By Porter Anderson | @Porter_Anderson
Publishing Perspectives Editor-in-Chief
“It’s been nearly 3 years since I first picked up a phone and started calling publishers.”
And Peter Hudson, founding CEO of BitLit in Vancouver, is in a good position to tell newcomers to the publishing startup scene what to expect:
“Looking back, I understand why everybody I met in the industry told me it would be “impossible to get enough publishers on board.”
With the kind of candor you can’t always hope for from our many startup chiefs, Hudson—formerly with Westinghouse and a co-founder of Aquatic Informatics—recently wrote about what it has taken to become a success story: a lot of persistent phone calls to publishers.
BitLit is the company that makes it possible for owners of print copies of books to get ebook editions of those books at low or no cost.
Called a “Shelfie“—now the re-branding of the company to reflect BitLit’s consumer-facing operation—the mechanism involved is a mobile app that takes a photo of the reader’s bookshelf and sends that photo to Vancouver. There, the system reads the spines of the books on the shelf in question and then lets the reader know which ones BitLit has available in digital form. Not only is this form of “after-market” bundling effective for creating a second sale of a title for a publisher, but it also can generate consumer data that initially was lost. The print copy of a given title on that reader’s bookshelf might be many years old and there’s likely no data recorded from the original sale. But when the user comes calling at BitLit to get the e-edition, his or her data can be captured—a once-“lost” consumer has come back into view.
As good as that whole thing might sound now, in order to make BitLit fly, what Hudson and Mary Alice Elcock, Vice President for Content, had to do, of course, was persuade publishers to let them have the ebooks to make available to the readers. That’s where the calling came in—dogged, tireless, seemingly endless calling.
“It took 29 days of calling,” Hudson writes, “until a guy named Brett at an indie publisher in Toronto called ChiZine didn’t think what I was pitching sounded completely crazy. From that first deal, it would take over 500 days (and thousands of cold calls) until June 2014 when we hit 1%.
“One percent means that you’d have to try 100 books before you’d have one that would be eligible for a bundle deal.”
“The graph below,” writes Hudson, “shows the percentage of books on an ‘average’ shelf that are from publishers that we’ve signed a deal with. It starts at 0.0% on January 15th 2013, the day I made my first publisher cold call.”
A year ago, in January 2015, Hudson recalls, “we still didn’t have any of the Big Five publishers signed up.” Because those five houses control so much content, Hudson says, the company simply had to get some of those publishers’ titles in order to make their offering truly viable for reader-consumers looking to bundle e-editions with their print copies of favorite books.
He talks of going to the major trade shows—Frankfurt Book Fair, London Book Fair, BookExpo America—and not taking a booth or stand because he and Elcock had to stay on the move, handling up to 16 meetings per day, trying to talk publishers into signing on to the BitLit concept and providing ebooks. I can remember meeting with Hudson and Elcock, myself, at London Book Fair, a late-afternoon session in which we basically drank bottled water and chatted quietly, grateful just to be still and seated for a few minutes. Startups experience the major trade shows as journalists do: on foot.
Over time, bigger and bigger publishers were indeed arriving: Wiley, Elsevier, O’Reilly, Packt, as were distributors including Ingram Content Group. Funding was coming in, too, notably from Michael Serbinis’ Three Angels Capital VC fund.
There’s more: Read the full story at Publishing Perspectives
By Porter Anderson
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Publishing Perspectives: BitLit and Shelfie at Three Years: Cold Calling From Canada
Originally published at www.PublishingPerspectives.com
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