Yesterday I received yet another abusive and quite rude email from an author we approached in an effort to help them make money from their work. We get about one a week. In the email we were accused of

- preying on the ambitions of inexperienced authors
- scheming to rip people off
- profiteering
- vanity publishing
- deceiving people by calling ourselves ‘a publisher’ when in fact all we do is provide a service

and more…

It’s pretty tough to take but of course people are entitled to their opinion. What I want to do though is talk to some of the issues that are unique to the DIGITAL publishing world. Issues that most authors simply don’t think about. We know that what we do and the business model we present is very different to traditional publishing and as such we are working against some very strong perceptions of what’s normal or “how things are supposed to be”. To better understand why, it is first and foremost essential that one accepts that digital publishing and traditional publishing are entirely different universes.

Just an hour ago I had a conference call with an executive at Audible.com who are our main distribution partner. To be clear, we do not have an exclusive arrangement or we are not endorsed by Audible, we are just a content provider. We chatted about the realities of dealing with authors and their agents and shared some war stories of how this emerging digital space is still being digested by many folks in the industry. Some interesting things though came out of the discussion.

The first thing I want to talk about is the real differences from a business point of view between delivering and supporting digital products and delivering and supporting physical books. Audible come in for their fair share of abuse I am sure when they tell people they keep 80% of the sale price – I know we sure get it. Before you scream ‘rip off’ from the roof tops, just take a minute, cool your heels and think about this.

There are about 200 staff at Audible today. Of those, about 100 of them are manning the phones, providing customer service to end-users who are mainly unfamiliar with how to use an audio book. You can just imagine the calls…

“I have pressed download and it says that the file is on my desk top but I have looked everywhere, I even took my computer off my desk and there’s no file on my desk…”

While some of you more technical people would find it inconceivable that there are still people out there like this I can assure you there are – lots of them. We get it here all the time. People who don’t know what a JPG file is and so on. In one instance we spent an hour on the phone with an author explaining how an audio book could be listened to without any CD’s being made or delivered. But let’s look at the financial implications of people’s general lack of technical skill – something that doesn’t have to be figured into the consumption of traditional printed content.

Let’s assume that the average employee at Audible is earning $1,000/week before tax. For Audible this equates to $100,000 a week just for customer service wages so that there are people there to answer your customers issues when they call – live. Customer service employees though are only one line on their expense sheet. In addition you have:

- bandwidth
- technical staff to maintain the platform
- staff to handle meta data
- management
- advertising that they run – Google Adwords, TV etc – all to drive traffic to the store where your book resides
- rent
- insurance
- servers and other IT infrastructure

The list goes on and on. Show me another Audio Book site in the world that provides this level of financial commitment and service to their clients? The bottom line is that there isn’t another one that does and that is why Audible are now the largest publisher of Audio Books in the world.

That is just the Audible side though. The really difficult thing we have encountered is the explanation of the service we provide. Some agree we are a publisher while others scream at us saying that we are misleading people and should be ashamed of ourselves. In other cases people think we are making a fortune from ‘upfront fees’ or from commissions on the talent we arrange for those authors who want their work read by a professional. Nothing could be further from the truth. Let me walk you through it.

The average author or agent first emails us to to do some basic due diligence. Who are you, what’s your business model, how do the royalties work etc. The first responses generally take about half an hour to an hour to cover. They then ask more questions, they ask for technical guidance, sometimes they want us to help with cover design or getting the book produced. In some cases I have personally spent two hours on Skype coaching fairly technical inexperienced people how to use Garage Band to record and edit their own audio books. None of this service is free to provide. Our staff get paid every week to help people down the very daunting path of getting their work into acceptable digital form and then into the platforms. We provide a bridge between the platforms and the physical book. Tick tick tick, the expense meter is running our side. On the income side though, we get zero until the first royalty check which is usually about 6 months later “if” the author or agent proceeds with us. Further, we only get it from royalties that were earned through the work we did – it is not billed to you. In other words – we put our money on the line but not in advances, we put it into our staff’s weekly wages and other operating expenses that are required so that we can serve you between your first contact and the day your first royalty check arrives.

When I tried to explain this to Mr Abusive yesterday he dismissed me as a “spin doctor”. I am sure if I sent him the bill for my staff’s wages he would soon see that real expenses are not spin, they are real dollars invested by a real person who is trying to earn an income by serving people – shame on us.

The main point is that “digital publishing” or “providing a service to help people publish digitally” (or however you want to describe the service we provide) is complex, time consuming and not free. Yes we understand that writing books isn’t free either and that it takes considerably more time and talent which is why the author get’s the lion’s share of the net royalties we receive after Audible, iTunes and Amazon have taken their cuts.

Pioneering a new idea is never easy. We are a small business and the numbers we present are the ones  that we think we need to make the investment we have to make upfront worthwhile. When the writing and agency community abuse our staff or write destructive discussion threads (which they have done) they discourage other new an innovative service providers to enter the market to help them monetize their work in new markets. Interestingly, 100% of the abuse we have received has been from people who are making ZERO from their work in digital audio book format.

Change is something that we need to embrace folks and holding on too tightly to old models or bad experiences from others does not serve anyone. I personally feel there is great merit in thinking deeply before jumping to ill informed conclusions and hammering ‘people’ who work in organizations that are adding value – or at least trying to.

Always remember that the sharpest weapon of all is words, and in the internet world, you can deliver lasting damage with little more than a key stroke and no human interaction at all. I have requested to speak with every abuser personally via a phone call on my dime. So far I have had a 100% refusal rate. I wonder how differently we would discuss new ideas if we were all forced to sit in a room together rather than taking the easy option of firing cannon balls down email pipelines or into blog threads where anonymous participants can say whatever they like at the expense of others. I guess I am an idealist. Oh well – on with the job.