Live From NY

Welcome to the guest blog at the Irene Goodman Literary Agency. We're pleased to host this column offering insights on a wide range of topics for professional authors. Columns come from publishers, booksellers, bestselling authors, publicists, top industry buyers, journalists, trade magazine editors, self-promotion experts, editors, and anyone else who can enlighten, inspire, or entertain authors. Please check back as new offerings are added periodically.

Thursday, October 06, 2005

NEW FRONTIERS by Isabel Swift

Once upon a time... readers could choose to read a book in hardcover, trade or mass market paperback or-occasionally-serialized in a magazine. But this era of technological advancement has opened up many other channels and modalities that offer book lovers a much wider range of opportunities for experiencing stories. As part of the New Business Development team at Harlequin Enterprises, it is my job to explore and exploit these opportunities. Our goal is to expand our publishing program in order to create new experiences and new ways of serving our current customers-as well as to reach new customers in these new spaces.

The examples I'll share are specific projects I'm involved in-but I hope they'll offer a sense of some of the possibilities of the future of storytelling. These are a few of the new vehicles and formats we will have the option of choosing as readers to share and experience the stories we love.

I wanted to talk about a few different initiatives we've been working on recently: we just launched a downloadable audio program with Audible.com; we are working with Dark Horse Comics to translate and publish the Manga versions of our Japanese Harlequin titles; we have launched a program with Vocel for cell phone content; this month we are launching e-books with a number of distributors-and we continue to explore content deals with TV and film.

It has been quite exciting! Harlequin has some quite unique elements as a publisher, which has made our journey into new formats a very positive one. Like other publishers, we invest in and build our authors, but we are also always investing in building strong, recognizable brands. In addition, we are highly customer focused, and our relationship with our readers-our audience-has been built over decades. We talk to our readers daily through our website and direct channels. Within our chosen focus of women's fiction, we offer a broad variety of stories-eight different imprints, fifteen series-and can deliver volume, with over one hundred new titles every month. We also have a global reach, with offices in eighteen countries around the world. This offers us a unique ability to present a compelling profile in this new media.

Recognition, connection with your audience, delivering consistently over time, an ability to leverage your assets and focus on building on your strengths are traits worth focusing on whether you are a publishing company, an individual author, or an agency. They are particularly important within new technology, where cutting through the "chatter" of an overwhelming amount of information is challenging.

Let me talk a little about the various initiatives:

Downloadable Audio: Audio has come a long way from the costly, often abridged, bundles of cassette tapes of book recordings piled on your car floor. Today, there are opportunities to access digital recordings of books on-line, often for less than the cost of cassettes or CDs. They can be downloaded to your computer or transmitted wirelessly to a variety of portable digital audio players, like an iPOD or be burned onto a CD. Harlequin has developed a program with Audible.com, who is making a number of our titles available for the first time in downloadable digital versions.

The rapidly growing market for downloadable audio not only can create revenue and introduce our books to a whole new audience, but it also gives our existing audience a chance to enjoy a story when they can't read. Most of us multi-task and this format enables people to enjoy our stories while driving, gardening, crafting, walking, exercising-and it also offers an alternative to large print for older readers.

Audible.com, the internet's leading provider of digitally delivered spoken word audio, has reported that sales surged from $5 million in 2001 to $34 million last year, and reports that half of its subscribers are new to audio books.

E-Books: Electronic publishing is a key part of the future and Harlequin has joined with several major e-book distributors to make our stories available for the first time in a number of formats with a variety of series and single title books.

E-books or electronic books are books in digital format which can be downloaded from internet sites and read on a desktop or laptop computer screen or handheld computers such as Palm or Pocket PC, and even on some mobile phones. Laptops and handheld computers offer portability, and because multiple books can be stored on a single device, it can enable readers to easily carry a selection of titles with them. Some programs offer a built-in dictionary and the ability to customize the appearance of the page and increase font size. Furthermore, e-books eliminate travel time and shipping expense, as well as the need to physically shelve and store books.

Manga: Harlequin has been publishing Manga (graphic versions of its novels) successfully in Japan for a number of years. With the market for Manga in the United States exploding in the past several years--$207 million in U.S. sales in 2004, up 35% over 2003-Harlequin has launched a program with Dark Horse Comics. Dark Horse is adapting the Japanese Harlequin Manga titles into English and distributing them in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia under a new label, Harlequin Ginger Blossom, which will introduce a new generation of readers to Harlequin.

Mobile Phone Delivery: Mobile phones are becoming increasingly diverse multipurpose devices-in addition to phone communication, they offer functions such as calendar, e-mail, camera, text, audio, and video. With a market of 1.4 billion mobile phones worldwide which continues to expand, mobile phones offer an interesting opportunity for content delivery. Harlequin has embarked on a program with Vocel to provide content for subscription delivery on U.S. mobile networks. Initially, we will be offering various features available from eHarlequin.com, but will continue to explore this market.

TV/Film: While film adaptations of Harlequin titles are not a new development for us, there is fresh interest in branded content-stories or programs that have the potential to bring viewers back for a repeat experience. Many channels are intrigued by the idea of building the same kind of loyalty profile Harlequin has with series readers with books in a TV framework. Cable and Television channels are highly aware of their demographic niches and are looking to both serve them and expand them. Harlequin is actively exploring opportunities to expand the market for our titles in this area.

All these developments will offer authors greater than ever opportunities to expand their publishing successes in a variety of formats and to reach new audiences. While many of these new businesses are still in developmental stages, we think there is real potential. While stories and storytellers will never lose their vital importance in all societies, how stories are told and how we experience them has, and will continue to change.

It is a new frontier.

-------------------------------------------------

Vice President of Author & Asset Development for Harlequin Enterprises, Ltd., Isabel Swift is a part of the New Business Development team, a group that is charged with supporting the organization in identifying and interpreting trends within the publishing arena and within the women's entertainment landscape.
Click HERE to check out her blog on eHarlequin.com.

-------------------------------------------------