How Can Publishers Build Platforms?
WHY ARE PUBLISHERS PAYING BOOKBUB
This is an opportunity; that’s how I want to frame it. Publishers have an opportunity to create an advantage for their authors and better predict the outcomes of each book they help expose to the world.
I was reading about a writer today who has 16,000 free subscribers and over 700 paid subscribers for her newsletter. She’s been building her list for about a decade and is very clear that this is a job for her. It’s how she earns an income.
I’ve read of two other authors who with 5,000 and 8,000 subscribers, respectively, who were able to generate thousands of presales individually through their email list alone. That was before a single dollar was spent on marketing.
Reading about stories like these leaves me slightly confused. Even more confusing is a service like BookBub.
Let’s get this out of the way first; this is not any slander toward BookBub. I was a long-time subscriber and appreciate what they do. Building a list of millions of subscribers is no small feat. Then to build a business around those subscribers that publishers fight for (and are willing to pay top dollar) is even more impressive.
But my argument is this: why do publishers need BookBub when they have the resources to build that same community, themselves?
Imagine Penguin or Scholastic owned a subscriber list with millions of readers they could segment according to interests (genre). If you look at entertainment in general, IP has become the single most important asset for any creator. Doesn’t matter if it’s music or movies. The ubiquity of platforms has created opportunities for the profits of IP to be realized in a manner that wasn’t possible before.
When I consider the potential for publishers to play a larger role in how they expose this IP, I don’t think they’re being innovative enough in their strategies. I mentioned entertainment as a broad industry because publishing now falls under that category. If everything is content, then so are books. And if publishers want to continue to compete, then they’ll need to become far bolder in their approach to promoting the IP they own.
How can publishers build platforms?
This is Writers Are Superstars. You know we’re not going to pose a question without giving some answers. So here are three suggestions for publishers to build platforms that can better serve their authors at all levels.
Frontlist Subscription
Most publishers earn the majority of their revenue from backlist sales. Those are books at least a year old. But what if publishers built a subscription platform that gives access to books that are yet to be released? Building this type of platform addresses a couple of problems, the main one being how to predict sales of a new title.
If you’ve paid any attention to the Penguin Random House Anti-Trust trial, you’ll know that there really is no metric for whether or not a new title will do well. But if publishers built a paid subscription platform that is only made up of unreleased titles, they would know which of those titles are getting the most reads and generating the most interest. This would develop at least a general indicator of the potential of a title to do well from a sales perspective and also give publishers an understanding of which titles may potentially need some additional exposure.
There’s something else that a platform like this would help address. Because this is a paid subscription, it creates an additional revenue source that didn’t previously exist. This revenue could be passed on to authors before their books are even out into the world. Why is this important? Advances are great, but they usually aren’t enough to sustain a writer. And since advances are split into two or three payments spanning over a year or two, even the impact of larger advances is dulled. The revenue from this proposed subscription model can provide authors with a solid source of income from the very outset.
Unpublished
There’s a stat I read recently thanks to one of our subscribers, Liana Kerr. It’s a Nelson study that basically states less than one percent of authors are able to secure an agent. If we extrapolate that number into how many authors actually become published, I suspect it would diminish even further below that of less than one percent.
What I propose is that publishers build a platform for unpublished titles. In many instances, an editor doesn’t pass on a book because they don’t think it’s good enough quality, they just don’t think it would be the right fit for them. Well, if it’s not right for them, it’s right for someone. What if there was a newsletter that gave subscribers access to books that were turned down? It probably wouldn’t be the full book, but enough to let readers decide if they want more. This helps give authors exposure, which we know is difficult to create on our own. It also gives publishers data that they can use to reconsider if a title would be successful or not. If a title has 10,000 reads in a three-month span, maybe that’s an indicator publishers can use to justify giving that author a contract. It’s also leverage for an author when getting into these discussions. They’ve just gotten validation that readers are interested in their title and can better negotiate their contracts. Or maybe they don’t negotiate and decide to put out the book on their own. There are possibilities and each gives the author more control over their future.
Teens Love Lit
One thing that I think is missing from the industry is a platform just for young writers. We created a platform called Teens Love Lit that was incredibly successful. What we did was partner with schools and different organizations to identify students who want to share their stories. Every week, a different teen was published on our site and their story was sent out in a newsletter. Thanks to our partnership with the Wealthsimple Foundation, we paid these teens to write these stories and were able to build a subscriber base of 90% teenagers. These were teens telling their own stories to their peers. I’d love to see a publisher replicate something like this. The quality of the stories was incredible and the teens were far more emotionally connected to the writing than I had imagined. We thought it was important for the teens to feel autonomy in how their stories are told and we gave them that. We were merely editors and distributors of their voices. It was probably the most fulfilling venture I’ve been a part of.
All of these ideas are just that; ideas. They’ll all have holes that need to be addressed if any of these were to actually happen. But my overall point is that publishers need to start thinking about building their own platforms. I see Scholastic and Penguin in the same light I see Disney. And if Disney saw a need to create its own streaming service and better control its IP, then why can’t our largest publishers follow suit?