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KENNEALLY: and Welcome, Everyone, to Bookexpo America 2013 to a Program We Call Self-Publishing: Disruptor Or Defender Of

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KENNEALLY: and Welcome, Everyone, to Bookexpo America 2013 to a Program We Call Self-Publishing: Disruptor Or Defender Of Self-Publishing: Disruptor Or Defender Of The Book Business? Recorded May 31 at BookExpo America 2013 For podcast release Monday, June 24, 2013 As James McQuivey, the highly-regarded Forrester Research analyst and author of Digital Disruption, notes, competitors in publishing and across all industries are taking advantage of innovative technologies to undercut competitors, get closer to customers, and disrupt the usual ways of doing business. Recorded at BookExpo America on May 31 (and carried “live” on C-SPAN2), McQuivey – along with Keith Ogorek of Author Solutions and Angela James from Carina Press – looked at the disruptive effects that the growth of “self-publishing” are having on traditional book industry players. With CCC’s Chris Kenneally as moderator, panelists also considered how authors and publishers can best follow McQuivey’s key advice: “Disrupt yourself.” KENNEALLY: And welcome, everyone, to BookExpo America 2013 to a program we call Self- Publishing: Disruptor or Defender of the Book Business? Good afternoon. My name is Chris Kenneally. I’m business development director for Copyright Clearance Center based in Boston, Massachusetts. I’m very happy to have you join us for this special program live on C-SPAN2. We’re going to look at the way that self-publishing is driving itself into the traditional publishing business, and I’d like to start by asking you if you’ve read the latest report on the book publishing industry. The headline reads – well, it always reads – Upheaval Predicted. According to Bowker, self-publishing is one of the fastest-growing sectors in the publishing industry that is under such upheaval. With 211,000 self-published titles released in 2011, the most recent figures, that’s a figure up more than 60 percent from only 133,000 titles in 2010. So in the hour ahead, roughly more than two dozen new books will appear in the marketplace. And as I contemplate figures of that kind, I think of Mae West, but not for the reason you’re thinking. Not for the hourglass figure, but for something she said. She was, besides a fine actress, a really great author and had some wonderful lines, and one of the things she said was, too much of a good thing is simply wonderful. I have to ask a question. When it comes to self-publishing and its effects on all of us, the ability that it gives us to express ourselves, is there really too much free speech? Can we ever have anything like that? It’s a question I think we need to ask ourselves. And to help us answer that, we’ve got quite a panel. I’ll start on the end with James McQuivey. James, welcome. McQUIVEY: Thank you. KENNEALLY: James is vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the foremost analyst tracking and defining the power and impact of digital disruption on traditional businesses, and he is also author of Digital Disruption, which is out just now this spring from Amazon Publishing, Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation. He published it himself in February. To James’ right is Angela James. Angela James, welcome. JAMES: Thank you, Chris. KENNEALLY: Angela is executive director of Carina Press, Harlequin’s digital-first imprint, where, as its motto proclaims, no great story goes untold. Founded in 2009, Carina Press releases e-books weekly in a number of fiction genres including romance, steampunk, gay- lesbian fiction, and science fiction. And finally, to my left, Keith Ogorek. Keith, welcome. OGOREK: Thank you. KENNEALLY: Keith is senior vice president of marketing for the Indianapolis-based Author Solutions, which Penguin acquired in July, 2012. ASI’s self-publishing imprints include AuthorHouse, iUniverse, Trafford, and Xlibris. The company also has strategic alliances with leading trade publishers such as Thomas Nelson and Hay House, as well as self- publishing imprints in the U.K., Spain, Australia, New Zeeland, and Singapore. So really a well-qualified panel to talk about this issue, and I want to start with James McQuivey. I suppose the advice you would give to book publishers today is, disrupt thyself. McQUIVEY: Absolutely it is. In fact, you opened this session by asking the question whether or not self-publishing was the disruptor or the defender of publishing, and I would actually contest the idea that it’s either/or. I actually think disruption is the best defense for publishing, and self-publishing is turning out to be a potential boon for publishers, because you can sit there and watch people market themselves, share their ideas, see which things gather any kind of momentum in the marketplace, and then make your offer. At that point, where a lot of the risk is taken out, a lot of the market has already been built, the market that you’re probably not going to have much money to spend to build anyway as a publisher in the modern world. So in fact, this is part of the best defense of the publishing world, to my mind, than all the industries that I work with. Turns out that digital disruption turns out to be a better friend than foe, when all is said and done. KENNEALLY: It may not feel that way to a lot of people in publishing right now, so perhaps we should go into some of the definitions and to explain why that would be the case. What is there to make friends with? First of all, define this digital disruption. We’ve had disruptive changes in economies in the past, but this is something very special. McQUIVEY: It is very special in that it’s affecting every single part of the business, and this is true outside of publishing as well. If you think about what an industry has to do, it has to create from some raw material some finished good, and that can be a service, it can be a product, whatever it is. It then has to distribute and market that, and then it has to support the customer. What digital has done is created an infrastructure that makes every single one of those steps easier and faster and cheaper. And this is true across the board whether you’re Citibank or Random House. And it turns out that the consumer is ready for it. Let me give you an example of how ready. Go back to 2003, the two-year mark for the iPod. At that point, the iPod had sold, after two years, one million units. Now, back then, that was a big deal and it was, oh, Apple has really changed the music business. Fast forward to the iPad. We’re talking about a device that has sold 80 million units in its first two years and has gone on since then to now after just over three years to sell 140 million units. That’s not just because Apple is a really good marketer. That’s because consumers like the fact that a digitally disrupted economy gives them more stuff, more options, more choice, more benefits more easily than before. That’s why this is special. KENNEALLY: Right. And that speaks to the point as to why digital disruption has to happen in publishing, because it’s happening everywhere else. McQUIVEY: You don’t really have a choice. The consumer wants a digitally disrupted life, and they’ll go wherever someone gives it to them, as Amazon well knows. KENNEALLY: Right. You meet with a lot of companies, James, and help them evaluate their product lines and think about the future. How would you look at the book as a product today, and what are some questions you would ask if you were having a meeting at a publishing house? McQUIVEY: The book itself is a concept, not a thing, and this is a hard thing for anyone. You talk about branch banking, you talk about what is a retail store. It’s hard to rethink those words, because they are in such common use. Books have been around now for half a millennium in terms of their printed ability, and they’ve gone far beyond that before mass printing was possible, so the idea of a book is fairly ingrained in who we are, especially those of us here in this room. But does it need to be? Can we rethink what a book is as we’re rethinking what an author is, as we’re rethinking what a publisher is? The answer is yes, we can, and yes, we should. But here’s the idea. It’s not just that we change. We take a book and we get rid of it and we replace it with an app or something like that. It’s that we expand the notion of a book, make it include more concepts, more ideas, more processes and ultimately, outcomes. That’s where we have to start. It’s that fundamental a change. KENNEALLY: Keith Ogorek with Author Solutions. I read on your blog, Indie Writers, that you recently attended the Blue Ridge Mountain Christian Writers Conference, and you blogged about this second Gutenberg revolution. James alluded to the fact that the book’s been around with us for 500 years and perhaps longer in other forms. Why do you feel that this revolution and this particular moment in book publishing is as revolutionary as when Gutenberg created the printing press? OGOREK: Actually, the title of the address I gave at the Blue Ridge Mountain Christian Writers Conference was The Second Gutenberg Effect, and the premise I set forth was that there was a shift in the authority and the ability of people to share ideas and impact other people with their content when Gutenberg first came out with his printing press.
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