Month: July 2008

The Outsource Question

Celebrate logistics, as I’ve said before, because logistics make the romance of publishing possible. A publisher can also outsource its logistics so it can focus on the sides of publishing it loves best and does best—probably editorial, sales and marketing. But just because you outsource doesn’t mean you can forget about operations, fulfillment and accounting. You just need to be involved in a different way at a different level.

Tom Woll has a number of suggestions for taking some (but not all) of the pain out of these functions.

* Outsourcing Accounts Receivable.
The pain of accounts receivable (AR) is that trade and other large accounts don’t pay in 30 days. “The average collection period in the book industry is between 90 and 120 days from the time of invoice. . . . The difficulty of collecting accounts receivable is, indeed, one of the primary reasons publishers use distributors . . . to cope with this job of collection.” (pp. 276-77) But you still have to monitor closely what the distributor owes you. And if the distributor goes bankrupt, you’ll likely see little if any of your money.

* Doing AR Yourself.
If you handle your own collections, it is vital to “monitor your accounts receivable every day” (p. 277), focusing on accounts that are more than 90 days overdue. As I’ve said before, it’s all about cash flow, baby.

* Outsourcing Warehousing and Fulfillment.
Customer expectations these days are that an item ordered will be shipped within twenty-four hours. Again, this is not an easy task, and many choose to outsource warehousing and shipping. But be careful.
    1. Don’t put your entire stock with one distributor. Again, if the distributor goes bankrupt, “your entire stock of books will be frozen (locked up) by the bankruptcy court and unavailable to you for some length of time” (p. 278). So you may want to handle some yourself or hire a second service to handle, for example, book clubs, premium sales and review copies.
    2. In any case, make sure the fulfillment service you use understands the fragility of books. A torn cover can make a book unsaleable.

Outsourcing was all the rage several years ago. And it can be very helpful for small or large publishers. But there are always drawbacks with every choice, and the industry is full of horror stories about outsourcing gone very wrong. Publishers should consider the pluses and minuses carefully when deciding how to handle logistics.

Go Directly to Direct

Maybe you thought this was old news, but Brandweek reports on a survey by Direct Partners that found “e-mail is now the most popular form of direct response marketing. . . . E-mail is used primarily by 35% of companies compared to 25% which use traditional direct mail and 21% who use package, statement stuffers or free standing inserts.” We’re not talking spammers here. This was a survey of large U.S. corporations.

Other findings:
– 68% market to their prospect database
– 82% market to their customer database
– 57% said their direct response budget will remain the same this year compared to last, while 23% reported their budget would increase by 10% or higher
– 47% said that less than 10% of their marketing budget went to direct response media

With rocky times for retail, many book publishers are looking more closely at direct response. Tom Woll devotes a chapter to direct response marketing as well in Publishing for Profit, which I’ve been reviewing here chapter by chapter. His word to the wise comes in two basic points:

* Results must always be quantifiable.
* Results must be constantly tested and refined against a control.

Woll offers fairly detailed help in how to plan and analyze direct response (which can include e-mail, mail, telephone or other programs). He even thinks that

once you start tracking your sales and promotional efforts, you’ll become addicted to the numbers. Just because this method of marketing is so calculable and analytical it is a refreshing change from the vagaries and sometimes whimsical nature of trade sales. (p. 272)

Every publisher needs to find its own mix of trade, direct and special market sales that makes sense for its editorial program and its readership. For some, that might mean going directly to direct.

The Logistics of Love

I’m not at ICRS this week because I just got back from our oldest son’s wedding in Colorado. At 9,200 feet, it was definitely a high point for our family this year. Stephen is the last of our four children to get married. He and Kristen are a great couple and very much in love. But after having been father of the groom three times and father of the bride once, I have come to the conclusion that weddings are not about romance. They are about logistics.

Transportation to meals, events, housing and the airport for dozens of family and friends. Schedules to make sure the right people are in the right locations at the right times for rehearsals, pictures, fittings, hair appointments and, oh yes, the wedding. Arranging for invitations, music, flowers, tuxes, returning tuxes, programs, locations for rehearsal suppers, receptions and, oh yes, the wedding.

Robert Fulghum once wrote, “Weddings are high state occasions run by amateurs under pressure.” He got that right.
While you don’t want the logistics to crush out the romance, however, good logistics can create the environment that allows the romance to bloom.

There’s a lot of romance about publishing–dreams of literary fame and bestseller status, elegant meals full of sophisticated conversation and interviews on PBS. Even without these dreams being fulfilled, there is an aura that surrounds publishing that is found in few other endeavors. But bad logistics can crush the romance right out of any publishing venture.

If you can’t be on time with the right copyediting, with the right publicity for the right people, with the right ads, with printing and shipping the book to the right places in the right quantities, then the luster of publishing can shine as brightly as a black hole.

By all means, celebrate the love. But every so often, celebrate the logistics too.

20,000 Staples. How Do You Measure, Measure a Career?

Today I used my 20,000th staple here at IVP. It’s taken thirty-five years to reach this milestone. But I have achieved in my career what few others ever dreamed–or ever thought worth keeping track of!

How do I even know this? When I first came as a lowly assistant editor, I was issued a phone, a bunch of blue pencils, a stapler and a box of 5000 staples. After eight years or so, the box of staples was empty. So I went to the supply cabinet and grabbed another. Four empty boxes later, the record was reached. (And that doesn’t even count the times I’ve used someone else’s stapler or the automatic stapler in the photocopy machine!)

I’m not sure how many different offices I’ve occupied (five, I think) in those years, how many commas I’ve deleted, how many airplane flights I’ve taken, how many emails I’ve sent (though I save them all, so I could add them up if you really want to know), how many times someone has interrupted me with a question, how many stories I’ve listened to in the hallway, how many cups of coffee I’ve consumed, how many meetings I’ve been to, how many lame jokes I’ve laughed at or how many phone calls I’ve made. (I’m not a nerd after all!) But for some reason the staples stuck.

As I’ve mentioned here before, large quantities of J course through my veins, which no doubt explains a lot. But why staples? I have no idea. I do know, however, that they’ve connected pages of memos, letters, reports, forms and faxes representing the birth of ideas and the death of dreams, the routine of standard procedures and the one-of-a-kind reply, the affirmation of a job well done and the diplomatic response to a complaint, the mass dissemination of information and the individual offer of an answer. In this way staples are a metaphor for what editors and publishers do–connecting people and ideas and actions.

All that gets closer than do staples to answering the lead question of how you measure a career. One ancient writer struggled with the same sorts of issues and did a tad better than I have here. He said that rather than counting staples, we should instead number our days. When we do, the first thing we notice is that they are limited, finite. Whether a few or a lot, we only get so many.

What, then, do we do with those days? Will we be wise or foolish with them? In my mind, we have each been given gifts or a gift, some ability in what we do or say, or how we think or see things, that is true to ourselves and that usually stands out to others. It may be the ability to drive a truck safely over hundreds of thousands of miles. It may be the ability to bring healing to the hearts or bodies of people. It may be making numbers into disciplined soldiers. It may be anticipating the needs of others even before they themselves are aware of them.

We begin to measure a career by identifying these gifts. But then we go further. We don’t just ask “What am I good at?” but “What gives me pleasure, joy or satisfaction when I do it?” Then we can ask if we have been faithful to the gift we have been given and to the Giver of the gift.

How do you measure a career? Perhaps that’s how you do it.