Despite yet another snarling DC snowfall, and the usual spate of A/V equipment on the fritz, some 60 Smaller and Independent Publishers (call them SIPs) turned up for AAP’s Fifth Annual Meeting on February 26th. A well-executed series of keynotes and panels kept most of the audience glued to their seats all day. Hyperion’s Bob Miller, the post-breakfast keynote, set the take-no-prisoners tone for many of the panels when he told the receptive audience that there were “six ways you can exploit the weaknesses of the larger house, so that you can eat their lunch.” Running down the alternative menu of options, he told small houses to deal personally with both retailers and reviewers on the one hand, and authors on the other; cultivate their own specialties; pounce on trends quickly, to beat out the sluggish large houses; and take note that while the big guys like to do things the way they’ve done them time and time again — “Corporate publishing craves predictability” — successes are often those very books and publishing strategies that stand out because they’re utterly out-of-the-box. The bottom line: “Dig deeply into each book’s uniqueness and make sure you show that uniqueness in the book’s title, cover, and marketing.”
Other topics during the day included a review of what is happening with POD and ebooks; panels on branding and licensing; a discussion of the value of attending specialty trade shows, given by Stacey Ashton, Director of Special Sales at AOL/Time Warner Books; and several panels on global issues — selling and licensing into it, attending international fairs, and Spanish-language publishing and distribution in the US (2003 is AAP’s year of publishing for Latinos). The luncheon keynote was Newmarket’s Esther Margolis, who spoke of lessons she’d learned from her early days at Bantam and from starting her own company, twenty years ago. She told the assembled that “the definition of ‘to publish’ isn’t ‘to print’ — it’s ‘to make public,’ and that requires marketing.” She said she’s not embarrassed to use the term “product” in talking about a book, “because products need to be marketed.” Finally, she explained the importance of a small house developing a style and presenting an image, and admitted that in the early years she took expensive space in midtown Manhattan, rather than larger, cheaper space downtown, because she wanted to project the image of prosperity. Similarly, she ate at the same expensive restaurants that she’d frequented when she was a highflying publicity director at Bantam, and hired a top-tier lawyer, so that people would know she meant business.
The day culminated in the annual cocktail party, which traditionally features clutches of roaming Washington politicos — though the weather seemed to have kept them away this year, or perhaps Pat Schroeder’s Hill connections are a bit more tenuous five years after her departure from Congress.
Whatever letdown that may have caused was wildly redeemed by the now-famous dinner at which Oprah Winfrey announced her new “Traveling with the Classics” book club. Even though there had been rumors of an impending announcement, the crowd, deliriously excited, leapt to its feet for three standing ovations. There were diverse comments in the subsequent parsing of the event, with some in the media fretting that Oprah could set off a “confusing competition” among the Library of America and other classics publishers. (For his part, Modern Library Publishing Director David Ebershoff said Oprah’s bounce would be just like a movie tie-in.) But one of the most succinct remarks came from PW’s Nora Rawlinson, who said, presumably with Jonathan Franzen’s misbehavior in mind: “Tolstoy won’t rise up and say, ‘I don’t want to be on your show.’” (Rawlinson also delivered a bon mot or two in a speech about bookselling. This year, she said, flat sales represented the new bullishness.)
Thursday’s sessions had a hard act to follow, but the Recording Industry Association of America’s Hilary Rosen came prepared with a bagful of battlefield lessons. Among them: think of your customer as the consumer, not the retailer. Also beware that retailers will rebuff any attempts to go digital, and “if there’s one thing the recording industry knows, it’s that we were far too slow moving online.” Don’t wait for the market to develop either, she insisted, speaking of digital downloading of music and books: go out and develop it. Following those words of encouragement, the day ended a little earlier than planned, as attendees rushed for trains and planes ahead of yet another snowfall — presumably not a metaphor for publishing’s ever slippery slopes.
