What’s the fuss?Crain’s New York Business, a publication I consider a “must-read” each week, just published a short profile of the first-week sales of the e-book titles published by Odyssey Editions on an exclusive basis with Amazon. According to Crain’s, only one of the 20 titles sold enough copies to appear in the top 1,000 Kindle titles for the week; the sales rank of the others ranged from 2,073 to 11,653. The newspaper asks the question, “Much ado about nothing?” The piece quotes an industry consultant (not me!) who offers up the claim that titles ranked below 1,000 sell fewer than 25 copies a week. Although their list prices range from $14 to $16, the titles all sell on Amazon for $9.99, so you can imagine someone saying, “All this fuss for $250 a week?” Or $13,000 a year. Across 20 titles, that’s $260,000 for books that probably cost much less than a tenth of that amount to digitize. And there are literally millions of books that are not yet available digitally. If Crain’s had asked me, I’d have said that the marginal books are not selling 25 copies a week; they are probably moving ten or fewer units. So I’m not making the point that e-books will soon rule us all. But Odyssey’s effort, with little money upfront and no ongoing physical costs, may well be creating a $250,000 business in its first full year of operation. That prompts me to ask a different question: ”Why isn’t every publisher already doing this?” CommentsIn an unscientific survey, I just searched the iBookstore for 5 well-known 20th century authors whose titles are in the public domain. Nearly all were being sold (for between $0.99 to $4.99), and none were by traditional publishers. Why let others take that revenue? Those books don’t even have rights issues. Posted by Liza Daly on 08/03 at 04:12 PM
In 1995, Joseph Bower and Clay Christensen recommended that disruptive change be managed “in an organizational context where small orders create energy, where fast low-cost forays into ill-defined markets are possible, and where overhead is low enough to permit profit even in emerging markets.” In a publishing business somewhat addicted to scale, those are tough conditions to create. Posted by Brian O'Leary on 08/03 at 04:28 PM
If we’re talking gross revenue and they have a 70% revenue share with Amazon then sales of 500 copies per week (20 x 25) is generating $182,000 annualized revenue. Of course if you assume they add titles every week then it gets very interesting.
It’s hard for me to believe that the Random Houses of the world can’t do this math… Posted by Martin Edic on 08/04 at 11:49 AM
Thanks for the note on the agency fee. Whether it’s a reduction of the top line or a change in the bottom line, a publisher would not get all of the money. As you point out, though, it’s not a bad deal, and it can grow. Posted by Brian O'Leary on 08/04 at 12:06 PM
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