professionals were able to remain up on the hill, above the community, living off the labor of those on the street. If that time ever existed, it's over now. If the publishing industry doesn't invest in the reading community in a serious, meaningful, sincere manner now, then maybe, like newspapers, the publishing industry as we know it will cease to exist.

Like I said, I'm not worried about the future of the novel. Story will survive. It will thrive. But the industry, the thing we know as publishing? It has to join the community or be cast off into the wilderness.

Or maybe I should just say this: I like to talk about books. Don't you, too?

Posted by: Kassia Krozser

For a few years now, I have bemoaned the dearth of publishing industry professionals at the annual South by Southwest interactive conference. It's not geared specifically toward publishers; though, in many ways, it's telling that online media, the motion picture business, gaming, and the music industry have come to dominate the festival. Why is publishing left off the roster?

Publishing people should attend the interactive festival for a few reasons. The first, of course, is that it's still cutting edge (though, as the size of the crowd increases, that's waning)-- what's being talked about in panels and at parties is what you're going to be chasing after in a year or two. The second that one this is made clear by SXSW: storytelling rules.

Gamers, particularly, get this. They understand that it's not enough to have guns and dragons and scantily clad women. The underpinning of great games is story. What gamers really get is that games are defined in many ways. Sometimes games are played individually, sometimes they're played by groups of people in the same building, sometimes they're played by groups of people within the same region, and sometimes they're played by groups of people separated by geography.

Games, like reading, make people happy*. Games, like reading, invite people to share in a common world with common rules. Games, like reading, offer an alternative to the humdrumness of day-to-day life. Games are fun. Reading is fun. It's no wonder that gamers focus on the importance of storytelling.

But today's games get that participants don't exist in one space at one time. There are options for everyone, be it the solitary soul or the gregarious joiner. Books are like that too -- reading, the act of processing text on the page into brain waves, is something we do alone; but we love to share the story, the experience, the words, the nuance.

To me, the future of publishing is tied to the future of storytelling. The future of storytelling requires the realization that we started out by campfires listening to tales and we have been telling stories in all shapes and forms ever since. Books, as we like to imagine them, are relatively new in our human history. Books, if I may commit heresy, are a means to an end: one way to tell a story.

I am not much of a gamer, just ask my mother. She and my sister play Scrabble like it's a blood sport; I play for the sheer joy of the game. They hate me. I am madly in love with story. When I look back at what has engaged me through the (many) decades, story, mostly in text format, is front and center. I am happy to meander through convoluted plotlines, as long as I can trust that it's all going to come together in the end...even if I disagree with how it happens.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about this over the past year, and it still feels weird to write it loud: publishing can learn a lot from the gaming industry. Hmm, maybe not learn a lot, but remember a lot. Remember that it's the story, stupid. Remember that it's the reader who matter. Remember that we're not picking up books to make ourselves miserable.

Most of all, remember that reading is supposed to be fun.


Posted by: Kassia Krozser

“Graphic novel” is a weak name. For one thing, it sounds like smut. (“Man, that novel was so…so graphic!”) Besides, it implies that a book-length comic book must be fiction.

And that’s a rotten shame, because nonfiction graphic novels have a huge potential readership. The Zogby polling group just released a new survey on books and reading. It found that the most popular genres after general fiction are nonfiction: history, current events / politics / international affairs, biographies, and religion / philosophy. Library Journal’s 2008 book-buying survey says that the books with the highest circulation are in the medicine/health category. An Associated Press / Ipsos poll says that the most-read books in 2007 were the Bible and other religious works; history and biography were popular, too. Nonfiction sells.

So why does nonfiction account for only two percent of all graphic novels?

I took that figure from Amazon.com, which lists 74,021 graphic novels, of which only 1,573 are nonfiction. Quite a few of them aren’t graphic novels at all but prose nonfiction about comics like Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography and The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America.

Maybe there are so few nonfiction graphic novels because they don’t sell. Or maybe not.

Rank Amazon’s GNs by sales. You’ll find that the top one percent – in fact, the top one-third of one percent – includes plenty of nonfiction. There’s history and current events like The 9/11 Report and Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History series, and memoirs such as Fun Home, Persepolis, and Maus.

What’s more, Joe Sacco’s work of comics journalism Palestine seems to find new readers every time the Israeli-Palestinian conflict heats up. Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics is virtually required reading for anyone interested in comics. And Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor became an Oscar-nominated movie.

Publishers for kids know the strength of nonfiction GNs. Capstone Press’ Graphic Library series has dozens them, covering history, biography, and science (including – cough, cough – my own Samuel Morse and the Telegraph). Lerner Publications has its Graphic Universe line, Rosen Publishing has Graphic Nonfiction, the British publisher Osprey’s Graphic History imprint focuses on wars and battles, and Gossamer Books publishes nothing but nonfiction graphic novels.

But where are the graphic-novel equivalents or adaptations of the nonfiction that adults buy? It’s hard to find comics versions of spiritual and self-help books like The Purpose-Driven Life, The Secret, The Last Lecture, and A New Earth. There aren’t many political manifestoes like Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope and Ron Paul’s The Revolution. There’s a shortage of GNs full of advice along the lines of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, or Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. And where are the GN editions of food books like The South Beach Diet? As my retailer friends say, we’re leaving money on the table.

If publishers start generating graphic novels for grown-ups in a variety of nonfiction genres, will retailers and librarians stock them? Maybe not immediately, but I think it’ll happen. I can imagine publishers producing floods of squarebound comic books full of happy-talk spirituality, oversimplified investment counseling, rants about government, and hardnosed commands about how to eat, behave, feel, think, and live.

Say, publishers? Take your time, okay?

Posted by: David Seidman

Following the advice of bloggers and magazines is a sure recipe for entrepreneurial ruin. Does this mean don’t read the blogs or magazines? NO! It means, make the news, don’t follow it. Or—to paraphrase a successful ad campaign: “If you read it, it’s history, if you do it, it’s news.”

Reporting Versus Analyzing

ForeWord, true to its name, is almost certainly the best of the trade magazines—very ForeWord thinking (the theme of my blog today—and clearly the most useful source of information for any independent publisher, independent bookseller, or independent author or librarian. And no, I’m not suggesting you stop reading the trades. Rather, that as a publisher, agent, librarian, bookseller or author, you owe it to yourself to read all the trades—especially the innovative ones such as ForeWord—to give you the foundation from which to launch your new ideas.

But make no mistake—no entrepreneur survives on other people’s ideas. No author succeeds by cloning Harry Potter or The DaVinci Code—or Kunati Books. (Mind you I was tickled to find an indie publisher who "borrowed" our tag line: "Controversial. Bold. Provocative." ) No publisher can thrive for long with an unchanging list of ideas, concepts, marketing plans or authors.

So, read the trades, and the blogs (especially this one, and my publisher blog: http://www.kunati.com/our-publishers-blog/) but only as a base for new-thinking. What’s In and What’s Out is not a good foundation for publishing decisions.

What’s In; What’s Out?

This is the biggest issue I have with the larger magazines and newspapers and their predictions of What’s In and What’s Out in any area: books, fashion, food, wine, you name it. Some journalists and bloggers take on the role of creating fads and fashions, instead of reporting on them.

Independent “Fill-in-the-Blanks” Do It Best

Fortunately, readers don’t always follow these trends, and publishers who simply try to follow fads often find these titles heading straight to the remainder tables.

ForeWord-thinking indies often take the larger risks to introduce new talent, ideas and concepts. I recently read a blog that proclaimed, “Indie’s find the new authors, big publisher’s poach them.” Well, that may be an exaggeration, and clearly the authors have the right to profit from their new-found fame.

But it does highlight the role Indies have taken on; Indie publishers find the new talent and through innovation help them succeed, assisting debut authors to build their brands and careers. Indie booksellers do the same by hand-selling books. Independent magazines such as ForeWord, even more so. Read the story of ForeWord’s inspirational start-up in the 10th Anniversary issue of the magazine. Indies (in any field) are the unsung heroes, you could say.

An Inelegant Segue...
I’ll gratefully make a small plug here that only subtly ties in with my point in this blog: First happy 10th to ForeWord (much deserved!) And thank you ForeWord for recognizing the role of the Indie Publishers with your new Independent Publisher of the Year Award… I’m beyond delighted Kunati and our author’s were honored, and am so much hoping this inspires other indies to innovate, take chances and find new talent. Which is my crazy segue into …

Memoirs… In not Out!
Today I spent two hours chatting with a very talented memoirist with an important story to tell about abuse. Now, I was trying to explain, “post Frey, memoirs are out” but I found myself not believing it. And, in the end, I made an offer on this most wonderful book.

When I look at our book list, I see a dozen memoirs. So, clearly, we don’t believe they’re "out." They sell well. They are not famous people—just important stories from real people with genuine writing talent. Such as Mothering Mother: an important story of a daughter coping with her mother’s Alzheimer’s. And Paul Cook’s new memoir Cooked in LA: a stunning story of addiction to fame, alcohol and drugs. And most certainly Wendy Aron’s amazing Hide & Seek, both a memoir and a story of recovery from one of America’s most debilitating conditions: depression.

Clearly, we don’t believe memoirs are dead. Today, I saw Publisher’s Weekly described Memoirs as “Unstoppable” and cited bidding wars on memoirs. “Publishers continue to snap up memoirs, undermining the perception that the genre is embattled in this post-Frey, post-Seltzer era.” Indies, of course, knew this long ago. It's not news to us.

Novels, a Shrinking Affair?
Commonly accepted “publishing trends” indicates that novels are shrinking affair, certainly for the debut author. Now, here we may be somewhat different from the prototypical indie, and clearly different from the larger publishing houses. We love debut fiction and fiction in all categories. It’s one of the reasons why we’re in business. And we continue to show that debut fiction can be successful, even in a 1 million plus title universe, where self-published fiction will soon outnumber trade-published titles.

But What is the Secret?
Hard work? Innovation? Risk-taking? Creating new trends? All of the above. Our director Kam Wai Yu created the first book trailer back in the eighties. Movie trailers were his inspiration, but it hadn’t been done. Why, we asked? The synergies of two industries combined to create a new phenomenon. Now, we lead with book trailers. But, it’s hardly considered innovative now. Almost mainstream. Nice to set the new mainstream I suppose.

So, on to the next innovation. Blog tours. Okay, that’s mainstream now too. Ezines. Been there, done that. Social Marketing 2.0. Very yesterday. What’s next… well, I’ll share, but not today. (Hint: I share often at http://www.blogertize.com)

Does this Mean You Must Invent?
Of course not. It does mean you must be an enthusiastic early adopter. Make it your own.

By watching ForeWord and the blogs, you stay on top of the next great trend: interactive trailers, paperless galleys, paperless catalogs, live web, online PR... And then you add your own personality to what has proven successful. Blend your brand of enthusiasm with the hottest new trend. Ignore the big publisher trends. By the time you hear what’s hot, it’s yesterday. Live author chat? So old now. Virtual book plates. Done. Think beyond.

Make it your own. Work it (that’s the hard work part). Take risks, especially the ones that only cost time versus money. Invest the time (who needs TV time or sleep?—if I wanted TV time would I be writing this blog?) These are the tools of the indie. There’s no secret.

We Just Want it More
Why does this work for the indie? It’s simple, really. We want it more. We work harder because we want it more. There’s no stopping innovation--and innovation has always come from individual minds.

Individuality is definitely the territory of independent publishers, independent booksellers, and independent magazines such as ForeWord. We have to invent to succeed. We have to work to grow. And we do it with a big smile, because enthusiasm is a big part of the formula for success.

Posted by: Derek Armstrong