The Book Business: What Everyone Needs to Know®

One question for the future is whether text-to-voice (TTV) tech becomes so good that production is hardly needed at all or, even more threatening to publishers, a consumer can simply “apply” a TTV app to an e-book text and make their own audio. We’re

Bookstore and other retail shelf space is shrinking at the same time that total title output is rising. The shift to online sales combined with the shrinking retail shelf space hurts the biggest publishers the most because their competitive advantage is largely built on their ability to put books on shelves at scale. Sales moving online could ultim

The question will be this: what does the “established” publisher have to add to the marketing and distribution of a title? As long as there are lots of decentralized bookstores, publishers must call on them, take orders from them, and ship to them. But as and if the ecosystem becomes more online, more e-book, and physical retail becomes more Amazon

There are several: books don’t die anymore and disappear from the competition, and in fact, books that were thought to have died have been brought back to life in the digital no-inventory-necessary world. That adds further competition to face each new book as it is published and makes the challenge more difficult for each new commercial effort.

The requirement to communicate strategy, change, and corporate goals clearly and inspiringly to the staffs as large as those at the Big Five companies is not a trivial challenge, particularly in a time when uncomfortable change is often required. Beyond communication, the publishing companies have not outlived the normal incumbent allergy to change

There will always be a place for the small, specialized store that has low overhead and capitalizes on very focused curation talent. But, if Amazon has or develops ambitions to put more and more of their inventory into retail spaces rather than warehouses, for any other bookstores to compete with them could become very difficult.

That has meant that PRH can take more risks and put more muscle behind more books than the other Big Five publishers combined. They have used their strength to build proprietary audience reach—through email lists and topical or vertical Web presences—that the others can’t match. What they have not done yet, although the threat is always there that

The last three are all about the same size, in the middle triple digit millions in annual sales. Harper Collins is about the size of all three of them, or about $2 billion in sales. And Penguin Random House is about the size of all four of them put together, or about $4 billion in sales.

Making a standard trade deal means the author will get broader distribution, but the price of the book will go up to the consumer (costing sales) and the share of the price that goes to the author will diminish sharply. Nonetheless, some authors find self-publishing a path to finding a publisher and, for many, the trade-off of greater exposure and