As publishing houses struggle through the current industry upheavals, new contenders are quietly emerging, both stealing some of the traditional firms’ business as well as creating entirely new markets. One of them is three-year-old Blurb, based in San Francisco. Helmed by Mediabistro Circus speaker Eileen Gittins, the company has emerged from the sidelines to make it possible for anyone to publish a professional-quality book.
But this is no dubious self-publishing venture of the old model. It was started when Gittins, a technology entrepreneur by vocation and photographer by avocation, got frustrated after she created a book of photographs and profiles of former colleagues — to give as gifts — but couldn’t find a way to publish it both professionally and economically. In this day and age, especially to a Silicon Valley denizen, that just didn’t make sense. So Gittins rolled up her sleeves and created a company that now enables anyone to do just that. Last year, the company shipped about 1.3 million orders to customers in 70 countries and enjoyed revenues of $45 million.
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The way it works: Users download Blurb’s free software application to design their books. They then upload the resulting file to the site and place their order. Blurb sends the order to one of its printer partners, which publishes the book. Users who want to make the book available to others — whether family members in the case of personal books or complete strangers in the case of commercial books — place the book in the store, for easy ordering.
Ahead of her Mediabistro Circus talk, “The 21st Century Book,” Gittins tells us how she did it.
Who’s using Blurb?
There are three categories. There are people who are making personal books, to share with friends and family. The second group, their intention is to market themselves or promote their business in some way — everything from a photographer’s portfolio book, to a gallery exhibition book, to a brand book, to corporate “brochureware-in-a-book” books. The third category are commercial. These are people who are absolutely making a book to sell for profit. Sometimes for personal profit. But increasingly for social causes, as donation vehicles for nonprofits.
What are some examples?
A few weekends ago, I took a 10-minute period on a Saturday and looked at every book coming in over the server. They ranged from a book on how to be an expert dog sledder, to a book on game theory, to a couple of wedding books. There was one book called The Story of Us — it sounded like the guy was going to ask the girl to marry him. There was an ad agency book in there for a timber client. There was a painter in the Midwest who ordered 400 books, half of them hardcover, half of them soft cover. It looked like a catalog for an exhibition. And about 40-something percent of our book orders are international. So I was seeing books coming from Greece, Italy, the UK, Australia, and Canada.
Honda Civic in Canada and Lexus have made books. There have been “wrap party books” — Pixar did one for Wall-E and one for Up. These are books that are not publicly available because the whole point of them is to celebrate the people who’ve put heart and soul into these productions, which take years, and at the end, this is the uber-gift. We see those kinds of books all the time.
| “You build a product and then your customers astonish you with what they do with it.” |
We see a lot of marketing books for events. We’re starting to see pitch books for companies that are pitching. They’re doing this instead of the PowerPoint deck, which is one click away from the delete button. But if you present that same content in a book, it elevates the content.
When I started the company, I wasn’t thinking about these far-ranging applications. That’s probably the meta-message: You build a product and then your customers astonish you with what they do with it.
What’s been your biggest order?
Our largest order just came in last week — for 20,000 [copies]. It’s a commercial book, for sale, by a guy named David Kirsch. He’s in New York, and he owns a wellness company called David Kirsch Wellness. He offers physical training services to the modeling industry. Heidi Klum is his most famous client. His first book [with Blurb] was called the Butt Book. He sold 15,000 [copies] of that book. That was so successful, he decided to do a second book in the series, on arms and abs.
Why did he decide to go through Blurb as opposed to through a traditional publishing house?
He has gone through traditional publishers in the past. He’s a very successful published author. The last couple of experiences he had were very frustrating for him, as he tells the story. Number one is the creative control issue. David is particular. He’s built a whole business. He’s an entrepreneur. He knows what he wants. And he had long, drawn-out conversations around the title, what goes on the cover, the size of the book, how it would be marketed. And it was painful. The second issue was, after doing all that, he found himself doing all the marketing anyway. He was leveraging his database, his contacts, his social network, his frequent flyer miles. So that led to issue number three which was: If I’m doing all this work, and I’m spending all my time and energy and actual money promoting it, why am I not seeing more [revenue] on each book? Why is everyone going to make money except me? So if he skipped traditional publishing and self-published it, he would keep more of the proceeds.
In a digital age, why do so many people — particularly the ones creating personal projects — want to make hardcopy books?
When you take it to print, you, the author, are saying, “This matters.” The second thing is that, as we do live more of our lives online and things are more digital, you have a real appreciation for the physical. Human beings are tactile. We like to touch and hold things. There’s something really wonderfully connecting when you are turning the pages yourself.
What did you have to learn in order to make this company work?
Blurb is succeeding in huge part because of its business model. We knew that, in the world of traditional publishing, you need big volume for each title to make any money. They really need books that sell at least 25,000 units in order to make it economic, because there are so many people in that food chain who need to get paid. We knew that, if we were going to have a prayer of really disrupting publishing, of coming up with a new way to think about this, we needed to be able to make money on “a book of one.”
Once we set that bar for ourselves, 50 things followed. For people who didn’t know how to make a book, how would they make one? We realized we would need to provide an application. What else? We needed to build out a network of printers all over the world, who would produce a book for X price, because we could sell it for X plus. So, how do we get them to sell it us for that price? Well, we have to take cost out of their equation. How do we do that? We have to create a standard output file format from the software that we build, so that, each and every time, they can take all that pre-press labor out of the equation. Then we need a whole back-end, an e-commerce platform that enables people not only to buy their own book but to sell and share [the] book. So we figured out how to do that. Then, to really get people to sell their books, what should that model look like? We needed a model where the author gets to keep 100 percent of the profits, over and above the cost of printing the book.
All of this followed from the question: How do we radically rethink what a book can and should be? Books used to be things that were only created based on their salability, their commercial viability. We wanted to take that out of the equation. Two-thirds of Blurb’s business are books that are not for sale at all. They’re either for friends and family, or they’re for promotion. So if we needed to depend on profits from the sale of the books we’d be in deep you-know-what. We wanted to enable everyone in the world with something to say, and the princely sum of $12.95, to be a globally published author. That’s a very different thing that traditional publishing, and we needed to build a whole infrastructure behind that to make that work.
| “We wanted to enable everyone in the world with something to say, and the princely sum of $12.95, to be a globally published author.” |
What do you like about creating a company that’s doing something no one’s ever done before?
The plunging into the unknown. Seriously. I’m a big Star Trek fan, and I like the motto, “Go where no man has ever gone before.” There are people out there who are really talented at optimizing and making something that’s working more efficient. That’s not my calling. My true calling is the creation side, the invention side. Of thinking about gaps. That’s how I started the company, out of personal pain. When I can find something that I can personally relate to and feel passionate about, like, “Somebody should fix that. That is all wrong.” And then you get to a point where you think, “I’m the person that should fix that. I’m the one that should build that, because it is all wrong that the rest of us can’t publish a professional-quality book.” I’m just a person who loves that whole creation side of thinking through not only what’s the gap, what’s the market opportunity, but also what’s the business, how do you reach people, what do you stand for, what’s your mission, what are your values, who are you going to hire. I love that.
Fill in the blank: Don’t start a new company creating an entirely new product, that’s upending an existing industry, unless:
Unless you have thick skin, are maniacally committed and passionate, and cannot imagine a life where you’re not doing it. And you have to be a little crazy, because the odds are not good [that it’ll succeed].
What’s the secret to making this a profitable business?
The secret was going back to that “book of one” economics. If you reverse-engineer back [from what success looks like], and you say, I think people will buy this book for $30, [then you ask yourself] what do I need to buy that book for? What are my cost of goods on that book, so that I can make a healthy profit margin? That’s what we did with our early print partners. We said, to have a business, we need to be able to buy this book from you for X. And you go back and forth and have a negotiation. Printers are not having a happy life now either. So going after people and saying, How would you like to build out an entirely new, hugely profitable revenue stream, where it will be the cleanest business coming over your transom that you have ever seen in your life, you never have to lift a finger to do one business development or sales call, we just supply you the most clean volume you’ve ever seen, are you interested? If the answer is yes, you have a little more leverage to say, if we’re going to build this together, because we’re inventing this new industry together, we need to have a price point that will drive people to say, that’s awesome. So that’s what we did.
[We also asked ourselves:] How can we model out the business so that this doesn’t become a body shop? So that it doesn’t become overpopulated with people? Because people are your No. 1 expense item. That led us to the conclusion that we had to build a [technology] platform. We’re not trying to be a publisher. We’re not offering consulting services and editorial services, that are people-driven. We had to find ways to automate things, so that we make it possible for people to do this DIY. So that just drove all kinds of technology decisions and an approach to the business that, every step along the way, we ask ourselves: How do we automate this? How do we scale that? If we can’t answer those two questions, we typically don’t build it.
In the traditional publishing industry, there are countless assumptions about what you must and must not do to be successful. Which of those did you jettison to make this work?
Everything! [Laughs] One of the secrets to our success is that we never hired anyone out of traditional publishing. Not one person. We didn’t know we couldn’t do things, so we just did them. It’s very hard to un-learn people. It’s much easier to teach people than to unlearn them. We didn’t want the “this is the way we do it” kind of thinking.
The CEO of one of the big publishing houses told Wired.com a few years ago, “A good book will get published. Self-publishing is denying that fact. The filters of agent, editor, and publisher are still essential.” What do you think about that?
Those functions of curation and editorial are still hugely valuable. The question, though, is: Who does them, and where do they get done? Many people on Blurb create proof copies of their book, and then they distribute them to people they trust. If they’re a designer, they circulate it to other designers. If it’s copy, they’ll send it to somebody who’s a good writer. And they get feedback and edits. David Kirsch’s books? He has an army of people who are reviewers for him before he publishes a book. Those things still happen. It’s just we’re using our networks now.
The theme of this year’s Mediabistro Circus is “Women in Media + Tech.” Has being a woman in this business helped, hindered, or been a non-issue?
For me it’s been a non-issue. That has to do with Silicon Valley. It’s not perfect, but it is more of a meritocracy than other industries. We just have that expectation that, if you’re good, you’re hired.
Gittins’ tips on starting a company from scratch
1. Build an advisory network of colleagues and friends who can help you think about your business idea. “Trying to do it alone is very difficult,” Gittins says. “You get your own echo chamber going. Also, getting the emotional support from that network is very important because it’s a very hard thing emotionally to start a company.”
2. Ask yourself whether the world really needs your idea. “Really try to be tough on yourself,” she says. “Companies tend to get started either because of gaps — there’s a hole they think they can fill — or because there’s an opportunity that’s emerging, that they can see on the horizon. Both are valid. But you really need to think things through. Out here, in Silicon Valley in particular, the number of companies that are started because an engineer thought something would be cool to build are legion, and they don’t really serve a market need.”
3. When it comes time to raise money, think “lean and mean.” “Try to think of what is the minimum valuable product (MVP) to some subset of the people you want to serve that you could build,” Gittins says. “Then be very focused on delivering that minimum, so that you can learn as you go. You put something out there and your customers will tell you what they like about it and what they don’t. They’ll speak with their wallets, or their attention.”
Eileen Gittins defines “The 21st Century Book” in her upcoming presentation at Mediabistro Circus on May 20 in New York.
E.B. Boyd is a freelance journalist based in San Francisco.
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