Decades Old? No Problem: Publisher Makes A Bet On Aging Books
A good book may last for hundreds of years, but it often attracts attention the first time it is published, if the author is lucky. Then he disappears.
A company called Open Road Integrated Media is trying to transform old books into giving them a second life. It will do this by using machine learning to make these titles more visible online and publishing largely forgotten or out-of-print books in a new innovation announced Wednesday.
“These books have the potential to breathe new life into them, and that flies in the face of conventional wisdom in the industry,” says David Steinberger, CEO of Open Road.
Publishers usually focus their marketing efforts only on new books. After a title has been around for a while, publishers usually have to move on to the next title, no matter how much they believe in the book. Older titles get little attention, though new readers sometimes find them popular thanks to film or television adaptations or the Tiki Tok.
Open Road Markets used books using machine learning technology, which crawls the web for each title – reviews, social media posts and retail websites – and then generates marketing recommendations for that title. The software tests prices and promotions on retail sites to increase sales and optimizes keywords for books to appear in search results.
Another key point of the company's approach is its army of serious readers, who receive nearly three million Open Road newsletters. By following book links on retail sites like Amazon, these readers encourage algorithms that rank higher on those sites.
Steinberger said Open Road can double the sales of the pending titles they promote on average. Sales of 1942: The Year That Tested Winston Groome's Soul have doubled since hitting the streets to 35,000 e-books , he said. “Starting Place: A Memoir of a Colored Man” by J. Drew Lanham sold over 15,000 e-books, more than double previous sales.
Grove Atlantic, an independent publisher, has partnered with Open Road to promote its nearly 1,500 consecutive titles, including 1942: The Year That Tempted the Minds of Men and Black Hawk. After seeing the results, the company invested in Open Road, said Morgan Entrekin, editor of Grove Atlantic.
Every publisher released books they knew were great but didn't work in the marketplace. "It's exciting to see how they're selling," Entrekin said. "The fact is, quality can win over time."
Although Open Road is primarily in the e-book business and their reprints will be available as print-on-demand in the future, they expect to remain focused on e-books.
A new Open Road initiative, Re-Discovery Lit, republishes out-of-print or undersold books, returning the rights to the book from the publisher to the author. (There is usually a relevant clause in publishing contracts.)
The rediscovery will begin this year with several hundred books. These include The Ticket of the Season by New York writer Roger Angell. "Danger and Hope" by New York Times bestselling author Barbara Delinsky; and "Who Killed Peggy Sue?" by Eileen Gouge, also a New York Times bestseller.
"These wonderful books are waiting to be discovered by a whole new group of readers," said Sarah Shandler, editor of Alloy Entertainment, which publishes Goudge and is now an Open Road affiliate. "But with so much focus on the future, some of these wonderful themes are being forgotten."
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