I attended the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference last week in New York. It was well attended by an interesting mix of old-world publishing types and new-media technology types. There were a lot of predictions and pontifications, but some common themes emerged. I’ll share a few of them—at least as I saw them—over the next few posts.
All but the largest imprints are a thing of the past. For those of us who came to the publishing industry from other industries, the whole imprint thing was a puzzle. Classic brand management suggests that the more brands you maintain, the higher your costs and the more you dilute your important brand(s). And in publishing, the end customer (the reader) could generally not care less about which imprint produced a book. In these tough economic times, publishers are consolidating imprints to reduce organizational redundancy and focus the brand dollars. Recently MacMillan consolidated their six children’s imprints into one division, under a brand (MacMillan Children’s Publishing Group) that will likely mean something to the end consumer.
At the conference, Michael Hyatt, CEO of Christian publisher Thomas Nelson, said they consolidated their twenty imprints into one (Thomas Nelson Publishing) two years ago. In addition to the cost and brand-focusing benefits, he has recognized that their organization is benefiting from being more clearly all part of the same team.
So, what brand is important to consumers in the post-imprint world? Authors’ brands—or, as many of the conference attendees called them, “author platforms.” That makes a lot of sense to those of us who read books. We buy authors, not imprints. To this point, Simon & Schuster launched a new website in January; you won’t find any mention of imprints, but a lot about authors. And look at this quote from the press release announcing their new site:
“Additionally, the site serves as a curator for the author’s brand, aggregating author-related content from around the web so fans can follow activity either by or about the author, whether it is news, Twitter, or blog posts, national and local appearances, and much more. Fans can also be notified about such author activity via an email alert.”
This is great news for authors, but with it comes responsibility to work to build their own brands. As published authors have known for years, the responsibility of promotion of books (and brands) is falling more to authors (and less to publishers) all the time. Writers need to use the web, blogs, and other social media tools to build their brands and create networks of followers who will pay to consume their books and content.
