When Bob Miller recently announced that he was leaving Hyperion to start a new-style imprint at HarperCollins, tongues, predictably, wagged as to the why and the why now. But for the most part, publishing pundits were intrigued.

Miller’s 25-book-a-year “studio” is supposed to take traditional publishing paradigms—the returns system and the advance vs. royalty conventions—and turn them, profitably, he and Harper hope, on their heads. Never mind that Roger Cooper has been experimenting similarly—particularly with the advance/royalty model—at Perseus’s Vanguard (see p.8); Miller’s move was widely hailed as surprising and brave and most of all, innovative.

More than anything, the common wisdom—publishing is so not about innovation!—gives us license to cling to models we know are outdated. In fact, we’re actually more forward looking than we think: a new study from the Book Industry Study Group, which will be formally unveiled at its Making Information Pay conference on May 9, profiles companies and individuals who have successfully initiated new programs or products in the past decade. (Interesting note: though they were not expressly asked to volunteer stories about digital innovation, virtually all of the publishers who responded to the BISG survey reported not on such traditional issues as returns or advances, but on e-projects.) Some of them—the POD Espresso machine; Random House’s decision to release the digital version of Suze Orman’s Women and Money for free via Oprah; and Michael Cader’s Publishers Lunch and PublishersMarketplace—are well known to most publishing folk. But what’s interesting is their backstories, and the lessons those stories tell.

It was not surprising to me, for example, that Publisher’s Lunch and Marketplace got up and running so quickly and successfully because it was, for a long time, a one-man shop. (It’s not a whole lot bigger than that today.) You don’t have to be a bestselling business author to know that individuals are almost always more nimble and focused than even the most e-friendly corporations—especially back in the year 2000. What was surprising, though, was the way some older, more established corporations recognized how much individuals, and their thoughts and ideas, matter. Wiley let a tech v-p run with the idea that the house needed a whole new way of evaluating proposals, which, more and more, included Web sites and other nontraditional means of publishing, not to mention promotion and revenue. Thanks to Gwenyth Jones, Wiley now has a formal e-proposal process, which makes the house more attractive to authors who know they must be multiplatform. Likewise, Harlequin and Hachette risked their brands by releasing short fiction e-books and testing “light DRM” (i.e., mostly un-rights-protected) audiobooks, respectively. In both cases, the rewards ended up outweighing the risks—the products suffered barely any cannibalization or piracy—and new models were born.

Granted, this process stuff is not what most of us usually think about: I’ll admit, some of the info in the BISG study is so back-office-y as to be beyond un-sexy. But maybe that’s the good news: we’re already pretty good at the fun part: finding and producing what I still refuse to refer to as “content.” But who couldn’t use a refresher course—taught by Bob Miller, BISG or whomever—in how to move our beloved “content business” into the future?

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