Download Your Assets

Your Assets
The Editorial Process
L6
Ing. Jiří Šnajdar
2015
Your Assets
Like all other businesses, publishing companies,
whether one-book firms or Goliaths, are ultimately
deemed successful or not by whether they are
profitable and how much they are worth when they
are sold.
If you approach your business with these two key
factors in mind, then every decision you make will
help incrementally build your company for
success, which can be defined as its positive
future value.
What are the assets of a publishing house?
As we saw in relation to the balance sheet, they
consist of:
• Cash
• Accounts Receivable
• Inventory
• Prepaid Assets
• Plant and Equipment
• Intangible Assets
• Prepaid Assets
While protecting most of these—cash, accounts
receivable, protecting cash and accounts
receivable needs some attention and protecting
intangible assets needs substantial explanation.
Cash and Accounts Receivable
While protecting cash and accounts receivable
would seem obvious, it’s always amazing to see
how few smaller publishers actually have systems
in place to ensure the security of these assets and
how little thought is given to this critical task.
It is up to you, as manager of your company, to set
up the procedures to secure your cash and
receivables.
These procedures must account for opening the
mail, handling cash, recording the receipt of
checks and cash, getting that money to the bank,
reconciling the bank account, and writing your
checks.
The key idea to remember is that the same person
must not be responsible for all of these functions.
One person tallies the cash and checks for deposit
into the company’s bank account, and another
posts them to the accounts.
A third person should then be responsible for
tallying the same money, and the two tallies should
be the same.
Your auditor or accountant will be able to reconcile
your revenues with your bank deposits so you can
be sure the two are equal.
Remember, the person writing the checks must
never be the one reconciling the bank account!
If your company is doing $5 million or more
annually, seriously consider having a formal audit.
Intangible Assets
When discussing intangible assets, you should
immediately say there is a difference between the
accounting definition of intangible assets and the
legal or everyday definition of this term.
In accounting, , as noted in discussing the
balance sheet, intangible assets refers only to
what is called goodwill, or that amount received for
the company when it’s purchased, over and above
its book value.
The most important intangible assets for a
publisher are contracts and copyrights, which
protect the publisher’s work from plagiarism and
other forms of infringement.
For this reason publishers must ensure they have
contracts guaranteeing them the right to publishers
for the life of the copyright.
Whether the copyright is in the publisher’s name or
the author’s, the publisher must have the right to
publish the work transferred to it through the
wording of the contract.
How much are copyrights worth?
If the book is a perennial seller, that one copyright
alone may be worth more than the company itself
would otherwise be worth.
You need systems in place to secure your assets.
Your strategy as a publisher must be to build asset
value.
Your strategy as a publisher must be to build asset
value—and the best way to do that is to publish
books that sell well over time.
As the number of those books grows, your asset
base grows—assuming you hold the contracts
granting you publishing rights for as long as the
book remains in print.
One can never tell what book may be the one that
will be worth more than the others combined.
The publisher must always keep in mind why he’s
in business—to increase value or, if a not-forprofit, to at least break even while increasing the
value of the mission and the organization’s assets.
Copyrights
The best way to protect your copyright assets is to
register your books with the Register of
Copyrights. You should register every book you
publish and insert a copyright notice on the
copyright page of your book. Registering your
copyright with the Copyright Office helps avoid this
problem.
Copyrights
Because the act of copyright involves any number
of legal points so is better to leave it to your
attorney.
The symbol © (the letter C in a circle), or the word
“copyright,” or the abbreviation “Copr.”; and the
year of first publication of the work.
For example: “© 2006 John Doe”
One question that frequently arises in relation to
copyright is who should register the work?
The law stipulates that it can be done by any of the
following:
The author, The copyright claimant, defined as
“either the author of the work or a person or
organization that has obtained ownership of all the
rights under the copyright initially belonging to the
author.”
This category includes a person or organization
who has obtained by contract the right to claim
legal title to the copyright in an application for
copyright registration. The owner of exclusive
right(s). The duly authorized agent of such author,
or owner of exclusive rights etc.
Copyrights
The key point is that if the registration is not made
by the author, then that author must transfer the
rights to another party, who will then be able to file
for copyright.
This transfer is done by contract. Almost all
publishing contracts have wording that specifies
that the author transfers the right to publish the
work to the publisher for the duration of the
contract.
Contracts
Every book you publish should have a signed
contract giving your company the right to publish
that book.
Contracts provide the primary value to a publishing
house because they give the house the many and
varied rights needed to produce and sell the book
in question.
Without a contract, no publisher should publish a
book, unless all aspects of the book are in the
public domain; that is, if the time of copyright has
expired and the book can no longer be
copyrighted.
Contracts
A key provision of most contracts stipulates that
the publisher can assign that contract to any
company that buys the assets of the Publisher. It is
the contracts that permit the publisher to publish,
that give value to the publishing company.
Thus it is absolutely critical to protect all aspects of
your contracts and to get the broadest grant of
rights you can.
Publishers who are also authors should have a
contract for each of their books. The reason is
straightforward.
Contracts
As we’ve seen, companies can buy and sell their
assets to others. This includes inventory as well as
contracts.
Although you may or may not earn much from
your works, it’s impossible to know what the longterm success of a book might be.
The Editorial Process/ Content Management
Most of the time, the easiest way to manage is to
standardize the processes people use to make
decisions.
One excellent way to provide organizational
structure to your staff is to set up templates that
can quickly determine and illustrate whether
certain functions meet the criteria that have been
agreed upon.
Editorial Category Planning
One of the most essential requirements for any
publishing company is to know exactly what is
being published and when it is due to be
published.
In publishing as in many other businesses, there is
a very fine balance between maximizing your
revenue and optimizing your cash flow. In
publishing, cash-flow concerns are inextricably
related to the acquisition process, , necessitate
spending money out of pocket for author advances
and manuscript
purchases.
The fact is, author advances may be necessary
years before a manuscript might be finally
submitted.
Editorial staff, indexers, art and photography,
permissions, all must be paid, in most cases, prior
to the book’s on-sale date.
Paper, printing, and binding costs also must be
paid on time to maintain one’s credit standing with
manufacturers.
For many publishers this means payment within 30
days of completion of the job.
Your editorial program is the basis of your cash
flow.
The primary planning objective is to allow enough
time to write and produce your book while at the
same time minimizing the time you are out-ofpocket for cash.
How much time is enough time? How much time
should you leave between the time of signing the
contract for a manuscript and the time it’s
published?
At least 24 months. Between the time you sign a
contract for a book and the time it’s published, a
variety of tasks must be performed to ensure that
the book will generate as much revenue as
possible.
Editors must have time to work on the book to
ensure its accuracy and quality.
Sales and Marketing need to know exactly what
books they’ll be selling in the next season, and
preparations for the next season usually begin 12
months in advance.
Subsidiary-rights people must get manuscripts and
jackets to begin to generate serial-rights sales,
book-club sales and other rights sales.
Serial rights are broken down into first serial, those
sold prior to a book’s publication; and second
serial, those sold after a book’s publication.
How much time do magazines and book clubs
need?
Most magazines schedule their feature articles
about six months in advance of publication. A
publisher trying to sell these buyers, you must
show them material six months to one year in
advance if you are to be consistently successful.
If we look at editorial acquisition as a flow chart,
ideally it would look like this:
Mission Statement
Manuscript Solicitation
3-Year Editorial Plan
Editorial Meeting
Title Profit-and-Loss Statements
Proposal Meeting
Contract Negotiation
This is where the 3-Year Editorial Plan comes in.
The easiest way to view your current and future
editorial program is to do so by category.
You have defined your program and are now
focusing strictly on the categories in which you
have special knowledge or expertise or on those in
which you know there is particular opportunity.
The time periods should conform to your selling
seasons, which may be annual or semiannual,
usually spring and fall.
When you’ve decided on the time periods, place
those titles you already have under contract in the
time period in which they’ll be sold.
If you have only one book, it probably means you’ll
have to focus on finding distribution and finding
new titles, because most distributors or sales rep
groups won’t take on one-book publishers.
If you’re publishing more than one title, are they in
the same category?
In the same selling season?
Can you combine your selling and marketing
efforts to achieve savings or maximum return for
your promotional effort and dollars?
If you have books in more than one category, do
you have the marketing budget to support each
book?
Keep in mind that to the outside world, your niche
is defined primarily by the continuity of your
editorial program.
the 3-Year Editorial Plan allows you to see your
overall program succinctly by category.
With this in hand, you will know exactly what slots
need to be filled and when you are long or short on
books within categories, seasons, and years.
To identify promising areas and subjects for new
books, areas that may be overpublished, and
subjects to avoid, use a simple technique.
Drop into four or more of your local bookstores,
both chain stores and independents.
Supplement this with visits to online databases.
Approach all of these using a simple Comparative
Book Template.
The object of the template is to centralize and
organize similar title information so trends become
visible.
It is based upon those titles currently stocked on a
random selection of bookstore shelves as well as
those titles that are currently being sold and
announced.
Each Comparative Book Template should be used
to focus on one subject category, using as many
pages as needed.
Each Comparative Book Template should be used
to focus on one subject category, using as many
pages as needed.
• title
• author
• publisher
• price
• number of pages
• price per page
• color or black-and-white
• size of book
• copyright date
• special features
• format
Once the template is completed, you can review it
to see:
Who are your competitors’ current authors? Are
they well known?
Is your subject category highly published, or are
there few books on the shelf? If only a few, why?
Who are the dominant competitive publishers in
the subject area? What are they doing right?
What is the average retail price of hardcovers and
paperbacks that are on the shelf? How should you
price your book relative to this: higher, same, or
lower?
What is the ratio of hardcover to paperback books
within the subject category?
What is the average price per page (retail price
divided by the number of pages)?
What do the jackets or covers look like? Are there
similarities?
What buzzwords are used on the jackets or covers
that might apply to your books as well?
Is there a book size that is fairly standard (such as
6" x 9") or do formats vary?
How many titles have copyright dates that go back
more than two years?
Which are in second editions or higher?
Are there special features that are particularly
attractive and that might work for your book?
After reviewing your findings, apply them to your
own books.
Now you can make much more informed decisions
than you could before you started this simple,
straightforward, rewarding process.
Editorial Acquisition
Manuscripts come from a wide range of sources.
Today, larger houses rarely read unsolicited
manuscripts, leaving it to agents to screen material
for the house.
This leaves some room for the smaller house
willing to spend time mining for gold.
Internally Generated Manuscripts; Work-Made-forHire. A second way to acquire a manuscript is to
have an idea, flesh it out, and find someone to
write it.
Another way to accomplish this same thing is to do
everything within your own company, creating the
project as a Work-Made-For-Hire, which means
you’ve paid someone on staff to write the book
and your company owns the project’s copyright
and all other rights.
Meetings and Seminars.
Another way to get manuscripts is to attend
meetings and seminars on topics of interest to
your publishing program.
Agents
Agents are an excellent way to get material.
Don’t forget that agents work for authors. Agents
also must sell books to stay in business.
How do you get manuscripts from agents?
You simply let them know what kinds of books you
are interested in publishing. Try to find those
agents with a stable of authors writing in your
subject area.
International Publishers
The largest book fair in the world is the Frankfurt
Book Fair, a huge international rights fair, held
each October in Frankfurt, Germany.
Here, rights to hundreds of thousands of titles on
every conceivable subject, in every language, are
available for copublication or rights purchase.
If you make the effort to meet publishers in other
countries, you’ll be surprised first at how receptive
they are.
Editorial and Proposal Meetings
Once you’ve begun to generate a flow of
manuscripts, you must apply your own editorial
judgment to those submissions.
You can’t and don’t want to publish everything that
comes through the door.
The first step in this editorial process is to pass the
manuscript to an editor for his or her review. If the
editor agrees that the manuscript is worth pursuing
further, then it should be discussed at an editorial
meeting.
That is, how good is the manuscript?
Is it well developed?
What are the weak points?
The strong points?
Are there competitive books on the market?
What are the author’s credentials for writing the
book?
The proposal meeting, on the other hand,
augments the editorial meeting because at the
proposal meeting, sales and marketing provide
input into how the manuscript or proposal under
consideration will fit into their programs.