English

Honoring our senior colleagues.

Last Friday we celebrated the 70th birthday of Bette Ezzell. Bette is the VP of Credit here for us at Thomas Nelson. What a joy as we all gathered to surprise and honor her. You see Bette tells me that she was going to retire at 65, but then she was named VP and decided to work a bit longer. We laughed a bit about that and then another colleague of mine pulled me aside and shared a story with me- and I want to share that with you today.

He told me about what he was told on his 50th birthday. A 75 year old colleague here at Thomas Nelson came up to him and said ?Son, let me tell you.

"Today you are turning 50 years old. The most productive years of your professional life now lay ahead of you. You will do more in these next 20 years than you ever did before. You have already made and learned from your mistakes- the rest is a piece of cake."

I sat there with my piece of birthday cake in my hand thinking and watching Bette greet the well-wishers. How true I thought. In a day where cutting salaries and replacing with novices is celebrated behind closed doors of many businesses, I was so proud of Bette and our Thomas Nelson Team- celebrating her and her contributions. We need to savor these gems.

To my senior colleagues and industry pioneers- I salute you. Thanks for your leadership, years of service- and may they be many, many more.

 

Will Grupo Nelson be at Expolit?

Many of my friends and colleagues in the Spanish industry have been asking me about our presence at Expolit in Miami this year. They are planning their time and want to be sure that they book their agenda correctly. The questions generally are two and sometimes they sneak in a third question.  They basically ask me:

• Are you going to be at Expolit?
• Will Grupo Nelson have a booth at Expolit?

So let me simply let you know what we as Grupo Nelson are doing by answering the questions here. Let me start with the second question first.

Q. Will Grupo Nelson have a booth at Expolit?

A. No.

Q. Are you going to be at Expolit?

A. Yes. I will be there Monday and Tuesday only. Along with me will be our marketing and publicity director, Claudia Duncan. We will be there to work with authors, media, and several booksellers from Latin America. I am also looking forward to sitting in on the SEPA meeting on Tuesday morning.

There you have it folks, I hope that answers the questions for you. I look forward to seeing you there.

An open letter to the booksellers of Chile.

Dear booksellers,

 The eyes of the world fell to Chile this weekend as we heard of the devastating earthquake that has rocked your country.  As I write this we hear of continued aftershocks all the while rescue worker pull people from the destruction. The pictures we have witnessed speak and pull on our hearts. We see the broken streets, the fallen homes and businesses, the crushed and the deserted.

But, beyond the pictures we know the heart of the Chilean people. You are a strong people and you are the hope of the nation as it even now begins to rebuild. The inspiration and hope that you bring as booksellers for the community are the tools that will help lay the foundation for the local community.

We want you to know that you are in our thoughts and prayers. We stand with you today with hopes for a greater tomorrow.

Larry

Where is Larry headed now?

As I start to write this the snow is still falling and the temperature outside has finally bottomed out and begun its slow crawl up the slippery gage. Right now it reads somewhere around 15⁰ (f) and looks to be thinking about moving to 16⁰. But I am about to leave all of this and head to South America for about 17 days.  

I will be making a whirlwind trip through several countries touching base with our key customers. Over the last two years most of my travel has been in Spain, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina. While our sales team meets regularly with our customers internationally, admittedly with some of our South American customers it will be the 1^st time that I have met in their offices, in their cities and countries for about 2 or 3 years. I opted for this trip because I really need to get back in touch South America, with our customers, their needs, and the local market.

My travels will take me to the following seven countries; Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela. (Yes- it is summer there) I want to invite you along to follow some of the
posts and tweets that I will be doing form each of the countries as we travel through them- I will share some of what I am learning, hearing and seeing about the local industry as well as what we can do to help the industry and our market position.

To make the most of the trip I have set out both general and specific goals for my trip. Here are my general goals that I want to accomplish in each country:

• Listen and learn from the local publishers, leaders, distributors, and booksellers in each country.
• Listen to what our partner’s plans are for the year and understand how we can help them accomplish their goals.
• Share our Grupo Nelson Publishing priorities and goals for the year ahead.
• Assist our sales team in hand selling a few key products including our new Study Bible from Dr. Charles Stanley.

Here is what I am looking forward to:

• The people and friendships we will renew
• The speaking opportunities
• The shared meals
• The great ideas that will come from being on the road

What I am not looking forward to:

• The more than a dozen flights
• The constant change of hotels

It’s just a ticket for one, but you can follow along if you want to learn about travel, countries, or the Spanish industry on Twitter or just look for my daily posts here on the English site.

The 5 challenges that we will face as a Spanish Publishing industry in 2010

I always look forward to the holidays, and this year is no different. It signals a time with family, celebrations of wonderful traditions, and opportunities for some rest. The holidays also signal the end of a year and the birth of a new year. I love the hope that a new year offers. I know that I have a clean canvas and can absolutely paint my future any way that I want to. At the same time I also prepare myself to be ready for opportunities and challenges. I do this both personally and professionally.

As I look out on the year that awaits us I see several opportunities that will present themselves to us. I
am already working with the team to ensure that we are ready to take advantage of them.  I cannot wait to share with you some of the things we are working on for 2010. I think one of them has the opportunity to be groundbreaking for the Christian publishing industry.  Those announcements will come in due time.

Let me though mention a few of the areas that I believe will be challenges for us as an industry in 2010. We are already working on positioning ourselves as a team for these changes and identifying strategies to help us embrace the opportunities that challenges always bring. Here I will identify 5 areas that will challenge our industry that will affect Authors, Publishers, Distributors, Booksellers, and Consumers.

Marketing: Traditional marketing, defined as the static analog marketing whose results are difficult to measure, will continue to decline. In 2009 we saw a very large portion of the print media shut down with some of them scrambling to regroup and carve out their digital space. We are also seeing a decline in Trade Shows marketing money as it is being drawn away from these traditional venues and being invested in new consumer oriented marketing.

Use of Social Medias: As the traditional marketing continues to shrink, ”Social Medias” will continue to grow and change the way that marketing is used. However, we will go through a strong learning curve. The use of Facebook, Blogs, and Twitter are just the start. It will continue to evolve, so much so that in the next 6 months there will be a whole new “cool” medium out there that we will all be scrambling to understand. I think it will eventually end up inside one of the new e-readers (perhaps the coming Apple reader- they seem to understand it), which will be a perfect fit for our industry. Imagine that. It will be up to us as industry leaders to determine where we will find our fan bases for our product.

Marketing: There are no crazy ideas.

First of all, please know that this post is primarily about getting to share the below video with you. But I also wanted to quickly look back on our marketing decisions over the last year as well.

Over the last year we have taken some shots from people in the industry because we chose not to use our marketing dollars in the normal manner. Some of the cuts have been difficult and have not been easy. At times we even began to have doubts, but hindsight, we are very pleased. We have cut our advertising in dozens of magazines, reduced our traditional marketing funds for trade shows over the course of the last year. Many have urged us to keep spending for sake of the relationships with those we would pay, and in some cases we have re-evaluated the cut and re-instated the advertising spend.

However, we have freed up hundreds of thousands of dollars to target toward new manners of marketing in the future. We believe that there will be, and already is, a dramatic shift happening in the way that we market to our consumers. We are poised and already investing in vertical columns of readers and consumers. We are digging deep and experimenting with various forms of marketing; from viral to communal. We have given ourselves the freedom to do new things.

I am all for trying something new in marketing and getting your name out. Many times we are limited in our thinking to the tried and true. But what if you had to be creative? Think all the good ideas are taken? Think again. Here is a video from the Frankfurt Book Fair this year. This Publisher, Eichborn, has a Fly as the logo. Well look at how their marketing team decided to get their name out there. So enjoy thinking about new ways to market. There really are no crazy ideas anymore. What will you do to make your company stand out in a crowded market place?

Local Christian Bookstore versus Local Church Bookstore

As I was wrapping up a conference in Buenos Aires I did as I normally do and just walk around to the different lunch tables and thank everyone for all they are doing in their region or country. It is usually a time where we try and out complement each other with words of gratitude for the other. 9 of the tables this was the case. Then I got to my 10^th table.

I was quickly asked to sit down and to be the definitive answer on (in their words) “why the Local Church Bookstores where unfairly practicing a trade and where undermining the Local Christian Bookstore.” OK, hornets’ nest, not a topic that usually ends with happy people on both sides. So I took a look around the table and saw that it was 3 Christian Bookstores versus 1 Church Bookstore. The three were convinced that the 1 was taking away customers from their stores and had hugely unfair advantages such as rent, salaries and utilities that were all covered by the church.

So I was told- “what should we do about them?”

And after a thoughtful deep breath, here is what I answered.

What is the role of the salesperson in the near future and long term?

Several months ago a member of our sales team asked me about the future and how it related to him as a sales person. It was a very good question and one that, if you are in sales, (remember—we are all in sales) you should pay attention to. The issue at hand- electronic downloads of both audio and video content from our authors as well as the next phase, which is well underway, digital downloads of the written product via Kindle and PDF’s.

 

If you have been anywhere but under a rock, these were some of the same issues that heavily affected the structures of the music industry, forever erasing the lines of ownership and distribution. I have included the three questions asked- but save your time- jump to the third question- that is the key question.

 

• 1.    In the Thomas Nelson website (our corporate site) we are selling downloads but are we the ones getting the sales, (meaning Thomas Nelson) or is it any other company? 

[>>>LAD]       We are as Thomas Nelson though our internet channel, they are also available through Audible, iTunes, i-amplify and many others.

 

• 2.    If our distributors would like to develop the idea in their own website, can we help with the technology to do it? If not how can it be done? Will we sell the license so they can have the product to be download by their customers?

[>>>LAD]     We already have developed the technology for them. And they can start selling tomorrow / actually today. Note that I am testing it on my blog. I simply followed the quick and easy steps – though I am doing mine as a freebie only directing everything to TN. But they can fill out the form and get a certain share of the sale. We hold the server. Check out the upper right column of my blog to see example. But we will not create new technology for them- they just need to become an affiliate (no, they don’t get a normal discount – it will be much less - but no inventory at all J) and copy and paste into their site- they can literally be up and running today.

 

• 3.    This question came to mind as I was doing these questions. How do you think this initiative will affect our roles as sales people in the near future and in long term?

[>>>LAD]      First of all “Near Future and Long Term” let me just say in the future. We are changing to quickly right now to differentiate much past 18 months. For right now- sell, sell, sell! But shortly - In the future we (as sales) will need to become providers of content for different vertical groups. You MUST become an expert in an area. That is to say- how do I begin to understand all the needs of specific groups of consumers, and how do I get them connected to my author’s content. Example: Leadership Books – driving down to business groups , Small Business Associations, entrepreneurs, managers, and many more… how do we reach them and make them fans of Maxwell and business content. Could we see a day shortly where they eventually sign up to be “mentored” by Maxwell daily with our content? Right now we are Horizontal as a publisher and even more so as an industry. We sell a wide variety and it is displayed widely in a bookstore waiting passively for people to come in and browse- scan the horizon. We must become Vertical – that is we must know:

1) who is our authors core customer base, we must know

2) how they want it delivered to them, we must know

3) when they want the product delivered to them,  and finally

4) at what price they want the content delivered to them.

This may be 5 years off- or it may be 18 months off. These are exactly the questions that the “digiready©” team at Thomas Nelson is tackling right now.

Change is the only constant.

It has been stated thousands of times before – “Change is the only constant.” Change is all around us, and ever happening with or without us. Change knows no political, social, language, or economic boundaries. Change doesn’t care about your calendar or even what public opinion states. Change wears no watch, carries no baggage, and claims no special office. Change is neither good nor bad, neither right nor wrong, change just.

In today’s business climate and in our industry especially, change is no stranger.  But what has become increasingly obvious is the speed with which change is now occurring. I won’t take you all the way back to the Gutenberg or the rotary press, but if you even think about the last 10 years and the changes we have all lived through, you really start to smile and even chuckle a bit. Though I must say as a complete aside- the coffee on American Airlines still has not changed. In fact I think they still use the same old stale coffee grounds. But almost everything else has. Think about the way we communicate for instance. We have gone from the written letter in the mail, to the non reliable fax, to the e-mail. Does anyone remember how we used to all get off the plane and rush to the line of telephones to call back to the office to check if everything was under control?

Well get ready folks, I believe in our industry we are going to see drastic change in the next few years. Actually some of these changes are already happening and you may or may not even be aware.

1)      Marketing is an area we all recognize is changing. Already we are seeing the drastic reduction of print magazines. One after another are shutting their doors. A few are attempting to make the move to digital, but some are late in doing so and may not have the revenue stream to support themselves as before. But this is only a symptom of the underlying change. Marketing is going vertical now, allowing you to reach specific core audiences instantly with measured results through social mediums. “Triangulated marketing” will become the course of action. Yes I just coined that phrase J. Triangulated marketing (think GPS tracking of your customer) will consist of social media that composes listening, speaking, and core community stations and platforms.

2)      Publishing formats are changing.

a.       The digital world of downloads and readers is a whole area that others who are much smarter than I are already covering. Plus in the time that I took to write this blog a dozen new digital issues where revealed.

b.      Just know this- we are no longer publishers of books- rather we are content providers. If you can remember that you will be ok through this change.

3)      Traditional Author, Publisher, Distributor, Retailer definitions are changing. Without going into the area of self publishing / self distribution, which is the best option for many authors, I believe that we will begin to see the traditional model of Publisher selling to distributors and or booksellers lines that have been in place for decades begin to blur. I saw in Sao Paulo bookstore that had as its name that of the publisher big and bold and then underneath in smaller letters the phrase “operated by (name of the traditional bookstore). Here you found every single title of the Publisher whether it be front list, back list, or even remainder. Let’s give it a US look for the example: Harper Collins Bookstore… operated by Barnes and Noble. You wanted shelf space- you got it buddy. Wouldn’t that rock some people’s worlds? But I think it will go so much deeper than that.

So it matters less whether you believe, or even like the changes that you see coming. What matters is how you and your team are adapting to them. And think of it this way- If nothing ever changed in your business, would your business need you?

Twitter: is it a social fad or here to stay?

About 6 months ago I started to use Twitter as one of the areas that would allow me to explore some of the social sites and see what was going on around me in Spanish Publishing. Twitter is a quick burst communication tool that allows you to communicate with a group of people who follow you. Twitter is different from text messaging, different from Facebook, different from e-mail in several ways. Primarily Twitter is a network of links. Twitter will only allow you to send 140 characters. That’s it 140. Not one character more and yes that includes spaces.

Twitter really came of age just over the last week when suddenly it was the source for an entire generation of voters in Iran to get the word out about what was happening in their country. With lightning speed a world that was banned from reporting in Iran was networked around the world with information of where to go for more information. You see it’s not always about what those 140 characters say, it is where they send you.

The last thing I did as the doors shut today on the airplane was to get my friends timeline update via Tweetberry (a must have if you have a Blackberry and are Twittering). I was the only one on the plane who had received the word- Michael Jackson had died just minutes before. One of the groups that I follow had the word out within minutes, and it began to be forwarded all over (Retweet). I shared this with others and it trickled up and down the plane. We had many doubters, but as soon as we landed we walked out to a Dallas airport crowded around TV’s watching CNN.