The
Tao of Small
70,000-Odd
Small Publishers Might Be Wagging Your Dog
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (APRIL 2003)
They’re
out there — all 73,000 of them — scrabbling for your
shelf-space, mucking up your mindshare. That’s the number
of book publishers in the US, according to Bowker’s
Books in Print database, and it has nearly doubled in
the past decade. Blame the go-go ’90s, the dawn of dummy-proof
desktop publishing, Internet ubiquity, come-one-come-all
chain bookselling, and the growing, mystical aura of
ISBN numbers themselves. Every year, 11,000 new publishers
apply for these must-have digits, be they startups girding
for the long haul or — as most of them are — one-book
wonders. And this motley contingent, believe it or not,
may be keeping the business of books afloat. “We’ve
found ourselves in what I think is the only growth area
in the book business,” says Curt Matthews, CEO
of Independent Publishers Group. “Our business
has been growing at 30% per year for the last 15 years,
and we’ll do it again this year. Outfits like IPG, Publishers
Group West, and National Book Network — we’ve
all been having stupendous growth and really taking
market share from the big publishers.”
Call it the tao of small. “Our publishers are the masters
of the niche marketplace, and that is where publishing
has been developing,” says Jan Nathan, Executive
Director of the Publishers Marketing Association.
Grooming niche markets with direct and special sales
tactics, these presses are wandering way outside the
glutted trade bookselling channels. Yet for those very
reasons, tracking their sales has been like pinning
the tail on the donkey. The best guess to date is the
1999 study The Rest of Us, compiled by the Book
Industry Study Group and the PMA, which estimated
that the 53,000 smaller publishers at the time had annual
sales of $14.3 billion. Add some portion of that “very
conservative” figure to the $26 billion AAP estimate
— which is primarily driven by large publishers — and,
the study said, book business sales as a whole “are
billions of dollars higher than previously perceived.”
But whatever the dollar amount, some argue, commercial
publishing has left acres of market turf wide open for
the taking. “As larger publishing conglomerates are
probably narrowing the choice of books that they publish,”
says Small Press Center Executive Director Karin
Taylor, “there’s a huge opportunity for small presses
to step into that gap.”
Wagging
the Dog
“Somebody
referred to it as the tail that shook the dog,” says
Richard DiMaggio, Editor of small publishing
house The Consumer Press. “The large publishing
houses shut everybody out for so long, all these great
authors out there stood up and said I’m not going to
take this anymore.” While irate authors may or may not
be ripping up their Random House contracts, it
seems safe to say that those myriad small publishers
are indeed driving book-business growth from the bottom
up. Publishing consultant Thomas Woll, who is
currently tabulating the results of an update to The
Rest of Us to be released before the next BookExpo
America, points to Barnes & Noble’s report
that its share of purchases from the ten largest publishers
has been declining, from 74% in 1994 to 46% in 1997.
“That change reflects the significant expansion in the
superstores, and that expansion is coming at the expense
of the big guys,” he says. But who needs the superstores?
Woll adds that a three-year-old African-American health
publisher he works with is ringing up a million-dollar
business this year, making 90% of its sales to pharmaceutical
and minority health markets.
Even trade-focused smaller publishers’ sales are soaring,
if for diverse reasons. “The last couple of years have
been a real period of growth and expansion for us,”
says Jill Petty, Publisher and Editor at the
nonprofit South End Press, which has been buoyed
by strong demand for its Arundhati Roy and Noam
Chomsky titles, plus the all-too-timely Iraq
Under Siege. About 40% of sales go to the academic
market, and Petty’s been selling to progressive religious
organizations, in addition to guerrilla marketing at
political demonstrations. Petty observes that small
publishers have been victims of their own success. “Books
that may have been called niche books 20 years ago can
now be found anywhere. Our challenge is to continue
to find new voices and push the envelope.” (Many market-expanding
publishers come to the Small Press Book Fair,
held March 29 and 30.)
When it comes to thinking small, delusions of grandeur
don’t hurt, either. “I’m probably a bit Napoleonic,”
says Michael Wiegers, Managing Editor for Copper
Canyon Press. “I realize that we are a small press,
but I also like to think that when it comes to our niche
— poetry — we’re a major player.” Over the past decade,
Copper Canyon has ramped up from $200,000 in sales to
a cool million. Improved print-on-demand technology
has made possible on-demand reprints, and Wiegers is
exploring using POD exclusively: “We may start using
it for all of the runs, particularly in the realm of
poetry, where it’s a niche market and the numbers are
pretty small.” Copper Canyon also recently offered books
gratis to reading groups in exchange for detailed customer
information. “I love a publishing house like FSG,”
he explains, “but I would lay odds of Vegas that we
know our individual readers better than they know their
individual readers.”
‘A
Terrible Catch-22’
Knowing
thy readers is one thing; getting to them through a
book distributor is something else again. With Ingram
no longer listing small presses who do not have a distributor,
and B&N only working with a select number of distributors
(many of whom require a publisher to meet a minimum
title threshold), the pickings are getting slimmer all
the time. Even Amazon has been stiffening its
terms for Advantage Members, charging a proposed $49
annual fee, plus $8 for every paper check sent to publishers
who cannot accept payments electronically. The upshot?
“It’s incredibly hard to get a distributor for that
first book,” says Taylor of the Small Press Center.
“It’s a terrible catch-22.”
Some may want to hit up Biblio Distribution,
a division of National Book Network that handles 400
very small presses and is adding new clients at a clip
of 35 per month. NBN President Jed Lyons says
Biblio was launched after Ingram clamored for a more
workable way to source books from small publishers —
“Either the books were not being bought at all, or if
they were being bought, they were being purchased in
the wrong quantities,” he explains — and thus was born
Biblio, which Ingram now recommends as its preferred
supplier for small presses. Biblio Director Jen Linck
handles the top four accounts, while commission reps
handle the rest of the country. NBN’s client list is
actually shrinking, as some clients hop to the less
expensive Biblio, which maintains a sales organization
separate from NBN. The Biblio unit hasn’t yet turned
a profit, but, says Lyons, “If we can get this right
and do it in such a way that we don’t lose our shirts,
then I think we have an interesting business proposition.”
Meanwhile, Baker & Taylor may be offering
a similar haven: John Phillips, VP, Vendor Distribution
for B&T’s new Distribution Solutions Group,
says they’re currently taking on publishers with
revenues of $500,000 and up, and he expects to add smaller
publishers (what B&T calls “micropublishers”) as
the infrastructure gets more robust in the next 12 to
18 months.
For those who can’t get into the chains, there’s always,
well, everywhere else. Susan Doerr, Marketing
Director at distributor Consortium, recently
polled some of the company’s 75 independent publishing
clients. “The retail market is particularly tough right
now,” she says. “A lot of them are talking about alternative
places to sell their books. Course adoption and the
academic market were mentioned in particular.” Doerr
says she’s seeing a resurgence of direct mail campaigns
to drive academic sales, and to help beef up this sector,
Consortium recently hired an academic and library marketing
manager. “Our course adoptions are way up,” adds Laura
Moriarty, Acquisition and Marketing Director for
nonprofit wholesaler Small Press Distribution,
which works with over 500 small publishers. Libraries
account for about 25% of SPD’s business, and grants
have funded marketing campaigns that are now targeting
African-American bookstores and museum shops, another
growing market. (Moriarty says almost 60% of her list
is poetry; the average SPD title sells around 70 copies.)
Some may rightly caution that the small publisher impact
can be overstated. “Small presses are like restaurants,”
observes Jeffrey Lependorf, Executive Director
of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses.
Of his total database of 800 independent literary presses,
he figures, “at least 200 or 300 of these are brand
new and will probably not make it beyond a season.”
Still, assuming that a fraction of those hardscrabble
houses prevail, what impact might it make? “It changes
the perception of the book industry in the eyes of government,”
says Judith Appelbaum, Managing Director of Sensible
Solutions and one of the BISG members who worked
on The Rest of Us. “It says to culture-watchers
that people are reading more and buying more than we’re
giving them credit for.” Even the larger publishers,
she says, stand to benefit from a fuller accounting
of their smaller colleagues. “It always pays to know
who your competition is. If you think your competition
is six people who are just like you — and if it’s really
73,000 people who are not — then you should probably
be doing something differently.”
©2003
Publishing Trends
