KENNEALLY: Who Holds the Power in Indie Publishing
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Indie Publishing: Who Holds The Power? Recorded at Publishing University 2015 Presented by the Independent Book Publishers Association April 10, 2015 with Rana DiOrio, Little Pickle Press Kelly Gallagher, Ingram Content Group Jim Milliott, Publishers Weekly KENNEALLY: Who holds the power in indie publishing? Questions of power and the struggle to find balance in that assertion of power are appropriate ones to ponder here in Austin, Texas. A mile and a half away stands the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, adjacent to the University of Texas campus. “President Johnson liked power. He liked the feel of it, the wielding of it. But that hunger was harnessed and redeemed by a deeper understanding of the human condition, by a sympathy for the underdog, for the downtrodden, for the outcast. And it was a sympathy rooted in his own experience.” That’s what Barack Obama observed, exactly a year ago today, when he and the three living ex-presidents assembled at the LBJ Library for a civil rights summit, marking the 50th anniversary of passage of the 1965 Civil Rights Act. Indeed, LBJ liked power and he had a great deal to say about his own personal power and the power of the United States. Not everything LBJ said is repeatable among polite company, but there is one quote of his on the limits of power that you, as publishers and authors and businesspeople, may identify with. “Being President,” he said, “is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There’s nothing to do but stand there and take it.” Once upon a time, authors and publishers, along with readers and booksellers, knew their separate places in the book world, and they stuck to them. The distribution of power was uneven, maybe even unfair, but the pecking order seemed to make sense. Then, the revolution erupted and the digital transformation of books and publishing created a more level playing field. Authors and independent publishers, especially, rejoiced at this new-found freedom to write, publish, and sell books. As with so many revolutions, though, the change has come at a cost. In 2015, who holds the power in the book world? Are the rulers wise and beneficent or crass and cold-hearted? Are we building a utopia for readers, or making their lives miserable? Well, those are the questions that I want to put to the panel. As Angela Bole said, all of them are members of your board of directors. I will introduce them. I will also give you their Twitter handles. I understand that IBPA is looking for some tweets on this with that hashtag, #pubU2015, so if you would, try to remember to tweet with their handles. My own is @beyondthebook, after a podcast series that I host. And I’ll start on the very far end and introduce our panel here. Rana DiOrio. Rana, welcome. DIORIO: Thank you. KENNEALLY: Rana is online, or at Twitter, I should say, @ranadiorio. She is the founder of San Francisco-based Little Pickle Press. She has written her way through life as a student, a lawyer, an investment banker, a private equity investor, and now as an author and publisher of children’s media. Little Pickle Press is a 21st century publisher, dedicated to helping parents and educators cultivate conscious, responsible little people by stimulating explorations of the meaningful topics of their generation through a variety of media, technologies and techniques. And then to Rana’s left is Kelly Gallagher. Kelly, welcome. GALLAGHER: Thank you. KENNEALLY: Kelly is vice president of content acquisition for Ingram Content Group. You can tweet for him @IngramContent. Ingram Content Group is a comprehensive publishing industry services company that offers numerous solutions including physical book distribution, print-on-demand, and digital services. At Ingram, Kelly manages the content acquisition publisher team for North America, and leads Ingram’s selling and business development activities for print-on-demand and digital distribution products. Prior to joining Ingram, he worked for six years at Bowker, serving as vice president of publishing services. And then finally, right to my right here, is Jim Milliot. Jim, welcome. MELLIOT: Thank you. KENNEALLY: Jim is editorial director of Publishers Weekly. Their Twitter handle is publisherswkly. He is also vice president of PWxyz, the company that acquired PW from Reed in April 2010. Jim’s been with PW for 20 years, starting as the business and news editor, topics he still covers today, and prior to joining Publishers Weekly, Jim Milliot was executive editor at Simba Information, a publisher of newsletters and market studies on a variety of media segments, including trade and educational book publishing. So we know who everybody is now. Let’s get down to the questions about who holds the power. And Rana Diorio, you’ve been in this business for not a very long time. In fact, your timing was exquisite on this. You got into it right at the beginning of the Great Recession, so if you – DIORIO: That’s right. KENNEALLY: You only started at bottom, so there’s no place to go but up. DIORIO: But up. That’s correct. KENNEALLY: But your own background is, of course – well, I’ll put it this way – you were in finances, you were in the money. You were in the money business for many, many years. And I wonder whether people who hold the power in publishing, whoever they are, whichever the players are, are really the people with the money. How do you feel about that? DIORIO: Well, I’d argue that access to capital is an important part of being successful in publishing, Chris, but I think that the playing field has definitely changed. And I attest that change-makers have a lot of power. And I consider change-makers as those of us – I consider myself among them – who come into publishing to mix it up. You know, publishing hadn’t changed a lot since the Gutenberg press. And the digital tsunami started coming in in the mid-2000s, and it created a lot of opportunity for new entrants to have a voice. KENNEALLY: Well, I think we’ll talk about technology, certainly, but I do want to keep on that notion of the importance of capital. It was the point that you made for me and a light bulb went on. It’s an approach to thinking about business, because after all publishing is a business like all the rest of them, and so many businesses really can’t grow entirely on revenue. They need capital. They need outside sources of funding to get their foothold. And you know that very well indeed, from having advised start-up companies in the course of your business experience prior to becoming a publisher. Tell this audience about the importance of that. And the capital that you’ve got is your own. DIORIO: Right. So I started my company with my own capital and scaled it for four years with that. And then I went and I sought outside investors, and I had the acumen to do that. But I think it definitely takes capital to scale. I mean, you can start with a hardcore team and give them equity, but ultimately, if you’re really going to scale your business, you need capital. Revenue is certainly a great start, but to build a meaningful platform that’s scalable, you need capital. KENNEALLY: And considering the competition today, I mean, we heard from Peter Hildick- Smith just about how difficult it is in this world where there’s only so few book buyers relative to everything else, and so many book titles, you need as many resources as you can possibly have at your command. DIORIO: Yeah, and capital buys those resources. KENNEALLY: Absolutely. And the question of who holds the power, Jim Milliot, I’m looking at you. You’re in the media. The media holds the power. It’s not the money, it’s the media, isn’t it? MILLIOT: We like to think so, but it’s not as true as it once was. But going to what Peter – the presentation there before – goes to a lot of the stuff that we see at PW. And discoverability, of course, is the buy word, or the buzzword, for the last two or three years, that you never really heard before. And I think what we’re talking a little bit about here with Chris is that to cut through the clutter, reviews and publicity and someway to get your book to stand out is important. At PW, we do like 9,000 book reviews a year, which makes us the biggest review medium in the country, and most likely the world. So that’s one way to do it. And our position has become in some ways more important, because a lot of the mainstream media, as most of you probably know, do far fewer reviews than they ever did before. Now, some of that has been picked up by bloggers and that type of other social media avenues, but we still like to think, people do look to see some sort of credibility, some sort of authority behind it other than, you know, some anonymous blogger who may or may not know what they’re talking about. KENNEALLY: And I guess I was poking at you a bit, Jim, because we know that the story is that the media doesn’t hold the power, but they like to think they do, and they also like to tell a good story actually. That’s what the business of the media is.