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Martin Foner’s Publishing Newsletter

Because You’re Serious About Success… or You’re Not

Volume 22, Number 1

BULK SELLING & CUSTOM PUBLISHING, GOING TO BEA,

PREDICTIONS FOR 2017, CONGRESSIONAL TINKERING,

AND AN OFFER OF COMPLIMENTARY CONSULTING

Hello, Everyone…

Year number 22 for this newsletter. Tens of thousands of publishers helped, I hope, by some sound advice, cautionary advice, and just plain common sense advice.

I am glad everyone has survived the New Year thus far. Now we all have to survive the New Administration. If we just had a better idea of details, specifics, real plans, rather than this bombastic “I will solve everything for everyone”… I would have a bit more faith in the future. Done.

2017 is going to be a very interesting year for publishers. Read my futurist predictions for the year below. Without sounding too egotistical, and for those who are new to my newsletters, these commentaries have been very well received by my readers over the years.

Since all BEA decisions are being made now, I am including an article on how to compute your breakeven at BEA and whether you should go as an exhibitor or in some other capacity, depending on your goals.

As many of you know, I am a big fan of using bulk sales, special sales, and custom publishing as a major part of your sales and marketing plans, if your titles are appropriate for this type of selling. Today, I will cover the first of a few articles on bulk, special, and custom sales.

In addition, read that article carefully as I am making an offer of complimentary consulting on this type of selling. Yes, no charge, free, complimentary, gratis…

* * *

EXHIBIT AT BEA, STAY HOME, OR DO SOMETHING ELSE?

This has been a real time-worn question I get inundated with every year at this time. Do I exhibit at BEA or invest my money in some other forms of marketing? What will it cost to go? Does anyone really buy anything there? Are there enough buyers there to make it pay? All good questions.

Here is my ‘take’ on shows of this kind, and I have done close to 100 of them over the years for my own publishing companies and general ones like BEA.

Assume your costs to be as follows:

Booth, shipping, booth costs 4,000-5,000

Yourself (partner/spouse) two staff 7,000-9,000

Advertising & promotion 2,000-4,000

So, figure to spend $13,000 - $18,000 depending on staff, travel, promo, and related costs. I have always used an average of $15,000… here is the work out.

Assume you are selling $20 retail books. You have a normal overhead of 20%. You also have roughly 50-55% from Amazon, B & N, bookstores, other resellers, etc. And a book print cost of say $2 including shipping. So, at best you are clearing $4 a book. Even if you add back overhead you are still at best at $8 a book.

At $8 you would need to sell 2,000 books to roughly break even. Yes, that number is 2,000.

At the $4 figure, which I feel is a much better representation of reality in business calculations, you have to sell 4,000 books!

Actual buyers at the show, for 2017 estimated, is 6,000. General shows average anywhere from 20-40% of people will attend your booth unless you are doing something unusual or special for them. At 40%, you will have 2,400 buyers coming to your booth in three days… which seems high as that would suggest roughly one every 40 seconds! Which is almost impossible if they are actually taking the time to talk, look, or arrange to buy. But let that stand.

Each one of those visitors would have to actually purchase 1¾ books to hit your breakeven goal. At a 40 second stop, and even with four staff people… those are pretty impressive goals to achieve.

And all of this just to break even!

So, should you just stay home?

As always, it all depends on what your Strategic Plan says and what you believe you can accomplish at the show. For example, if your overall Plan is to license two of your new books for merchandise or TV programs… then exhibiting may not be the best use of your dollars. Equally, if your Plan is to get two new titles into the translation flow, exhibiting may not be the best use of your dollars.

In these two cases, a three day ‘ticket’ to be just an attendee, and then making appointments either with folks in the Rights area, or making them with key people for lunch or coffee there, or close by… does make sense business and fiscally. Last time I looked, a three day ticket was around $250-$300. Add your travel, since you only need yourself, and one box of books sent to your hotel, and maybe you are into $3,000.

A much better use of funds.

If your Plan includes getting your books out to the public, and you are thinking bookstores are a great way… not so great. In these more difficult bookselling times, unless you have a celebrity or very controversial, or known author… bookselling at the retail level is a ‘pull’ business and not a ‘push’ business. That is, customers come into a store and ask for a title and the store orders it, “pulls” it from the publisher. All the ‘pushing’ in the world won’t get a small store or a store with limited space/budget to take on your titles, or more than 1-2 of each as a starter.

You would be far better off to market to customers directly. And yes, some may go directly to Amazon and that isn’t a loss for you either.

On the other hand, if you already have a substantial presence in bookstores around the country, and can determine that many/most of them will be attending, then you can do some math and decide if the face to face is worthwhile to maintain the relationships… or if it is just better to continue offering strong long distance service and deals and financial reasons to keep buying from you. Remember, your cost is $15,000 +/-… and you can do a lot of promo with that budget.

* * *

PREDICTIONS FOR PUBLISHING IN 2017

I have already made a few of these in late 2016, but to condense and update my futurist thoughts for this year…

2017 will be a good year for books. I like Self-Improvement, American History, Politics, Personal Investing, Fiction or Non-Fiction about the Future, Personal Taxes, Health & Healthcare…

If taxes are lowered for 2017, and that includes capital gains, we will see a large number of small, medium, and even larger publishing companies for sale. If you are planning to grow, this might just be the best way to do it for the next year or two.

Ebooks, unless completely interactive or used in a textbook program environment, are going to flatten out further sales-wise. I would expect that for most titles other than commercial fiction or romance, that unit sales will see a small decline from 2016.

Printing prices will increase due to the paper pendulum swinging, labor costs rising from minimum wage increases in many states, and other factors of which we have no knowledge and control… see below.

The biggest factor publishing will have to contend with in 2017 and beyond is going to be the New Administration’s policy on imported goods, and how they will determine what is an American company importing from another company instead of doing business in the U.S. Depending on how far they want to push this protectionist, anti-free trade, jingoistic position, printers will be looking at doing more U.S. business, which also means higher print costs, and thus higher book prices at retail.

As well, the above also means publishers will be cutting back on inventory, and likely the number of titles they publish, sticking to the tried and true to bring in revenues and profits.

Self-publishing will push the gross number of titles “published” to over 500,000 in 2017… or roughly 300,000 self-pub titles, about 90% of them in eBook format on Kindle. Of these, roughly 6,000 will be worth any attention, and 294,000 will just make 294,000 people think they are real publishers.

Libraries will continue to decline in their physical book acquisition and spending. Which means if your line is heavily into the library market and you are into physical books… it is long past time to look for other lines or other markets.

The industry will survive until 2018, at least. Thank God!

* * *

YOU SHOULD BE AWARE OF CONGRESS…

That in passing bills this past week on the beginning of repealing Obamacare, as reported by Senator Rand Paul this week, the Congress has given itself, with ZERO Public input or comment or reporting, the right to increase the national debt by 50%!! Yes, all the swamp creatures who pounded Mr. Obama for eight years about his increasing the debt by 33% to recover from the worst recession in 70 years, and uninterrupted almost eight year job growth… have quietly committed the exact same sin, but worse, as a ride along to repealing Obamacare.

This means that when the new insurance plan is put forth and costs, say, 5 trillion dollars to implement… they already have the appropriation to spend the 5 trillion without any further vote or answering to the public as to what the hell is going on.

The actual numbers are…currently debt is 19.5 Trillion… the new bill increases it by 9.5 Trillion to 29 Trillion.

Why is this important? I mean, who cares? I do. And you should. As publishers my goal in these newsletters has always been to unite us.

Well, at this debt level we would be swimming in the same swamp as Venezuela and many other South American and African countries with inflation rates of 100-500% and more. And if you are a student of the Great Depression, you will remember the stories of taking a wheelbarrow of currency to the store to buy groceries. Well, at 29 Trillion national debt, we would be right in that ballpark. Well, to some, at least we already installed the leadership solution that Germany used back in the early 1930’s to solve that problem.

Thus, keep your eyes and ears open. When they start talking about the size of the increase in the national debt… get your excess funds into something stable. As many of you know, I am a big fan of gold and silver. US dollars will become marginally worthless if this level of debt is actually implemented. Just my personal advice. But, it IS based on decades of experience as a tax and financial expert and author… 10% of your asset holdings should always be in gold and silver…and if this takes hold… 33-50% would be a good level to ride it out. Just saying…

* * *

BULK SALES, CUSTOM PUBLISHING, AND SPECIAL SALES

I believe it is actually easier to sell 1,000 books to one customer than it is to sell one book to 1,000 customers. I have been in the forefront of this type of sales now since 1985… and for a few years did seminars around the country for publishers, large, mid, and small, about how to successfully think through and implement bulk selling programs internally on a title by title basis.

In my largest publishing company, we made a point to sell upwards of 500 to 10,000 of a title to single customers. As I indicate below, my largest single title sale was 250,000 books to one customer. We often sold specific titles by the pallet (2,500-5,000 books) to a single customer.

And once you understand the concepts of selling bulk or custom, I believe you will too!

Briefly, let’s define what each of these terms mean, and generally a bit about Bulk Selling. In future newsletters, I will provide more detail on succeeding in Bulk and Custom selling.

Bulk Sales are just that. Special terms and/or pricing you offer to get orders from non-retail resellers and other for quantities of your books. It could be as simple as selling boxes of your books, 12-20 in a box, for a special price to non-bookstores… or as complex as selling 10,000 of a title to a company for training staff… or as in between as finding an organization who would use your book and order 200 or 300 for all their offices around the country. The term encompasses both Custom Publishing and Special Sales, below.

Custom Publishing is when you customize one of your titles for a specific customer’s needs. Often it is only the covers changed to feature the customer’s name and information. Other times, it may include the addition of specific materials within the book for the customer’s specific uses. It is a little considered but very profitable niche of publishing. Personally, the largest single title sale I ever made was 250,000 of a single title to the State of California some years back. I had to customize both the covers and add four pages to the inside, but as you might imagine, it was very, very well worth it!

Special Sales is a term used to usually refer to bulk sales made to resellers. That is, a bookstore or catalog who usually orders, say, 25 of a single title now wants 1,000 of that title for a customer, and you have to quote the pricing since 50% or 55% isn’t going to make the deal work. I delineate Special from Bulk only because the terms are often used interchangeably, depending on how long you have been in the business, and each of them has a more specific meaning, at least from when I entered the industry forty years ago.

Now, let’s define which genres generally are good candidates to sell in bulk. Many aren’t. Fiction usually isn’t… neither is general children’s fiction… nor romance… nor poetry. What works is usually non-fiction with a specific focus. For example, cookbooks, generally, are only good for smaller bulk sales efforts depending… but a focused cookbook, such as one a number of years back dealing with re-cooking frozen leftovers, was sufficiently specific that a target buyer group was set up, solicited, and finally, one of the target group made a purchase of 10,000 of the cookbook for a promotion of their own.

Informational titles, self help (smaller bulk), technical titles, business titles depending on topic, directories, travel is always good, etc etc. As I write more of the articles in this series, it will become obvious which genres work, and which are tougher, and which simply don’t.

In the next newsletter, we will cover some specific selling basics of Bulk Sales, how to determine who your Bulk customer are, how to engage them, how to promote, and finally how to close the deals with pricing and features, and the basics on how to price your books at each level of Bulk sales.

*** HERE IS MY SPECIAL OFFER TO YOU. I am going to offer ALL publishers an opportunity to have ONE BOOK analyzed by me for its Bulk and/or Custom Sales potential, even give you a couple primary target markets to approach… AT NO CHARGE… COMPLIMENTARY… just so you will begin to have the idea of why Bulk and Custom Sales are so important to your survival. I have done this once before eight years ago. It was very strongly received with 500+/- books submitted to me to analyze. Yes, it took about six weeks to get to everyone, but I got a great deal of positive feedback… and we all need that.

Feel free to submit your book now. Send me an email with your book information, a link to it on your website, a copy of the Table of Contents, full size front and back covers, and your email and contact information. If you prefer to send me an eBook of your book, that is ok also, with the other information… to mfoner@nplconsult.com .

Subject line: Bulk-Custom Book Analysis

Remember, fiction, children’s fiction, romance, sci-fi, etc., anything of a fiction nature really doesn’t lend itself to this process, and I will likely reply with a blank page to those requests. Non-fiction works for the most part, informational, business, self-help, technical, are good.

Please be aware I will not actually be reviewing titles until after March 1^st. I am up to my Heineken in Lowenbrau (as they say in the beer business) right now with work. I will analyze ALL the books I receive, other than those mentioned above, one per publisher, through the 31st of March. ***

As well, while you are waiting for your complimentary analysis, each newsletter for March, will continue this series on how to Bulk and Custom and Special Sell your products. This series was amazingly profitable for readers eight years ago during the nasty recession, and helped to keep more than a few publishers in business during that time… and I am confident it is time to revise and report on these potentials once again to all of you. We succeed together or we fail together… you choose.

* * *

YOUR SUCCESS PLANNING

Every year at this time I ask the same questions… answer them for yourself… and then decide what you MUST do NOW for 2017 & 2018…

Have you achieved your goals for 2016?

Did you even HAVE written goals for the year?

Do you have written goals for 2017 and 2018?

Why not? Really?

What are you waiting for to decide to succeed?

Do you care? If not, then you are NOT likely to succeed any time soon!

Need I remind you that publishers who have a written Strategic Plan, complex or very simple, are FIVE TIMES more likely to survive through year five… and TEN TIMES more likely to successfully retire from your publishing efforts?

Whenever a new client comes to me to do this planning, I always ask why she/he has waited however many years they have been in publishing to do this work. The answer is always a shoulder shrug.

Care to leave your success to a shoulder shrug?

At the beginning of this year I had a prospective client who told me it was too expensive and time consuming to do a simple Strategic Plan. (It wasn’t… about $2,500 and an investment of less than eight hours.)

Now, eight months later, I get the call… he is in deep trouble and can I help? It would have been so much less expensive and time consuming and grief inducing if we had just invested the small amount of time and money when it should have been done.

Take the time NOW to Plan for 2017 & 2018 (have to hustle for 2017) and beyond. Contact me at mfoner@nplconsult.com. Don’t wait until there is a crisis… to start your decision-making.

* * *

PUBLISHERS CURRENTLY FOR SALE

One quick note… I have an academic publisher high school and remedial university levels… who wants to be sold IN THE NEXT 30 DAYS. Yes, really. And I would like to help him. Small price at $75,000. Negotiable. Or he will consider selling off many of the titles piecemeal if he cannot get a deal for everything.

Contact me asap at mfoner@nplconsult.com. Looks good to me if this is your genre and price range.

And for those of you thinking about selling… contact me mfoner@nplconsult.com so we can discuss it confidentially. Don’t wait… the world doesn’t wait and neither do buyers. There is a fair amount of buying activity despite the “unusual” political activity and the upcoming election. I believe it has something to do with the Fed holding interest rates yet again… which they did again just last week. If the Fed feels there is strength, and that is coming in December, this is a good time to make a move as a buyer… thus, we need sellers to match to buyers…

Let me know ASAP.

* * *

WHAT PUBLISHERS ARE LOOKING TO PURCHASE… AT LEAST WHAT MY CLIENTS ARE LOOKING TO PURCHASE

Currently, here’s what my clients are looking to acquire…

Content Driven Online Subscription – exactly what it says… if you have a magazine, subscribed content, or a large quantity of online content that could be monetized in this way, I have a client who is interested in either acquiring a going concern or creating it from current content

Relationship Related Non Fiction and Informational – topics dealing with relationships, human interest, people, and their issues

Pure EBook Companies, 100-1,000 titles+ considered – buyer is prepared to invest from a few hundred thousand to upwards of $3-$4 million, if the product line and revenues reflect this type of selling price

Interesting Craft, Hobby, and Personal Interest DIY and Non Fiction – client expanding into more personal crafts, hobbies, instructionals, DIY work, and related non-fiction, informational… is ok acquiring as few as a title or two or an entire company

Directories and Annuals – anything information that comes out semi, or annually, or biennially, in hard copy directory format, or online only… with or without paid advertising… small to large

* * *

Great Home for Sale in Los Angeles

Let’s cut to the chase. If you need a great entertainment home/larger home in L.A., this is it. PBS Celebrity Chef owned, (by my client, Tommy Tang), 3,800+ sq ft amazing house, drought resistant 1/3 acre oasis in the suburbs of a busy city. Too many features to mention here. Price is $1.149MM, roughly $100K under market. Go to www.6421orion.com and have a look. Then contact me at mfoner@nplconsult.com.

AND NOW A FINAL WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR (ME)

If you believe your publishing business, or any commercial business you own, isn’t up to what it should be creating or earning… then you should contact me at mfoner@nplconsult.com. I can help you grow your company to your goals and then help you exit profitably.

If you want to acquire another publisher, or line, or even a few titles, then you should contact me.

If you want to sell your company, or lines, or a few titles, contact me.

If you want to succeed as a self-publisher… contact me.

If you finally get the idea you need a Strategic Plan, then for certain and right now, you should contact me at mfoner@nplconsult.com.

There should be an unsubscribe button somewhere at the footer of this email, but if there is not, simply email me directly at mfoner@nplconsult.com, and I will have you removed from future emailings.

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