Publishing Trends

Book Packagers Make the Best of a Worst-Case Scenario

“The advantage of working with packagers,” says Mark Magowan, associate publisher at Abrams, “is that when the math of a series goes down, you don’t have to fire your own staff.” Though Magowan may be grinning as he says it, it’s no joke that book packagers inhabit a lowly rung on the publishing food chain. Squeezed more than ever by thinning profit margins, tightening print runs, and grudging production grants, packagers have found themselves hatching a variety of schemes to avoid having to put their iMacs in hock. As packaging veteran Dan Weiss puts it, “Book packagers are moving along the value chain, either closer to publishing or closer to the creation of the brand.” Newly reinvented as “content producers,” “multimedia companies,” and “communications partners,” some of them seem to be finding that in the age of corporate gigantism, scrappiness can be a virtue.

“I know a lot of packagers who have gone out of business or who are incredibly marginal,” says Charles Melcher of book packager Melcher Media. “Publishers are trying to print the very smallest quantity they can. Where they used to say, ‘This is a great book, I’ll take 50,000 copies,’ now they’ll take 20,000.” The cut in print runs is a challenge, says Melcher, because of the large up-front costs to produce the books. He adds, “It reflects a growing trend in the publishing industry as a whole towards creating cheaper widgets.” Melcher has staved off the widget factor by producing only six books per year with a six-person staff. “Keeping a small, focused list is a real asset in this marketplace,” he says. “Less is more.” (With an average printing of 120,000 copies per book, he’s got a point.) At the moment, however, Melcher’s tapped the cultural imagination with DuraBooks, his patented, waterproof volumes. There’s Aqua Erotica (done with Crown’s Three Rivers Press) and a series of six Soapdish Editions for Chronicle. The publisher sold all 40,000 copies of Aqua Erotica in six weeks (they’re desperately reprinting 25,000 for Valentine’s Day), and the success has spawned a whole slew of water-related concepts such as The Amazing Book of Paper Boats, which comes with 18 cut-out boats that — you guessed it — actually float.

Surfing for Content

While packagers such as Melcher keep fishing for novel species of books, others are diving deep into the digital lagoon. “We’re definitely doing fewer books,” says Rodney Friedman, founder of health and wellness packager Rebus, which publishes the UC Berkeley Wellness Letter and packages books for Reader’s Digest, Time Warner, and others. “But we’re spending a lot more time doing digital work. That’s where the growth is. That’s where the new creative challenges are.” The digital deep can be perilous, though. Rebus helped launch WholeHealthMD, an alternative medicine site that rolled out with 25 editors on board and backing from the managed care firm American Whole Health. Though the site drew plenty of traffic, Friedman says, it couldn’t survive the riptide of Internet investors fleeing for their lives. “There’s just no funding for the content business model anymore,” he says, adding that while the site is still being actively refreshed with content, “we’re building it at a decelerated rate.” Staff has been moved to other Internet projects the packager is working on, and ironically, WholeHealthMD’s online content is now being salvaged for reuse in packaged books. “Simply existing in one business may be too difficult,” Friedman explains. “In the early days, you always needed to sell foreign rights or book club rights or paperback rights to make a business of it. If everything’s shrinking, why not take the one place that isn’t shrinking and try to build that into the model?”

That was precisely the theory behind Dan Weiss’s 17th Street Productions division, which he sold to Alloy Online, a teen portal, a year ago in order to move into consulting and other new ventures. Weiss says he began seeking an exit from his traditional packaging business when the market for his specialty — fiction series for kids and teens — began to dry up. “Generally speaking, it was a very mature business,” he says. “But packaging in general has become much harder. Consolidation has made every investment decision more complex. Getting a publisher to commit to a project is simply harder given the layers of bureaucracy that are now in place.” Being liberated from the series fiction niche has had its upside, however. He worked as a consulting producer for LiveReads in their recent launch of the Kerouac e-book Orpheus Emerged (which is being sold exclusively at bn.com until Dec. 20).

Consolidation, in fact, has provided opportunities for packagers with the appropriate, er, skill-set. “Our client base is greatly reduced,” says Susan Meyer, director at Roundtable Press. “But some of the heavyweights have gotten so big that in spite of all the attempts to create a sense of synergy, frankly the divisions are too big to talk to each other. We’re working with Gruner + Jahr, Broadway Books, and BookSpan. They’re all owned by Bertelsmann, but they all have their own needs. Our job has become to see what we can create that will be of service to all of them. I call it shuttle diplomacy.” Consolidation also means that paradoxically, publishers have a desperate need for packagers. “Time Inc. used to have a huge editorial and design capacity,” Meyer says. “But their merging and purging has stripped them down to the point where they go outside for books.”

Others are quick to note an opportunity there, as well. “I’ve always thought that publishers should have packagers on the payroll like studios have independent producers hanging around,” observes Michael Cader, founder of Cader Books and another packager who’s jumped into the e-world with his newsletter PublishersLunch.com. He describes that project as part of a natural continuum of what he’s always done as a packager. “In retrospect, Lunch looks to me like a packaged product,” he says. “It draws a lot on what I’ve naturally done as a packager: gathering information, refocusing it, and giving it a hook that makes it appealing.” He’s now expanding into e-packaging, including a couple projects with Al Lowman to publish authors “whose work doesn’t necessarily fit the agenda of the largest commercial houses, but which we think appeals broadly to commercial audiences and lends itself well to viral marketing.”

But others say that packagers must shoulder a share of the blame for their own hard times. “For a lot of packagers, their own success has come back to bite them,” says Judith Joseph, the former publisher at Van Nostrand Reinhold and Rizzoli, who now consults for publishers and packages a few books per year. “In too many cases, packagers have insisted that a publisher take too many books. That means there was a write-down at the end of the process, and that’s a losing transaction.” In her packaging work, Joseph says she has created an economic model that is “completely different than the model on which ordinary packagers work.” A typical packager, she says, comes to the table with a book and demands that the publisher take, say, 12,500 copies at $11.25 a piece. “The problem with that,” she says, “is that $11.25 may be a good price, but the 12,000 copies is too many, and everyone in the publishing house knows that.” Without divulging precisely what her economic model is, Joseph says that she does not charge a price per book or insist that publishers take a certain number of copies. “We find a way for everybody to do well and not have excessive liability on the part of the publisher.”

Velveeta, Anyone?

Then there’s the vast world of branded books, which takes custom publishing somewhat far afield — namely, the wire racks at supermarket checkout counters. “I think more packagers as well as publishers are looking for corporate sponsorships to help fund their operations,” says Julia Molino, director at Meredith’s Integrated Marketing division, which produces corporate-branded books (i.e. Kraft No Oven Summer Sensations and Home Improvement 1-2-3 for Home Depot). The Home Depot title sold hundreds of thousands of copies via trade channels, although most of Meredith’s books sell in warehouse or book clubs. Meredith also specializes in point-of-purchase digest magazines, which are often repurposed for books, custom magazines, newspaper inserts, and presumably any other printed surface. “A lot of publishers want to do custom books, but they’re not always successful because they don’t have the capabilities that Meredith does to tie it all together,” Molino says. “We really cross those lines and become a communications partner for our clients.”

Luck never hurts, either. Just ask David Borgenicht, who launched Book Soup over two years ago. He struck gold last year when his Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook, produced with Chronicle, hit the New York Times list and sold a million copies. “We try to create hybrids of genres in order to make the books more entertaining and theoretically more marketable,” he says. But isn’t he jumping into the packaging business at the same time seasoned players are bailing out? “We’re probably too young to know better,” Borgenicht jokes. “But we’re getting out of packaging, too,” he adds. “In order for us to be successful, we’ll need to find new ways to market our content and not just rely on books as the only revenue stream from that content.” It may be the new mantra in the content biz, but you gotta hand it to them. At this moment in publishing, a worst-case scenario survival handbook is just what every packager needs.