From PubWest 2013 Outsourcing Publisher Services A panel discussion with Jason Brockwell, National Book Network Phil Ollila, Ingram Content Group Susan Reich, Publishers Group West For podcast release Monday, February 24, 2014 KENNEALLY: Welcome, everyone, to a panel called Outsourcing Publishers’ Services: Getting the Most Out of Distribution Through Partnerships. I’ll introduce myself and welcome you. My name is Chris Kenneally. I’m a business development director with the nonprofit Copyright Clearance Center. In the publishing world today, regime change is underway. It’s not happening in Tahrir Square, or even in Times Square. The old is giving way to the new in the virtual square, and publishers like yourselves and players like the ones on our panel today have declared themselves on the side of the new regime. Indeed, the concept of publishing a book and distributing it worldwide is fundamentally different than it was even a few years ago. With a combination of print-on-demand and e-services, there’s potential today to reach more customers globally in both formats, E and P. To be successful and to focus on development of content, many publishers have begun outsourcing services, obviously including distribution, but as well, book manufacturing, back office, collection, and customer service. With our panel today, we’re going to discuss ways you can maximize that particular approach to your business, the outsourcing business. We have three panelists who are ready to discuss all of that. We’ll do alphabetical order. In the center of the podium there, Jason Brockwell is director of sales of the National Book Network, and is also account manager for Amazon. Jason, welcome. BROCKWELL: Thank you, Chris. It’s great to be here. KENNEALLY: Jason’s been at NBN for over 10 years, where he has sold a variety of accounts, including independents, specialty retailers, regional wholesale, and Barnes and Noble. Prior to taking his current position at NBN, he was national account manager for a number of customers, as well as some of the leading bookstores and regional wholesalers in the Southeast. He also worked as a journalist in Maryland. So Jason, again, welcome. Also to Jason’s left, we have Susan Reich. Susan, welcome. REICH: Thank you. KENNEALLY: Susan is president of Publishers Group West, the leading book sales and distribution company in the United States, with offices in Berkeley, California, and New York City. Susan had a long career in book publishing, with positions as president and COO of the Avalon Publishing Group, publishing director of Harper San Francisco, and associate publisher at Random House. She began her career in book retailing at Kroch’s and Brentano’s outside of Chicago, and was a book buyer for Brentano’s and director of merchandising at Waldenbooks. You’ll notice the theme, which I’ll finish up on here. Our final panelist, Phil Ollila. Phil, welcome. OLLILA: Thank you. Great to be here. KENNEALLY: Phil is chief content officer of Ingram Content Group, where he is responsible for Ingram’s publisher-facing businesses, and has played a key role in the transformation of Ingram from a traditional book wholesaler to a fully- integrated content distribution services program. He leads a number of Ingram business units, including Ingram Publisher Services, Lightning Source, digital distribution through CoreSource, wholesale merchandise, and Ingram Marketing. Prior to joining Ingram, Phil spent 12 years at Borders Group, where his last position was vice president of marketing and merchandising. The theme there is a fairly obvious one – each of these individuals has a real grounding in the physical bookstore as much as in the digital world that we all live in today, and so I think their perspective is informed by that. Susan, I’d like to start with you, if I could. For people who may not be working with PGW, or may not be very familiar with it, one of the things that I know you emphasize a lot is the whole notion of hand-holding, as you put it. Describe what that means at PGW, and why hand-holding is something that you should be looking for with your outsourcer. REICH: Sure. First of all, thank you all. This is my first PubWest, and it’s been a great experience. I’ve gotten to meet many of you, and everybody’s been incredibly welcoming. I think the number one reason why a publisher would consider working with any distributor is resources. Publishers, what is it that you want to focus on? Creation and development of content is what I’ve found most independent publishers – that’s their number one thing. So why not, then, go to a distributor for the things that they’re strongest at, and that’s sales, warehousing, the operations side, and education. Education means that it’s up to us as the distributor to keep our publishers informed, and we do that through sales conferences, meetings, webinars, and create a community and share that knowledge. I was on an Edelweiss publishing panel earlier this week and was able to talk about how we share that. We also share the costs of that with our publishers, so that is another unique feature, I think, of working with a distributor. KENNEALLY: Right. It’s important to stress, and we’ll get to this, I think, throughout this afternoon, that the kind of programs and services you offer are very much at the global level. So distribution has a whole new meaning today. REICH: Correct. It’s worldwide, and I think that’s true for all of us here on the panel, and it’s physical and E. KENNEALLY: How does that make your relationship with your publishers more complicated? It would have to, right? You’re talking about different pricing, different countries, different cultures of bookselling. REICH: One of the things we do as a distributor is that we have sales reps throughout the world. In certain cases, for us – PGW is part of Perseus. Perseus has a Perseus UK office. We use New South in Australia, and we have reps that cover the rest of the world. Also, when you put in your metadata into our system, you tell us what rights you have on the individual titles, and that way we can decide, if you’ve chosen to have us sell in all territories, which territory any individual title can be sold in. All of that is in the metadata that you feed us to begin with, which is what is all-important these days. KENNEALLY: Right. I wonder if we can get that microphone over to Phil. Phil, Ingram has a very ambitious program called Global Connect. We’ll talk about that in detail in just a second. But I wonder if you could build on what Susan was just saying and talk about the real opportunity here. In the past, getting books into other marketplaces was a physical task. Now it’s a digital task, and that’s clearly changed everything. OLLILA: I completely agree, Chris. One of the big things to change in the last 10 years, as I think everyone in the room is familiar with, is the barriers to entry to creating content and delivering content throughout the supply chain have fallen away, and fallen away quite spectacularly. In the past, the route to distribution was on a bookshelf in a bookstore or a specialty retailer. The question was how could I make my book interesting to those buyers, to make sure they end up on that shelf? So when I create demand in terms of marketing or publicity, I’m in a position to have that inventory out there in the field, prepared to sell it through the bookstore when the customer is ready. Well, in a large way, because of changes in Internet commerce, a variety of formats – physical formats, print-on-demand formats, e-formats – and the idea that it’s available globally, the idea of making it necessary for it to be on a bookstore shelf, while appealing from a marketing perspective, isn’t necessarily driving most of the demand. For those of you who were at lunch today, the BISG meeting or the BISG data review, you could see the preponderance of sales that are going through the Internet. So one question publishers should ask is, is the marketing I’m creating driving global demand for the title? Global demand can happen in any number of ways. It can express itself through the Internet. It can express itself through media. I’m not suggesting that all marketing is global, but it is likely that your marketing will be global and you won’t even know it. The second question is, for the formats that I’m developing – and I think of the Knock Knock presentation we had earlier today – what is the most appropriate distribution method? If it’s a book with a variety of things, or a complex package, then you’re talking about physical distribution, probably restricted to a specific geography. But if you’re talking about narrative, or if you’re talking about certain things with inkjet color or other ideas for publishing that make it easy to get into a global distribution network, that might be a different way to think about it. At Ingram, the thing that we’re the most proud of is we can offer distribution in every format, to every corner of the world, whether it’s physical or digital. The real question for publishers is, are you in a position to take advantage of that reach? How do you take advantage of that reach? And does the marketing you create and the demand you create through your authors, your publicity programs, or other ways of creating interest in books – what reach does that marketing have, and is it connected with your distribution solution? KENNEALLY: The point you made, Phil, that really struck me as important here, and I think bears repeating, is that one’s marketing approach as a publisher today is global, whether you know it or not.