The Bookseller.com

7th January 2009

GAYLE FELDMAN

Gayle Feldman is The Bookseller's US correspondent.

Miller's law

09.10.08

HarperStudio, Bob Miller’s boutique publishing experiment that gives authors a maximum advance of $100,000 in return for a 50% profit share, is coming to Britain, Australia and New Zealand effective immediately. Harper UK nonfiction publisher Carole Tonkinson and editorial director Susanna Abbott have just come on board to enable vertical international publication for twenty-five of twenty-eight books already signed in America, and for new titles going forward.

Miller founded and ran Disney’s Hyperion for seventeen years, until Jane Friedman backed him to try this new start-up earlier this year. At LIBF, just after taking the job, he discussed possible U.K. involvement with Victoria Barnsley. After Friedman’s departure, Harper CEO Brian Murray has continued to be “very supportive.”

Tonkinson says she is “hugely enthusiastic,” seeing “a creative opportunity,” while Miller says that he will benefit from “advice given by someone with a similar sensibility.” More important, he gets “the ability to do the profit share on a world-English-language basis without rights splits.”

Except for the first book, Who Is Mark Twain? (twenty-two unpublished Twain pieces out next April), and Joann Davis’s The Book of the Shepherd, a Paulo Coelho-wannabe fable by the editor who gave us James Redfield’s Celestine Prophecy, the list is nonfiction. Miller hasn’t ruled out adding fiction in future.

The five New York staff members will generate twenty-four books a year, double the number of Jon Karp’s Hachette boutique Twelve, but small enough to stay very focused. Miller says that they will exploit Harper’s “enormous investment in digital tools” to market books, and online marketing is something that can be shared with the UK HarperStudio is already providing its authors with digital video cameras to make “informal” videos of themselves. Four staffers run a regular blog, www.26thstory.com, which has attracted media attention, and Tonkinson is eager to join in.

The arrangement “is set up as a way of getting our books into the UK,” Miller is careful to emphasize. “The possibility exists to acquire books in the other direction, although there is no obligation.”

Some titles will travel better than others: Police drummer Stewart Copeland, or Rolling Stone magazine on the history of the nineties, have more obvious UK appeal than Gilbert King’s book on Thurgood Marshall. Still, the UK is taking all titles except for three, whose rights are held elsewhere.

As for the other major component Miller hopes to put into his play – selling books on a non-returnable basis – he admits that it “might fail,” although “it’s too early to tell.” Tonkinson will “decide how to deal with retailers” her end. What everyone agrees is that the 40% returns rate for new US trade books – twice the U.K. rate – is way too much. 

With returns, unearned advances and manufacturing costs all high – not to mention the highly unstable economy – margins are under pressure, even as there is downward pressure on pricing.

“We’re going to see all kinds of experimentation,” Miller predicts. “It’s become harder and harder to sell in the middle of the ‘long tail.’ Yet we ought to be able to sell 25,000 copies of a book - and feel good about it.” 

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