Professional publishers enjoy growth as they experiment with new business models, such as selling books by the chapter.

By Janet Spavlik

Blogging for Business

Joe Wikert did what any publisher would do to sign a highly sought-after author––he started a blog.

In early 2005, Wikert’s company, John Wiley & Sons, was competing with several other publishers to sign popular bloggers Robert Scoble (www.Scobleizer.com) and Shel Israel (http://RedCouch.Typepad.com) to pen a book about blogging. At a dinner with Wikert and two other Wiley employees, Scoble and Israel “came clean” about their hesitancy to sign with Wiley. “[Scoble] said, ‘Nobody at Wiley blogs. These other publishers get it. In fact, one of them, the CEO has been blogging for a couple years. Prove it to us that you guys get it’,” relays Wikert. “Ultimately, Robert said, ‘Joe, if you will go ahead and start a blog, and let us do a case study of it in the book, we’ll go ahead and sign with you guys.’ That’s all it took. I went home that weekend and started playing around a little bit.”

For the first six months of his blog (“Joe Wikert’s Publishing 2020 Blog,” www.JoeWikert.com), Wikert felt like he was talking into a black hole, he says. But once Scoble and Israel started pointing to Wikert’s blog on their own blogs, his traffic went “through the roof.” Wikert’s blog now averages from 1,200 to 1,400 visits a day, from direct visits to the blog (mostly through Google) or through RSS feeds, which Wikert says is the bulk of his traffic. “You can say, ‘1,200 to 1,400, that’s not really that much.’ But you know, any conference I’ve spoken at, I’ve never spoken to that many people.”

The result of Wikert’s effort was “Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers,” authored by Scoble and Israel, and published by Wiley in January 2006.

Wikert has learned that the blogging world has its ups and downs. For example, one of his blog entries, titled “If Steve Jobs Would Have Published Harry Potter …,” received a slew of harsh criticism. One commenter wrote, “This fails to be funny, clever, insightful or thought provoking,” while another bluntly stated, “Stick to publishing. Writing … is obviously not your thing.” How did Wikert handle the attacks? “The one thing that anybody will tell you before you get into this is that you have to be thick-skinned,” he says. “They’ll be some rough days. Scoble in particular has been a good fountain of wisdom for me on that front because he gets criticized all the time.”

“It’s run its course,” Wikert continues. “The beauty of it [is that] now I’m going to use it as a case study for a couple presentations I plan to make here at Wiley and also at a publishing conference later this year on blogging, about how the audience can turn against you.”

While Wikert’s blog is not directly related to his work at Wiley, he says the blog has had a positive impact on his job. “No question about it. If I had looked at just the first six months, I probably would have quit and not thought about it again. I was one of those people who looked at blogging as the last fad … and now I have a completely different appreciation for it,” he says. “In fact, I’m the guy flying the flag around here that we need to get more of us involved in this.”

“There are proposals and books frankly either in my group or that we’ve handed off to other groups within Wiley that are the direct result of [my blog],” Wikert continues. “So there are tangible results even in a couple short years that you can point to and say, ‘This is worth the time and effort.’ Now, as far as the time that I’ve spent on it and return on investment, I’m sure it’s awful up to this point, but again, there’s so many intangibles that you can’t really add up on a piece of paper that I definitely feel it’s worth continuing––and I have no plans to slow down with it.”

It’s a good time to be a professional publisher. This industry segment continues to post above-average sales growth, while many of its publishers are at the forefront of the digital revolution that has been transforming the way we publish and read books.

According to the Book Industry Study Group’s “Book Industry Trends 2007” report, sales of professional books increased by 3.2 percent in 2006 over the previous year, from $8.6 billion to $8.9 billion. This increase ranked professional publishing as the third-largest growth segment in dollar sales, behind only religious books (5.6-percent growth) and adult trade (3.9-percent growth).

A ‘Glutted’ Market

While the professional publishing market is reporting sales increases, it still struggles with many of the same issues that have been affecting most book publishers. Several professional publishers said they are facing the challenge of finding fresh, new titles that will stand out in a market that some view as saturated. “Something to understand about the book publishing marketplace is that it’s totally glutted. The number of new books being published in the United States has exploded,” says Johanna Vondeling, editorial director for San Francisco-based Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc. “It’s really hard to put out a book that’s just good content and expect it to sell.”

Laura Simonds, director of marketing and sales for Davies-Black Publishing––a division of CCP Inc., located in Mountain View, Calif.––views finding fresh content as her company’s No. 1 challenge. “Have we seen a new book proposal that’s, ‘Oh my God, we haven’t seen this before’? No, we haven’t,” she says. “… That’s what we’re looking for, and it’s getting tougher to find those kinds of exciting books.”

“[Professional publishing] is a very tough category … and we have been extremely critical about the proposals that we get and what we decide to publish,” Simonds continues.

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