Angela James (Executive Editor, Carina Press), Jenny Bullough (manager of digital content, Harlequin Enterprises Limited)
Angela James: working in digital field since 2004. Started a digital first press twice. Digital first genre fiction publisher. Started Carina in 2009 but decision process started way before: do digital first, recognized that digital readership growing and Harlequin already had a digital team, so was able to get a good speed to market, from acquisition to publication in 7 to 9 months, could test the digital first model, no advance but get a higher royalty rate on cover price, contract for 7 years, out of print reversion clause, worldwide rights, self-publishing becoming hot and have to compete with this; had to decide who was going to do it, existing employees working in print work flow or have a specific digital team for this endeavor, or use a team that does both; budget and business plan had to be put together; had to work up contracts, adapt from print business or use new form, actually used an existing contract but heavily edited and changed it to make it competitive; accounting, digital reserves, for example, competition was paying monthly, couldn’t do this so pay out quarterly instead of twice of year and had to modify accounting system and modify workflow as well. Marketing: have to do it differently and need to figure this out before you start publishing. Had to decide whether to use print marketing people or have their own digital team. Seems like digital should be faster and easier, and therefore cheaper, and this is not true. It is very difficult. Getting buy-in can be difficult – company needs to commit to this as a real business, not as a sideline. For example, speed to market is important and legal realized that they couldn’t support them fast enough. Buy-in has to be from all different parts of the company. Company has expectations of immediate return and it has to realize that start up costs will eat this up. Realistic budget is important. Need to think outside the box and this is difficult when working in an older model for so long. This has been a challenge. Have to have a combination of new thinking but still be able to work within the traditional model of the rest of the company. Pricing challenge: realized had competition and looked at other digital first publishers were doing. Figure out where do you want to fall and also what will readers expect. Price by word count. Pricing goes from $2.99 to $6.99 at 100K words, but had to lower it to $5.99 after some experience. Royalties: digital has a different royalty expectation. Competition was offering higher royalties than they were willing to offer. Offset the lower royalties by offering with other things such as marketing and promotion. Harlequin went with a different imprint because are doing so many things different from what Harlequin does. No DRM, for example. Harlequin has a very strong brand and some of the things they wanted to experiment with was not what the Harlequin reader would expect: male/male, sci-fi, for example. Use freelance editorial staff. Have agented and un-agented authors. Major resellers are used to direct to consumer so they had no problems with their direct to consumer site. Some authors come to them simply because they believe in digital. Royalty is 30% on cover price on books sold direct and 15% on books sold through retailers. Went with freelance editorial team – 13 acquisitions and content editors who are all freelance and 9 freelance copy editors. Got some really good editors due to the cuts in publishing. Cover art is freelanced as well. Social media personnel were picked from digital team at Harlequin. Harlequin has a well established community. Production has a lot of issues and can’t just take a print person and turn it over. Need background. Customer service done by Harlequin as they have a direct to consumer operation. Have to think differently about your product, your contracts, your royalties, job descriptions, marketing techniques, consumer relationships (especially true with digital first), deadlines (things shrink in the digital world). What do you do with your authors with regards to author copies? They give them a drm-free digital epub file. This could be an impediment for some kinds of books. In digital first authors have always been expected to do a lot of their own marketing, but need to support them. Do it yourself efficiencies: take ownership of marketing since you know the imprint the best, educate the authors and readers as to why they should come to the digital publisher as opposed to self-publishing. Need to take ownership of direct relationship with bloggers as opposed to going though the company’s PR organization. Ongoing challenges: “not real books” because they are digital, perception of quality, getting to the reader, continuing to innovate, industry data standards are out of date, adapting to constantly changing pricing market, metadata cannot support cross-genre publications that are available in digital first.
Jenny Billough: had to think about format. Mostly straight text. Decided not to typeset before going to digital band are rethinking this because may be doing print for some titles. Clean epub doesn’t guarantee a clean epub file. Decided not to use DRM, started with epub but added PDF because of so many requests from reviewers. Do you go through partners or direct to consumer or both? Very few model to follow and so had to develop a lot of this from scratch. Perception of quality is important. Some company people conflate digital with self-publishing and so don’t expect the book to have the same quality as their print books and this has to be fought. Have to have everything in place for readers to discover your product. Have to use the proper metadata and this becomes more challenging as the market expands. Legacy database systems were a problem. For example they wouldn’t take word-count and wanted page count instead. Had to create a lot of workarounds in order to meet start date and now working to modify existing back end systems. Had to decide on ISBNs by product or format. They decided just to use one number. Luckily had a workflow in place for digital books for other publications, but are still using their own separately in order to get the necessary speed and takes a long time to modify existing systems. Royalty reporting is within Harlequin’s system, but still requires some workarounds. Carina books not sold on Harlequin site because of the Harlequin brand promise, but they cross linking between site. Find allies and advocates in other departments, have to work within the existing system but will need workarounds where it can’t incorporate digital, will probably develop and use your own systems and processes while you work to change the system to incorporate digital. For example tried to do their own submissions but ended up being overwhelmed. Metadata: will your accept errors that are specific to digital? For example “drm free” . Decided to take Word file and do their own formatting to make things easy for authors. Many formatting decisions have to be made: page numbers, headers, hyperlinks, title page, back cover copy, for example. Some of these may not work on all readers – Sony Reader without wi-fi will not be able to use hyperlinks. Proofreading and QC which was adapted from traditional print publishing model. QC the final output file as well as the input file and QC as many different file formats as possible. People who do the final QC are not the same as those that do the proofreading. This is a big benefit of NetGalley as reviewers will point out problems. Doing formatting into one Word file in-house, convert overseas, and then do their own QC. Do it yourself efficiencies: take ownership of processes as soon as possible, such as metadata, conversion, wharhousing distribution. Have to become an in-house evangelist and work the grass roots. Take direct control of metadata so that you can change it in response to the market.
