Image – Getty: Stefano Barzellotti
By Richard Charkin | @RCharkin
‘Benefits and/or Disbenefits’
As promised in my previous article, I’ve been pondering the benefits and/or disbenefits of measuring the things we frequently do in publishing.I think of them as quantifiable or unquantifiable. Just because we can’t measure the efficacy of a particular action doesn’t necessarily mean we shouldn’t do, but it might be a signpost. Here are some examples in which the costs may be more measurable than the benefits.
Richard Charkin
The corporate strategy meeting. Lord knows I myself have organized and attended enough of these.
Typically, they involve between six and 10 senior executives gathered in an expensive hotel or similar for up to three days to plot a strategic course for their publishing business. The costs are perfectly easy to quantify, although I suspect they’re rarely measured let alone published—lowly employees might be scandalized. The benefits are less obvious. How many of these meetings end with a list of worthy missions and indeed mission statements, most of which are blindingly obvious or impossible to fulfill?
Restructuring of publishing companies comes in two distinct forms.
The first is to align a company’s workforce with its objectives. The cost of restructuring is relatively easy to calculate: termination costs; office redesign; pay raises for the winners; and something less attractive for the losers. The press release announcing the new structure won’t mention any of these costs. It also won’t be specific about what actual benefits will accrue, possibly because nobody really knows, although phrases like “adjusting for a changed future” or “creating a more light-footed organization” or “responding to the needs of our staff and our authors.”
The second form is more accurately a euphemism for cost-saving through a round of redundancies. Again, the costs are easy to quantify—the costs of redundancies, employment lawyers, human resources support staff, not to mention the less measurable damage to the morale of existing and exiting staffers.
The benefits should be reduced future costs of employment. Do we ever measure this? By the time everything has shifted around it becomes impossible to do more than guess. My guess is that the savings rarely exceed the costs.
Changing sales agents is a fairly common happenstance in publishing. It’s easier to blame a third party for a lack of sales than challenge one’s own editorial taste or marketing brilliance. In theory, there might be cost savings with a new contract but these rarely eventuate after the new distributor has applied all the small-print extras. In theory, there should be higher sales, perhaps for the first month or so, as the persuaded retailers stock up. But of course that uplift is nothing like as great, as the tidal wave of returns from the previous agent flood back. Having lost the contract with the publisher, there’s nothing a distributor likes more than clearing its warehouse of all memories of that disloyal client. Has anyone ever measured these costs? I doubt it.
‘A Growing Tidal Wave of Awards’
Book prizes are everywhere: in every country, every region, every language, every sub-discipline. Clearly for an author to win a prize is great but is the benefit measurable? Certainly the Booker Prizes have generated huge sales, similarly the Prix Goncourt and the Planeta Prize. In some, but not all countries, the Nobel Prize in Literature and the various Pulitzer Prizes can boost an author’s sales.
But what about lesser-known awards? Submitting a book for a prize is not hugely expensive—form-filling, sending a number of copies, writing supporting documentation, etc. Multiplied by, say, 50 prizes per year, however, results in a substantial figure, not to mention the editorial and marketing overhead these applications entail. At least in my experience it’s hard to discern any measurable benefit to the publisher except to reputation in most instances, but reputation rarely butters any parsnips. The winning authors, meanwhile, will probably be enabled to demand or get higher advances for their next books. Lucky them.
An aside: In the United Kingdom, the prize money is legitimately untaxed. Perhaps instead of royalties, publishers might award authors prizes for their books.
And it’s not just a superabundance of book prizes for authors.
There’s a growing tidal wave of awards for publishers. At the annual British Book Awards, for instance, there are numerous book trade honors. An example was last year’s gathering. In short, 17 winners were announced by a minor celebrity in a vast underground ballroom and were lauded by the 1,000 or so well-dressed book trade professionals who had paid (or their companies had paid) more than £300 each for a mediocre meal, much cheering, ghastly music, disappointed shortlisted non-winners. It feels like a cheap pastiche of the Oscars.
Well, I can only guess at the cost of this annual beano and many similar ones around the world, but it is substantial. And the benefits? I suspect the answer will be “good for staff morale”; “raising the profile of the book trade”; “rewarding talent.” Does any of this enhance our key responsibility to support authors in their quests to reach readers and earn a living? Is there any way of measuring the benefits?
Does asking this question make me a killjoy? Probably.
Meanwhile, we are in an industry under severe margin pressure with challenges from over-production of titles; societal changes toward long-form reading; the dominance of distribution by a few mega-technology companies; and the threat of ASI disruption [artificial superintelligence] to copyright itself.
We owe it to our authors, our businesses, our people, and our trading partners to ensure we use measurement to guide our instincts, not to replace them, so that we reduce frippery and make informed decisions.
Join us monthly for Richard Charkin’s latest column. More coverage of his work from Publishing Perspectives is here. Richard Charkin’s opinions are his own, of course, and not necessarily reflective of those of Publishing Perspectives.