The Wall Street Journal (www.wsj.com) publica un artículo de Aaron O. Patrick comentando como Penguin ha decidido comenzar a publicar autores noveles, para intentar modernizar y hacer más rentable el negocio editorial.
Wall Street Journal:
Penguin Rolls Dice With Novice Authors
Pearson’s Book Unit
Aims to Spur Profit
As It Cuts Expenses
By AARON O. PATRICK
March 8, 2006
Penguin, the publisher of such best-selling novelists as Tom Clancy and Patricia Cornwall, has taken an unusual gamble to prop up sagging profit: publishing more first-time authors.
About a year and a half ago, worried that book advances were getting too large, the company decided to cut costs by hiring more unknowns. First-timers typically command a smaller advance, the fee a publisher pays the author before a book is published, and, sometimes, before it is written.
“The industry has reached a point where the level of advances for best-selling authors has parted company with the revenue that those authors generate,” Penguin head John Makinson said in an interview last week.
Reviving Penguin’s fortunes is important for its parent, Pearson PLC, of London. Penguin earned £60 million ($105 million) last year, up 15% from a year earlier. But in 2004, profit was £52 million, 37% less than the £83 million it posted in 2003. Revenue grew just 2% last year.
Penguin also has the lowest profit margins of Pearson’s three main divisions; the others are the Financial Times group and educational testing and publishing. For 2005, Pearson reported total net income of £624 million and revenue of £4.1 billion.
The publisher hasn’t given up on big-name authors entirely. Former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan sold his memoirs to Penguin for more than $8 million. The book is expected to be published in fall 2007. (See related article1.)
Penguin’s shift to lesser-known literary lights has led to a big increase in the number of novices it publishes in the U.S. to 150, or 6% of its roster of authors last year, from 78, or 3%, the year before. Penguin’s U.S. division issues about 2,500 titles a year.
The shift involves risks for the 71-year-old publisher. Unknown writers generally don’t deliver big, reliable sales. Their work is harder to promote to the public and to important booksellers like Barnes & Noble Inc. The strategy could backfire, leaving Penguin with lower costs but also lower sales. If a book bombs, the author doesn’t have to pay back his or her advance.
But Penguin executives say something needs to be done as sales of inexpensive paperback novels, which make up a third of Penguin’s business in the U.S., are on the decline. According to the Association of American Publishers, adult mass-market sales fell an average 3.5% a year from 2002 to 2005.
Penguin also is trying to revive itself by releasing more expensive paperbacks with better-quality printing, cutting costs by sending invoices to shops by email, selling books over the Internet and trying to reduce the number of books returned by retailers.
It can take years before a new author delivers significant financial returns. By itself, the process of buying a book and getting it on bookstore shelves can take a year.
The U.S. division of Penguin started talking about increasing the number of new authors toward the end of 2003 and in 2004, says President Susan Peterson Kennedy. That means many of the books involved in the effort didn’t reach shops until last year. As a result, it is too early to tell if the strategy will have a meaningful impact on profits.
But in recent years, Penguin has had some successes with new authors. Georgia nurse Sue Monk Kidd’s first novel, “The Secret Life of Bees,” sold 4.5 million copies. “The Kite Runner,” the first book from Afghan doctor Khaled Hosseini, sold three million copies. Penguin said these books helped persuade it to publish more novice writers.
