Tweet This
Jane Friedman knows the book business.
As a young publicist in 1970, she launched the first author tour, taking Julia Child across the country to promote Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Later, as an executive at Random House she started the first audio book division inside major publishing company.
Friedman would eventually run the whole show at both Knopf and later, News Corp’s HarperCollins. She left that CEO role in 2008 but wasn’t yet done with publishing. In 2009, she jumped right back in—this time as an entrepreneur—taking advantage of the Amazon Kindle/Apple iBooks digital revelation to launch eBook publisher Open Road Media. “I’d always been entrepreneurial but within a corporation,” says Friedman. “ You go through your career and someone is always thinking that someone was protecting you. I wanted to do it on my own .”
What she is doing is finding new readers (and new revenue) for old books. Known in the business as the backlist, these are titles (more than a year old) often ignored by the publishing marketing machine as companies move on to promote new titles. Digital publishing rights didn’t exist before 1994. Taking advantage of the surge in popularity of Amazon's Kindle reader, in 2009 Friedman started a land grab for the rights to publish the older works of authors like Pearl Buck, Michael Chabon, Pat Conroy, Michael Crichton, Alice Walker and William Stryon. “I want [Open Road] to be backlist. I know we can get the rights. These are titles that have sold forever, and will sell forever if they’re marketed.”
Friedman offers a 50/50 profit share with authors. Her model is capital-light with no advances and, thanks to the Kindle, no printing or shipping costs. For her cut, Friedman digitizes the copy, designs the cover art and creates and runs the marketing campaigns. Most of that is done over the Web via social networks and video—mini documentaries and mash-ups touting the author.
Since its launch, Open Road has raised a total $24 million in three rounds of funding from investors like Azure Capital Partners, NewSpring Capital, Kohlberg Ventures and Golden Seeds. That cash has helped Friedman digitize and market more than 5,000 titles. She also publishes about 20 new works each year. Open Road recently began publishing Spanish language books and is teaming with foreign publishers to translate their books into English.
While Open Road is a tech play on the expanding dominance (and shrinking overhead) of eReaders, Friedman insists the business comes down to having good copy.
"Content is king, and it will remain king--tech will come and go... It’s not I don’t believe in tech, I do. But I also know that content is king. Not to quote Rupert Murdoch, but he used to say: ' You have to own the pipes, but if you don’t have anything flowing through it, what are the pipes going to do? ’ We developed technology to market and sell our content, but the technology doesn’t come first. You got to have the content and then get the technology behind it."
And while her model focuses older titles, Friedman is confident Open Road won't exhaust the supply books available to publish:
'We will never run out of books. We haven't even touched public domain yet. You can put them up online and there is no royalty to pay and all the money comes to you. Now you can get them for free but have you looked at any of those free books? They’re really terrible. We pride ourselves on the reading experience. We are not a self publisher. Every week we are signing up new authors and their backlist in droves. We will do another 2,000 books this year, and another 2,000 next year."
Not that Friedman is afraid to shake things up if the backlist strategy goes stale.
"One of the problems with traditional publishing is that the word innovation never used. That’s because you’re protecting your base business, getting books into bookstores. As bookstore shelves diminish, one has to figure out a way to spread the word to get to the public. But in traditional publishing you can only market a book for a certain length of time because you have to market the next books, and you’re sitting on a balance sheet that has huge advances. We have the opportunity to play and that’s what we do."
