For years, Fran Toolan has been hard at work behind the scenes, developing and improving some of the machinery that makes the publishing business go. As the self-annointed “Chief Igniter” of Firebrand Technologies (formerly Quality Solutions), a company he founded in 1987, Tolan has built software that publishers of all sizes—including Simon & Schuster, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Perseus Books Group, and University of Chicago—use to do everything it takes to bring a book to market. And last December, in a bid to expand Firebrand's connection to publishers, Toolan took over the NetGalley project from Rosetta Solutions. “Rosetta Solutions was not generating any revenue and their investors were hit hard by the economic downturn. They needed to find a buyer or partner who could move quickly to keep the product and pilot projects running,” Toolan explains. Now with operational and budget responsibility for the project, Toolan is working to turn NetGalley into a viable and vital way for publishers to manage the pre-publication lives of their books.
Toolan rebranded Quality Solutions as Firebrand at its first annual user conference two years ago. As part of the rebranding initiative, Firebrand remodeled itself as the hub of a community of publishers—its clients—trying to master the new challenges of a changing industry. Toolan hoped that, through the user conference and communication throughout the year, publishers using Firebrand's software would collaborate, sharing strategies and ideas. After this year's user conference, held last month, Toolan reports moderate success.
Toolan cites an increase in collaboration at the last conference. “The conversations were much more frank, people were much more willing to ask for help than they had been a year ago, or they were willing to share small successes,” he says. “Nobody's had a huge success in any of this, but where people have had a small success in social marketing, or e-book conversion tasks, they've been willing to share those, and certainly have been vocal about where they think we should be heading with our products and services.”
That's not a bad accomplishment in the highly competitive publishing business, where most people are a little nervous about how to take next steps. “I do see that there are classes of publishers that are willing to experiment more than others,” says Toolan, “and I feel as though many of our customers are on the leading edge of a lot of that experimentation.”
On the current state of NetGalley, Toolan sees progress, “albeit slower than I'd like it. But it's evolving too.” Firebrand spent the last year revamping the original technology behind the site, and conducted a trial last spring with 40 publishers, HMH and O'Reilly among them. “Those pilots did okay,” says Toolan, “but the big issue that publicists have is that there's not enough media pull.”
There are publishers who are taking advantage of the places that e-galleys do effectively reach. Toolan cites Unbridled and Poison Pen Press as examples of two companies having good success, and others are getting excited about NetGalley. “There are a few publishers willing to expand the number of people they try to reach with electronic galleys, and those people have been very happy with the way the services work,” says Toolan. “They're reaching people they would have never touched before—in libraries, at indie retailers, and bloggers. I think that there are a lot of very legitimate professional readers who have been underserved by traditional publishing.”
Toolan also notes that NetGalley has proved useful for publishers of illustrated books and other kinds of books that are not well served by traditional galleys. “They just show really well on a PDF.”
He's bracing himself for an uphill battle—publisher by publisher, reviewer by reviewer—to win support for NetGalley. “Publishing in general has put a huge emphasis on the major media outlets for publicity. As much as NetGalley is positioned very well for the viral marketing aspect of the book business, you still need Oprah and USA Today and PW to get the word out about a big book,” he says. “But we're definitely seeing a lot of pick up on the viral side, and the viral side actually helped reviewers pick which books to review. It's going to be a battle of one person at a time.”
