Lisa Holton
Founder and President, Fourth Story Media
Since there are enough dire predictions rolling in at a steady clip, here are some potential positives to be taken in context of a year we all acknowledge will be challenging.
• More wagons venturing further into the digital frontier: There is still a wide spectrum of opinion on how fast publishing will move toward digital, and what that word means exactly (or even generally). For some, it means digitizing the files, offering more e-books, figuring out the Google settlement, and perhaps doing a Twitter campaign or two.
For others, it means offering more content via the web, finding online distribution/affiliate partners, and experimenting with new revenue models (while trying to remember that our current ones often look rosier on an acquisition P&L than they do on the balance sheet, so perhaps experimenting isn’t as risky as it seems). For Fourth Story Media and our partners, it means believing that the word “publish” is not bound between two covers, but instead defined by the art and craft of connecting great writers with their audiences. We will continue to publish stories over multiple platforms, cultivate multiple revenue streams, and follow our audience—children and young adults, for whom “digital” is synonymous with breathing.
While most of these steps will be small and guarded, there will also be some bigger developments, as some publishers begin to see ways to create the distribution channel as well as the content.
• Small is the new big: Having taken the leap into small business ownership from the corporate world just over a year ago, small is seeming more and more attractive, especially in the wake of Black Wednesday, Gloomy Thursday, and Madoff Monday. Why? Because our size and focus allow us to spend most of our time immersed in the world of online media and digital creation. We’ve changed the business model for two of our projects based on shifts in the online revenue market with little cost, fuss, or very many meetings. Our marketing team spends very little time in meetings, which means more time to spent in the market—finding the hottest new sites for our audience, making great contacts in new media, coming up with brilliant new viral campaigns based on recent experience. We’ve discovered a rich pool of talent across all fields including editorial, design, programming, and business development. They are fast, flexible, and because they love what we’re doing, are committed to us and our projects to a degree that is increasingly rare in any field. And as word gets out about what we are doing, great talent—from emerging writers and illustrators to established veterans—are seeking us out, hungry for a new creative experience.
We are a small start-up, which means cost-cutting, efficiency and bootstrapping are not a brutal, painful shift but a daily way of life. We believe that by staying small and focused on what we do best, and then partnering with powerhouses like our friends at HarperCollins for their publishing, sales, marketing, and distribution muscle, we can bring new ideas, creativity, and innovation to our industry.
So perhaps there will be more small, independent “studios” in the near future, and perhaps some of us will become the electric cars of the digital publishing world.
Holton is the former president of Scholastic Trade Publishing and Bookfairs. (Full disclosure: MPI has a consulting relationship with Fourth Story Media.)
