1 Examining New Business Models with Lyron Bennett, Sourcebooks

1 Examining New Business Models with Lyron Bennett, Sourcebooks Brandi Larsen, BookCountry John Tayman, Byliner Karl Weber, LID Publishing a panel discussion recorded live Digital Book World 2014 Conference for podcast release Monday, January 27, 2014 KENNEALLY: On behalf of Digital Book World and Copyright Clearance Center, my employer, my name is Chris Kenneally. I want to welcome you to our program today called Examining New Business Models. I appreciate your joining us. Just to remind you about the program notes and all of this. Until very recently, the core business model of publishing was in a steady state. In fact, it had been so for a couple of hundred years. Publishers acquired copyrights, sometimes risking cash to do so by paying in advance, they printed books, and they sold them. Complexity came over time with the introduction of new formats, hardcover, eventually followed by trade and mass market paperbacks. And in past decades, audio books became part of the mix. In the late 1990s, though, Ingram’s Lightening Source successfully introduced print-on-demand technology, and when Amazon launched Kindle in 2007, the e- book market came of age. The combination of these two developments created an opportunity for publishing without inventory. Now, it seems in 2014, new models roll out regularly. Publishers in topical verticals are creating subscription offers, they are working with other suppliers of services for the same, and even selling memberships. They’ve created live events and tickets to readers to meet their authors. 2 Over the next 45 minutes here, we will discuss with innovative publishers what they are trying to do and how their new approaches move beyond simply selling books one at a time. I’d like to introduce our panel here. Moving from the very far end, we have Lyron Bennett. He’s the business manager of Put me in the Story from Sourcebooks. Lyron, welcome. BENNETT: Thank you. KENNEALLY: Sourcebooks’ Put me in the Story is a personalized book platform that connects people to the brands, characters, and books they love in new and powerful ways. Lyron’s role is focused on creating partnerships with best-in-class content providers. Earlier, he was the first editor of Sourcebooks’ Jabberwocky, the children’s imprint of Sourcebooks, as well as a business development manager for Sourcebooks’ EDU, the education division of Sourcebooks. We encourage tweeting here, and I’ll try to give the handles for each of the panelists here. Lyron is on Twitter at PutMeInTheStory, and the hashtag of course for Digital Book World is #DBW14. To Lyron’s left is Brandi Larsen. She’s director of Book Country. Welcome, Brandi. BRANDI: Hi, Chris. KENNEALLY: Book Country is the online writing and publishing community from Penguin Random House that connects writers to each other, gives them resources to write their best books and to publish. She’s on Twitter at BrandiLarsen, all one expression. Then to her left is John Tayman, the founder and CEO of Byliner. John, welcome. Byliner is an online publisher of original fiction and nonfiction by some of the world’s best writers, including bestsellers by Amy Tan, Margaret Atwood, Jon Krakauer, and the list goes on to Sebastian Younger and many others. These Byliner originals are written to be read two hours or less and are sold in major digital bookstores and by subscriptions. What’s interesting about John, and we’ll talk about this, is that prior to founding Byliner in June 2011, he contributed to many award-winning publications including Outside, GQ, Time, and The New York Times Magazine, and his bestselling 3 nonfiction book, The Colony, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times book prize. He is on Twitter at MotorMouths. And finally to my right is Karl Webber. Karl, welcome. WEBBER: Thank you. KENNEALLY: He is chairman of the U.S. editorial committee of Lid Publishing – that’s L-I-D Publishing – which specializes in business books. He is also a writer and editor, specializing in topics from business, politics, current affairs, history, and social issues. His projects have included the New York Times bestseller, Creating a World Without Poverty co-authored by Mohammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank and winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. He is also co-writer for the number one bestseller What Happened Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception by Scott McClellan, which he edited, rather, and as well, three bestselling companion books to acclaimed films, Food, Inc., Waiting for Superman, and Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, all of which he edited. He is on Twitter at KWebberLid. With all of that by way of introduction, John Tayman, I do want to start with you. It’s an interesting story for Byliner. I wonder if you could start by very briefly telling us why you decided to go into the publishing business after being such a successful author. Why would you get into a business that’s having such a dramatically challenging moment? TAYMAN: This is going to sound very self-centered, but I wanted to start a company that was solving some of the problems that I always experienced as a writer and as a reader. I’ll repeat what you said. Byliner, we work directly with leading authors to deliver their stories to readers. Our emphasis is on stories that can be read in a single sitting, two hours or less. And we use the authors themselves to personalize the reading experience, which is primarily on mobile. We’re subscription-based, but we have a retail strategy as well. The primary thing, as soon as everything moved to digital, the lack of flexibility to write a book the size that I wanted, release it when I wanted, how I wanted, led me to start Byliner. KENNEALLY: I suppose it’s important to point out that in the mobile environment, books are competing with all types of media, and you have an emphasis on this notion of something that can be read – can be consumed, if you will – in about the time it takes to sneak away and see a movie some afternoon. 4 TAYMAN: Yes, that’s exactly right. We consider ourselves in many ways an entertainment company, and our competitors are Netflix and Spotify and Pandora. We want to be able to fit a perfect story into the reader’s life at the moment that they can most appreciate it. It may be 20 minutes on their commute, it may be 90 minutes in bed at the end of the day. KENNEALLY: That’s a different way of thinking about the experience for the reader, but talk about the business model. That’s our title today. We’re examining new business models. Can you give us an idea about the real intrinsic differences that Byliner has from traditional publishing? TAYMAN: Well, on the publishing side, there probably isn’t all that many. We function as a digital publisher, so we do many of the same things that you guys have been doing forever. We will work with authors to generate story ideas or to talk with them about various things, so we commission original fiction and nonfiction. The main difference is that it is always in that 5,000-30,000 word space. And if it’s nonfiction, we at times pay assignment fees. The thing that’s interesting about it is it gives the authors flexibility and opportunities that they hadn’t necessarily had in the past. A good example, one of our first books was Jon Krakauer’s Three Cups of Deceit, and we timed that specifically to a 60 Minutes episode. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a book about Greg Mortenson and three cups of tea. But because it was built from digital up, eight hours after he finished it, we had it in the bookstores. With authors like Margaret Atwood, she’s using Byliner to serialize her new novel, Positron, so it’s been coming out in episodes every few months. Just the flexibility that they have, and then the consumers can just enjoy it however they want. KENNEALLY: Right. Brandi Larsen from Book Country, tell us a bit more about what Book Country is offering to authors. It’s much more than a self-publishing experience, although that is part of it. BRANDI: True. What we do in terms of traditional publishing versus what we do, we don’t secure copyrights, we don’t leverage a print inventory. The things in our business, we have three components. We help writers workshop their books, we help writers find their first audience and connect with each other, and we give them a place to self-publish. Where we align in terms of the overall thrust of our work is really bringing better books into the world. 5 KENNEALLY: This workshopping notion, it’s about the readers in that community of Book Country – and something like 13,000 authors are now enrolled – being able to evaluate their competition, if you will, and they do a lot more than just say, that’s great or that isn’t so great. BRANDI: Yes. I would say that instead of evaluating their competition, I think really what they’re doing is they’re understanding the genres in which they’re writing. We’re open in over 60 different genres, and one of the things that we do is we’re connecting people to each other and we’re helping them to understand what they’re writing in. So the feedback that they’re getting isn’t, yeah, I loved it, it was good.

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