Today business analytics are available for publishers and going forward, analytics will rule the publishing industry. When a bank or an insurance company rolls out any scheme, it is supported by solid business analytics. The same is going to happen in the publishing industry very soon.
“Digital printing is changing the horizon of the publishing industry. It has changed the outlook of publishing in totality,” says Subhasis Ganguly, publishing veteran and consultant – publishing operations. “As it is really difficult to predict the publishing industry due to its dynamic nature, digital printing could help bridge the gaps, especially at the time of sampling and end of season sales.”
The long tail, which is still a big burden for any publishing house, can be brought under control through digital printing. “The rule still applies wherein publishers sustain on 20% of the book titles while carrying forward 80% of the titles [long tail] which don’t sell,” he informs. Publishers have a tendency to declare these long tail titles out of stock or out of print. However, today with the digital printing they don’t have to carry the stock, and at the same time you don’t have to declare them out of print.
“With digital, you don’t have to de-stock your books year after year. Today, once you receive the order, you print and deliver. However, it is easier said than done because this needs tremendous standardization of your file and powerful content management. Your meta data has to be up to date and even big publishers find it a challenge.” According to Ganguly, a huge focus needs to go on tagging of meta data, managing content properly and standardization of files because “if I need to print 200 different titles in a day, I cannot simply pick up one after another CD to print the titles. It has to be an automated system. And this is not possible unless your file is standardized.”
Self-publising trends
Speaking about self-publishing, Ganguly says, “Self-publishing is growing in India. Unlike before, today an author can self-publish if he does not find a publisher. If it turns successful, as the trend goes, publishers can of course publish these books.”
According to him, any good publisher receives on an average 15 to 20 proposals a day. That puts around 200 to 500 proposals a month. Publishers don’t have that much of bandwidth to judge every manuscript. The cost of a book is also a big challenge in India today and the publishers need to manage their cost. “It may not be possible for publishers to evaluate each manuscript every time—if it happened to do so, JK Rowling’s Harry Potter would not have been rejected by publishers,” says Ganguly.
“Self-publishing nowadays can be thought of as a prototype which has already tested the market, and if people are liking it, publishers go for it. It is easy to say that a publisher has rejected a book. But it is impossible to say whether a book is good or bad. There are examples where an author’s first book did not do well but when the second book of the same author was published, surprisingly the sale of the first book went up and became a bestseller—the first book outsold the second book,” he says.
Reflecting on the market dynamics of publishing, Ganguly says it is very difficult to guess. “Fortunately, today business analytics are available for publishers and going forward, analytics will rule the publishing industry. When a bank or an insurance company rolls out any scheme, it is supported by solid business analytics. The same is going to happen in the publishing industry very soon,” concludes Ganguly.
