Creative Content

“Something happened yesterday,” says journalist and author Andreas Wirwalski, rather mysteriously. “What happened yesterday Jane?” To his left sits Jane Friedman, former CEO of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide, and to his right is Jeffrey Sharp, an independent film producer (of Boys Don’t Cry and Revolutionary Road fame). What happened yesterday was the launch of Open Road Integrated Media, a new enterprise that Jane and Jeffrey will head.

Jane Friedman, Andreas Wirwalski, Jeffrey Sharp

Open Road Media is a content marketing company, financed by Kohlberg Ventures, that is making waves across the fair and appears all set to transform the e-publishing landscape and usher in the era of the integrated media company. “The e-book will be the centre of a multi-platform universe that will include film, video and other forms of digital entertainment,” says Jane.

The cornerstone of Open Road Media’s strategy will be what they call the ‘author branded backlist’. Jane expounds her mantra, “The absolute reality is that the author is the brand. We’re going back to the future, which I just love.” The plan is to market e-books through a proprietary online platform designed to reach consumers where they live, socialize and shop. Open Road Media’s e-books will be backed up by a world of premium audio and video content such as author profiles, behind-the-scenes features and mini-documentaries.

It isn’t just the conception behind the company or that the future of publishing has materialised in a big way that’s exciting. What’s equally impressive is the fact that Open Road Media’s launch titles will include the works of world famous authors like William Styron, Pat Conroy, Joseph Heller, and Dame Iris Murdoch. It won’t just be established writers who will join Open Media’s stable. New titles will be nurtured in their Studio division, as well as in Discovery, a premium self-publishing division. “We will also work with publishers, like Grove Atlantic, who own the rights to books by being their marketing arm,” says Jane.

“At Frankfurt this year it’s become obvious to me that publishers are understanding that digital is happening and that it’s happening fast,” says Jane. Jeffrey, who’s a first-timer at the fair, says that he’s always looked to the page for inspiration when producing films. “I always try to get authors to come to my sets. They’re a great resource and inspiration.” The genesis of his partnership with Jane, which seamlessly integrates the two industries they thrive in, lies in their collaboration on film adaptations when she was still at HarperCollins. “Both our industries, legacy publishing and independent film making, have been hit hard by the recession. So we were drawn to each other with the idea of taking things forward and starting something new,” explains Jeffrey. They both agree that the Berlinale Film Festival and the Frankfurt Book Fair have been crucial to the merging of their industries

Their vision is not to create a hybrid product, such as an interactive e-book, as much as it is a way to create a multimedia world around the e-book. True, Open Road Media will be better positioned to create film adaptations, as they’ll hold the rights to content for all media. But apart from these adaptations and mobile gaming, they’re an integrated media company in the sense that they’re marketing will encompass a variety of digital platforms. It’s a company that is “born digital” and will only print traditional books using print-on-demand technology. Jane says, “The idea that we send out a digital book and it isn’t coming back appeals to me. I’m done with looking at inventory.”

Earlier this year I was chatting with a journalist who covers media for a prominent online magazine when the topic of Jane Friedman arose. Did I know what her plans were? No idea. He’d been getting the same response from everyone he asked and was clearly bewildered. But, he said, one word did keep coming up: legacy. No-one would tell him what it meant though. Aha, I thought. The rapid conglomeration of publishing businesses from the 1960’s through the present, combined with the subsequent layoffs necessitated by the relative failure of the mergers to produce the anticipated profits had combined to eviscerate the institutional knowledge of the combined intellectual property. So while these companies did have licenses to vast amounts of quality content, there were very few people left who knew very much about what the damn content was. Jane, however, had a pretty significant repository of information—she was a one-woman institutional memory. So, I suggested, if I had that knowledge myself, one thing I might do is, to use a wee bit of jargon, “arbitrage those asymmetries”—exploit the gap between what I knew of the value of a given backlist book and what that book’s publisher knew.

Fast forward to this early afternoon in the Film & Media Center where Jane is sitting down to a chat with her business partner, the film producer Jeff Sharp. Delighted, I am, to note the format. A conversation between two knowledgable folks is really an ideal format for presenting new business models to a rather disparate audience. The programming folks at the Book Fair are very mindful of this in how they approach authors: the conversation, as opposed to the reading, is the classic format for authors being introduced to the Frankfurt Fair goers, and using it more on the business side of things would be wonderful.

That all said, it’s the content, rather than the format, that has engendered a standing-room crowd. Metaphorically, we know what’s coming, for her new company is called Open Road Integrated Media, and it’s clear Jane wants to hit the open road. But, in the classic brusque locution, show me the money!

In a four page press release, she duly obliges. Consider the following an idiosyncratic cheatsheet for wherever you find yourself this evening when the question of what’s Jane up to arises.

— Arbitrage the Asymmetries! Basically Open Road is going to monetize Jane’s relationships with established authors with significant backlists: Styron, Conroy, Murdoch (Iris, not Rupert), Heller…Crichton is a TK (copyediting speak for “to come”), “joining the Open Road down the road,” says Friedman. What’s the asymmetry? Well, for one, it’s trust. Publishing is a people business, after all, and authors and agents trust her.

— “The Author is the Brand” Open Road’s not shooting to brand itself but is going to offer a platform for all the aforementioned authors’ content in an author-centric platform. So the trust is being reinforced by Open Road’s willingness to make the author front-and-center.

— Rich digital media. A digital media development firm called Code & Theory is developing a proprietary platform that hosts ancillary bells and whistles—profiles, audio, mini-documentaries, and so forth. (Notwithstanding the digital cornucopia, “the eBook is the center of our universe,” Friedman clarified—the video is promotional, not living inside the book.) Both Sharp himself and a third principal Luke Parker Bowles (yes, son of), have a background in film and video and believe that the quality of the Open Road video will be above the average. This appears to be a major dimension of the day-to-day activity of the company as they’re going to have significant in-house production facilities.

— “Co-Marketing.” They’re taking their digital platform and their video production facilities and integrating it with business partners focused on niche content: Kensington’s GBLTQ list and African-American list to start with and also some Grove Atlantic titles (“literary” being the niche: Jim Harrison, Mark Bowden, P.J. O’Rourke announced thus far…) Given the business relationship is described with a rather fuzzy “co-marketing,” this falls for the moment under the rubric of “terms not [yet] disclosed.”

— Frontlist and self-publishing. The division that will handle this dimension is called Studio and run by Gotham Books’ founding publisher Brendan Cahill. Parallel to Studio is Discovery, and Discovery is a “curated” self-publishing wing—both operations benefit from the integrated digital marketing platform, and from print-on-demand (with possible subsequent conventional distribution or licensing). Unclear so far though are the terms of the self-publishing deal and how significant a component of the projected revenue it constitutes. Friedman indicated that Open Road would be absorbing marketing cost: “We plan to service every author in whatever way the author wants.”

Other stuff you should know:

— Their website OpenRoadMedia.com is not going to retail eBooks. It’s a general marketing platform for the Backlist, and the Studio and Discovery frontlist.

— Although this was barely discussed, the movie production aspect of this has to be one of, if not the largest revenue stream; Sharp currently has Styron’s “Lie Down in Darkness” in development.

— No advances.

— Profit share, numbers undisclosed.

— 750-1000 titles in Year One is the plan, but Friedman did not indicate the proprtions of that comprised by established author backlist, frontlist Studio, frontlist Discovery, and co-marketing agreements with Kensington and Grove.

—While their profit share terms apparently the current royalty offered by publishers for digital, Friedman is not intersted in competing on price. It doesn’t matter if other publishers match her royalty rate because, she says, she’ll do a better job marketing. “The secret sauce is the marketing platform.”

I’d love to give you a two cent opinion on how this all adds up but one has to be cautious. It is clear that Friedman has a wealth of relationships to monetize, it is clear that Sharp knows how to produce financial successful movies, it is clear that they can make a very robust digital marketing platform happen, and that at both the author and publisher level, that platform will be very useful. If that platform is to make money by generating unit sales of eBooks, sales will have to be pretty enormous, but if the platform is also being licensed on a fee-basis above costs of production for all that amazing video, it could be profitable fairly quickly.

The first ever Tools of Change Frankfurt conference took place all day today, bringing together representatives from a number of different parts of the book industry to discuss opportunities for the future of the publishing industry.

Seeing as that my flight arrived at 7am this morning, I didn’t exactly make it to the opening sessions . . . and wasn’t entirely cogent during the panel that I participated on.

That said, the presentations I attended were pretty inspiring, especially the one from Michael Tamblyn’s “Your Reading Life, Always With You,” which employed a very “reader-centric” approach to contemplating the future of e-books.

Tamblyn–the VP of content, sales, and merchandising at Shortcovers.com, an e-book retailer launched by Canada’s Indigo Books & Music, Inc.–gave a very engaging and humorous presentation littered with real-life situations and the impact these situations should have on the future of e-books.

His basic goal was to demonstrate the readers would be willing to pay $14+ for an e-book–if there are enough useful features included. This might seem like a small point, but publishers have been collectively freaking out about the now-almost-standard $9.99 price point that Amazon.com has helped institute and that readers have cottoned on to. Remember the #9.99boycott of a few months back? This is supply meets demand meets value expectations stuff, and at the moment, what you get when you buy an e-book is only worth $9.99 to the vast majority of e-book users.

But Tamblyn things that can change. He pointed out a myriad of features that would entice readers to fork over a few extra bucks for an improve level of e-functionality.

For example, “longevity of the book” was an obvious starting point. A traditional book can be passed down from mother to son, generation after generation, until the book falls apart or goes missing. Tamblyn’s argument was the readers would pay an addition $.25 for an e-book with this feature.

Other potential e-book features Tamblyn thought readers would be willing to cough up a few cents for, included:

* “shared library,” the digital equivalent of what happens when two people move in together and start sharing books;

* “multiple platforms,” which would allow a customer to purchase the e-book, print book, and audio-book versions of a title for one low price;

* “loaning ability,” so that you can share your favorite books with someone and cultivate word-of-mouth; and

* “the social aspect of reading,” through which it would be possible to share information about what you’re reading or have read via all the various book-related social networks such as Good Reads and LibraryThing.

Tamblyn briefly touched on the technical side–claiming that all of the features discussed could be implemented almost immediately–but what he’s most concerned with is giving readers what they actually want. And getting other publishers to buy into this vision.

Personally, as a print book publisher and reader, I was actually swayed quite a bit by his presentation. With each example I could imagine how this would occur in my life and how I’d be much more tempted to invest in an e-reader if x + y + z were possible. It was also striking how well his ideas fit in with those found in Ted Striphas’s The Late Age of Print.

This need for publishers to be “reader-centric” when expanding their digital initiatives was a theme that ran throughout the Tools of Change panels, including the panel Richard Nash of Cursor moderated on the “Deconglomerated Publisher & the End of the Supply Chain,” (which is also the one I participated on) and Kassia Kroszer’s presentation on “Starting from Scratch” in building a digital publishing company.

Never having been to a TOC conference, I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect, but the turnout was fantastic and the level of discussion extremely sophisticated. Great first year, and hopefully this will become a staple of the Frankfurt Book Fair for years to come.