A World Where Data is King

As a metadata evangelist, I’ve been looking for ways to prove to publishers & retailers that storing & sharing of high-quality metadata is worth the organizational changes and investments.  Publishers ask me for hard data, which doesn’t really exist.  Today, I am proposing some very simple assertions and then going to explain why they are of value, how they can be implemented, and in many cases demonstrate that there is little re-inventing of the wheel.  So, I want you to close your eyes and imagine a world in which publishing is a lean-mean-metadata-generating machine (that also publishes quality works).

Assertions:

1. Every published work has the following metadata:
   • Title (approved by author, editor, and marketing)
   • Contributors (all authors, editors, illustrators, etc listed. Broken by first & last name, with a “sort by”)
   • Publication Identifier (an ISBN, EAN, etc. As long as it is unique for each medium)
   • Work ID (unique identifier to reference to a specific work [*description below])
   • Publication Date
   • Short Description (255 characters or less)
   • Long Description (2048 characters or less)
   • Category(ies) (Ideally using an open standard code)
   • Basic Tags (Character Names, Themes, age-appropriateness, [*description below]) (approved by Author, Editor, & Marketing)
   • Rights (territorial, format, etc)
2. Distribution of metadata is free & provided in an XML structure (Ideally using an open standard, such as ONIX)
3. Data feeds timestamp last time a record was modified, and allow a user to do a search on records modified/added since a specific date

Existing in a World Between Tech and Business

For the first 13 years of my career, I wore many hats, but it was usually clear what hat I was wearing.  I started out almost exclusively being a programmer.  I would discuss with my boss what the needs of the application were and I would then go about creating such an application.  Peppered in with my early career were the side-projects I either did alone or with friends.  In those cases, I was given the opportunity to be both the business person (making decisions as to the direction of the company, and then how it should be implemented) down to the technical decisions & coding.

Even in my last role as CIO/CTO of BookSwim; There were times where I would clearly be representing the business needs and desires and then I would put on my engineering cap and start to code alongside my developers.  I may switch back and forth between roles 10 times a day, but at each moment, I was clearly representing a side.

With that, I’m brought to the point of this post – my current role, Director of Innovation, doesn’t have a clear role.  To give some clarity into what my role does, I am responsible for prototyping out new features, and coming up with a list of what is possible and proposing that to “the business.”  From there, they will determine what makes business sense, and I will define a project further and hand it off to the engineers to be developed.

It wasn’t until I was in the role that I realized how freeing this was – and how crucial it is for other businesses to allow at least a few of their employees to exist within this realm.

In all the previous organizations I’ve worked in, when representing the business side you had to be doing at least one of the following:

• Increasing revenue
• Cutting costs

Devaluation in a World of Overabundance

Lately I’ve been reading a book that was written in the mid-to-late 1700s.  The author, who at many times was very wealthy, often traveled with all of her personal belongings in two or three large trunks.  From his descriptions, this seemed to be the norm – and most poor individuals could carry their belongings in a large knapsack.

While our generation has its minimalists, McDonalds and so many other companies have shown us that we want mega-ulta-super-sized things.  Also – we don’t just want one, we want 10.  A TV in every room, a car for every person in the family, lithographed food dishes for every household pet, etc.  Stuff – we want it, and we work our tails off to get more of it.

I am don’t have an opinion if this is right or wrong, nor do I wish to talk too much about it in specific, but I want to talk about how I believe it is changing the world of literature and culture.

When the internet began to gain major footholds in the US in the mid-to-late 1990s, people competed for eyeballs.  In the mad-dash to get more eyeballs, companies spent millions and millions of dollars to generate content and provide it for free.  Who wants to turn away a free product?  Once enough people were generating free content, free was no longer the novelty and people had to create unique, quality, free content – all at the expense of investors.  Finally, as those companies began to go bust, the few that remained were faced with a problem – everyone thought that if it was on the internet – it should be free.  Companies then began their “rush to the bottom” of who could create the most free content for the least amount of money and monetize through other means.

Here we are, more than 10 years later and book publishing has begun to shift from book-makers into content-curators.  Many early experiments that publishers had with going with a conversion house then throwing the online included a great many errors and had people saying: “why should I be paying for this content that is lower quality than the free content that is out there?”  Additionally, people interact with content differently online than they do off.

Enter dedicated e-readers & quality e-reader apps.  Publishers are starting to make more of their content available, more readers are reading digitally, agency model comes in to play, people question if an e-book should be 0.99 or 14.99, most publishers accept that e-books are inevitable.  As with the early boom of the internet, the retailers are at a race to get mindshare (eyeballs) and content.  How do you get mindshare – well, undercut your competitors.  Sell content as cheaply as possible, encourage publishers/content creators to sell content cheaply (giving a higher % split if selling below a certain price for example).

Where does that leave us?  Well – we have a great many traditional publishers that are in reasonable turmoil trying to figure out how to morph their company into something completely new – and how to operate with lower top-line revenue.  You have competitors coming in offering self-publishing solutions letting an author take all the risk (and potential reward) for creating their craft.  People want more, so give them more!

Long set-up for me to get to this.  The wonderful Margaret Atwood is quoted saying: “Who is going to buy my cheese sandwich.”  How is the author going to eat?  In today’s short-attention span generation, is there a large enough market for long-form fiction/non-fiction?  There could be, but now is the decision point where that will be made.

If Amazon pushes hard on the self-starting author platform, letting the author worry about editing, cover design, etc, and then gives preferential treatment to the book because its 99c, you will start to see that race-to-the-bottom we’ve seen before.  Sure, the $9.99 book is well written and edited better, but you can get 10 books a 99c, so who cares if 4 of them aren’t very good.  Does that mean that the $9.99, well edited, well written books need to drop in price?  Well, if they want to compete, they need to.  What happens when you lower price?  Top-line revenues decrease, sales increase, but in this case, probably not enough to make up for the price reduction.  Less money goes to the publishers, who then cut staff (reducing quality) and begin to cut advances (reducing the attractiveness for authors).  GO GO GO!  RACE TO THE BOTTOM!

Its a vicious cycle until readers finally demand that content should be $3.99 (I have no data, just making a point), that doesn’t have grievous spelling mistakes and at least one other person has read through the text to ensure it has a defined beginning, middle, and end.  You’ll get a huge number of under-employed people who are also hobby-authors, instead of full-time authors (not that there are many left nowadays anyways!).

What can we do to stop this?  Demand quality.  Pay $1 more for the well-formatted ebook.  Pay $24 for the hardcover that comes with the digital version as well.  Buy ebooks direct from a publisher’s website if they are offering them.  We, the consumer, have the loudest voice of all – we get to speak with our wallets.  As of now, there are some very powerful forces in the market, but none who completely dominate – so we need to act while we still have the chance.

-Nick

Structured Innovative Thought

I’ve spent the past 15 years of my life working with extremely creative and intelligent people.  While I’ve always been encouraged to come up with ideas, and I’ve witnessed other people come up with ideas, for many years I thought that innovations just came to you.  Additionally that it was not a learned skill.  Over time I learned that to be incorrect and as I dove deeper into the business of innovation/ideas I learned there were frameworks around idea generation.

Many years later, and having gone through probably 10 different thought frameworks, I’ve decided to share with everyone my current framework, which seems a mish-mosh of existing frameworks.

1) Take the time to think

Isolation/small groups work best.  Turn your cellphone off or on vibrate, step away from the computer (or close everything except for word [or if you're a writer, feel free to use write-or-die]), and be with yourself and your thoughts.

2) Ask questions – do not answer them (yet)

Phrase the problem you are having as a question.  See if you can phrase it another way.  Keep rephrasing until you cannot come up with another way to phrase it within 2-3 minutes.

3) Break down your answer requirements

If your question is “how can I get from NJ to CA?” then you need to frame the question more.  Who is traveling, why, etc.  Lets say its a publishing executive, and it is for a conference.  Your parameters might be: “<$1000 round trip”, and “same day travel”

4) Brainstorm solutions – try to get every one

If you’re in a hurry, try to come up with solutions that fit your parameters.  In this case, the only solution is flight.  But, try to come up with every way – including ones that may seem crazy.  So, for the travel case, come up with air, rail, car, bus, and cruise.

5) Justify your crazy solutions

For each of your solutions that don’t seem obvious, try to make a case that it is the best idea.  This forces vertical thinking and will often lead to new ideas.  Suddenly you realize that taking a cruise may take 4 days, but, it will enable the exec to take a big client out with them and have 4 days of great business development.  Force yourself to find at least 3 reasons why each idea is the best.  Feel free to go back and add more ideas as you have them, then justify those ideas.

6) Ask the negative

Ask yourself why you shouldn’t solve the problem.  Try to justify a reason that your solution shouldn’t exist.  For example, if you make TVs and people complain that they have to get up to change the channel, your solution may be “give them a remote to control the TV.”  In this phase, you try to justify why NOT to have a remote and how to make a remote unnecessary.  You get ideas like: “the remote can get lost” “have audio controls” “set a guide so that the TV goes to your favorite channel/show” etc.

Solving Non Problems

Often times you are looking to create value where the question is too broad or you don’t have a clear issue to solve.  In this case, I ask an open ended question and use my answers for further ideas.  I start with my goal.  The example below would be from the perspective of apple in getting people to use their iPad daily.

1) I would use my iPad daily if ____

• It had my email on it
• allowed me to daily download my favorite webcomics/news for offline reading
• it had built in calendar/todo list for managing things
• it had the ability to bar-code scan so that I could take it grocery shopping
• it could be clipped easily to things for hands-free usage (such as my shopping cart at the grocery store, my office desk,…
• it held enough charge that I didn’t have to recharge it every night
• …

“Where are we going” – Or better put: “Are we there yet?”

Being a huge believer in patterns, and a keen watcher of technology, and an active participant in the publishing industry – I wanted to see what value I can provide in some of the recent discussions happening.  As Apple enforces its 30% cut in all sales using its devices (well, anything purchased through their stores + purchased through apps purchase through their stores), Amazon continues to create closed devices, Android grows rapidly but Google doesn’t seem to be focused on Google Books, and publishers scramble to find a way to survive in a world where physical book chains (borders) are closing – there are so many discussions, fears, arguments, and changes.  (These are US based predictions)

What can we make of it?

In the short term:  Honestly, I have no idea.  My guess is there are going to be some big pissing competitions between Apple, Amazon, and publishing.  Harsh terms will be made, then reversed, companies will change because they are forced to, this is in the short term.  It isn’t going to be a fun ride, but I hope it should be a short one.

In the long term(5-10 years):
1) Devices - Tablet computers will fade into a more user-friendly PID (Personal Interface Device) which will be highly connected to the cloud.  As laptops – for the most part – replaced desktops, tablets will start to replace laptops and PIDs (or whatever they are called) will replace laptops and tablets.  Desktops will always remain as the best “bang-for-the-buck” machines to do high-processing needed (although cloud computing may replace that, no clue when that would happen).

2) Physical Books – Not dead, but a minority share of the market.  Maybe 25-30% of the market.  Most bought online from places like amazon, but the indie bookstore does have a chance as they will provide community-based activities and value.   Venues such as grocery stores, convenience stores, and the like will also continue to stock a limited number of titles.  Unlike CDs, Tapes, and VHS, the Book will never completely go away (as the book is the self-contained container).  Most likely POD will get better and reduce the size of returns and cost of current distribution.

3) Book Formats – There will be no format winner.  There will be 3-4 major formats and a few open source formats for different types of media.  All the major reading platforms will support all the major formats so, to the user, there will be absolutely no difference.  For the most part, books bought anywhere can be used anywhere (although, one or two guys – such as apple – may limit content purchased on their platform to their reader).

4) Distribution – Distribution costs will decline due to competition and will probably be down to 10-15%.  Services similar to overdrive will be great interfaces between the storefronts that pop up and the publishers.  Oddly there will be a distribution market similar to the physical one with distributors and retail outfits.  Unlike the physical space, tech-savvy publishers will be able to interface directly with storefronts to cut out the distributor – giving them the edge.

5) Enhancements – A new medium will be born.  As I’m not creative, I’ll call it enhanced storytelling.  Long-form and short-form will still remain, but there will be a hybrid mixed-media experience that mashes audio, video, images, text, and basic interactivity into a new form of story telling.  This will capture 10-15% of the “publishing” market but will expand the market into people who were not traditionally readers.  We will look back at the “innovations” of today and laugh at how long it took us to make them, how crude they were, and how we ever got by on ePub 2.

6) Who will win – Readers.  As margins shrink, cost to create content grows, and user’s expectations change, publishers will be forced to make wiser investments.  More books will earn out their advances as publishers listen better to readers needs.  Additionally, there will be more data and feedback on what readers want, how they read, etc, so that better decisions can be made.  The publishers who adapt this ability will survive and thrive.

While things may feel like a roller coaster – as they surely are right now – there is a clear direction.  These are predictions while they are based on watching the format/device wars with music files, movies, and many other technologies, that doesn’t mean much.  This is mainly meant to put into perspective the craziness that is going on.  The chance that Apple will gain such market dominance that there will be no other players, or that Amazon will own publishing are extremely far-fetched (although slimly possible).

I’d love to hear your thoughts/comments

-Nick

Publishers as Curators

While I believe everyone should have the right to a voice, I find immense value in the curation of quality.

As publishing is going through a great metamorphosis, I’ve reflected on what the role of a publisher is and what can make a publisher successful.  In the past, the ability to take your written word and mass produce it was enough to have a publisher provide value.  With the introduction of the computer, the internet, and self-publishing, publishers could no longer add production to their list of value add.

That leaves publishers with the following value-add: Advances, Editorial, Curation.  Advances and Editorial are extremely important to the author, but the Publisher cannot forget about their customers.  Boiled down to its core, I believe that publishers should all have the goal “To curate and foster authors whom will create content to meet the wants/needs of certain readers.”  Without authors, a publisher has nothing to present to their readers.  Without readers, the publisher has no business.

I doubt at this point I’ve said anything ground-breaking.  In fact, its probably a regurgitation of what many people I look up to in publishing have been saying for some time.  Now I hope to add value to the conversation:

Publishers should be lean and near-virtual companies.

Let technology companies make technology.  Outsource all aspects of production (for standard publishing, where there isn’t complex layouts).  Outsource ebook and app creation.  Focus on the following:

1) Recruit and Retain good authors (Acquisitions)

2) Engage your audience to understand their wants/needs (Marketing/Sales)

3) Maintain a consistent quality of content (Editorial)

Any publisher who can do that will be one who not only weathers this storm but comes out a leader in the new world that publishing is transforming into.

-Nick

Looking Back

I took that picture on September 11th, 2010 (high resolution available to those who want it).  That picture was taken from Hoboken, NJ about 1/2 a mile away form where I stood 9 years prior witnessing one of the most momentous events I will encounter in my lifetime.  So many lives were lost and so many more were affected that day yet it somehow still feels unreal.  Many have vocalized their thoughts and tribulations about the event through the past 9 years, yet I believe there are many, just like me, that have yet to understand just how we feel and how that day has truly changed us.  For me it has helped to be a reference point as to the fragility of everything – with enough effort, anything can be toppled.  Thankfully I managed to learn that lesson yet not come out living in fear that things will crumble at a moments notice – just accepting that they may and that life will go on.

To me, life is fragile, short, and unpredictable.  To me, thats what makes it beautiful.  Thats what makes all our efforts worthwhile.  So to those reading, and those close to me, thank you for contributing to this experience I call life.

-Nick

I Give to You, the Solution to All of Your Problems

Its really simple…
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Take a deep breath…

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Keep going…

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Take another deep breath…

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A little further…

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Give a smile (even if its fake)…

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You’re welcome.  In this high-pace life of ours, we don’t spend enough time to stop and breathe.  You may now go back to your inbox, twitter, facebook, txt messages,phone calls, TPS reports, deadlines, and TODO list.  :)

-Nick

Why Publishers Fear Metadata

While I cannot say exactly why publishers seem not to grasp the power of metadata to increase sales and reduce confusion within the marketplace, I can make a few guesses as to why they are afraid to do so.  In fact, the way that publishers have reacted to e-books is very telling.  Some have been doing e-books since they started, others joined the game slowly, while some are just firming up their strategies now.  Ultimately they took a wait-and-see policy and let users speak with their wallets.  As people bought more and more e-readers and e-books, publishers said: “well, look at that, we should get in on that.”  Although unlike e-books, there is no metadata device.  From the data that I’ve seen (personal research and external reports) books with quality metadata outsell books without.  Despite this, there is little pressure on the publishers to actually create this data.

Are publishers really afraid?  No, but the lack of excitement is baffling.  Imagine if at Bell Labs when the first semi-conductor was created industry looked and said, “Neat.”  Sure, we could have possibly developed into a steam-punk-esque world, or been happily living without cellphones or computers smaller than large rooms, but would we want to?

How is metadata akin to the invention of semi-conductors?  Its not – at least not quite as revolutionary.  That being said, metadata can be the key to making publishing a highly profitable and thriving industry.  Quality metadata linked with sales data provides high quality in prediction of sales.  As well, it provides information that allows for hyper-segmentation of markets.  Hyper-niche authors can easier address their readers and provide a higher quality of service to that market.  Marketing costs drop, prices stabilize/rise and profits are had.  Mid-list authors also benefit from the ability to target specific readers.  As targeting increases, mid-list authors can more easily find genre-readers within social networks and interact with readers to increase awareness and build followings.  Again – reduced marketing costs, increased sales, profits to be had!

-Nick

Sorry, We’re Out of Pretzels

Clearly, there are pretzels.  Wait – isn’t this a book industry blog?  Oh yes it is my dear reader and this is much more relevant than you may think.  Sympathy has long been a sales tactic that has worked.  Do you want to buy a car from the sales person who sold 100 cars that week and has a 6-bedroom house or the sales person who lives in a tiny apartment and who’s sales were down this week and they look like they could use some more food.  While some are selfish enough not to care about the well being of others, humans tend to go with the option that causes the least suffering to other (assuming the options are otherwise the same).  A similar concept is found in negotiations.

If you’re a publisher and you’re trying to work a deal with an author or a retailer and you just came form your pure champaign bath and had your driver drop you off in a new stretch hummer, its going to be hard to negotiate your price down/up 1%.  But, if you come in rags and say: “Look, all I can do is this” its hard to argue.  I’ve heard lots of doomsday predictions in the news about the publishing (in fact, the tagline “Publishing is Dead, Long Live Publishing” quite a bit).  Now, while its impossible to really say what the motivations are of the writers of these articles, I can’t help but feel like the big publishers are happy to paint a picture that they’ve got big problems.  In this crazy ever-changing landscape, having any bargaining chip will help you ultimately come out on top.  Plus, everyone loves to root for the underdog.