Less than three years after switching distributors, reorganizing Agate into three separate niche imprints and launching a digital textbook production service (PW, Dec. 12, 2006), Agate Publishing continues to aggressively expand its offerings.
“Henceforth, all frontlist titles will be released simultaneously as e-books,” Doug Seibold, who launched Agate in Evanston, Ill., in 2003, told PW. The six-year-old company initially rolled out 40 of its frontlist and select bestselling backlist titles in e-book formats in February and, this spring, four new print books will be released simultaneously as e-books.
The e-books, priced between $4.99 and $9.99—a lower price than the hard copies—can be downloaded as Adobe PDF files. They, as well as the approximately 125 Agate titles currently in print, are available for sale to the trade through its distributor, PGW, and directly to consumers through the company's Web site, www.agatepublishing.com.
Making Agate e-books widely available in the marketplace has been a collaborative effort, engineered primarily by the company's Paris-based Web developer, Giant Chair, and in partnership with PGW. Through its Constellation e-book sales program, PGW supplies files to and manages the sales relationship with Kindle and with Google Search, while Agate supplies files to and manages the sales relationship with OverDrive, Ebooks.com, Books 24×7 and Ecobrain.
Partnership doesn't end with PGW: Agate is also collaborating with Amazon.com in what Seibold calls “coopetition,” or “partnering with your competitors in the new digital environment.” Amazon's payment services program enables Agate's Web site sales.
Seibold said that the company has been strategizing for the past two years on how best to both produce, price and sell e-books so as to increase net margins, while at the same time building up readership and partnering with authors. “Adobe PDFs are the simplest [format] for us to produce, and the best way for us to enter this market in an efficient way,” he explained.
The project began with creating a digital archive containing the production files for the Bolden imprint list of African-American—oriented titles, the b2bimprint list of business-information titles and the press's newest imprint, the Surrey list of food and lifestyle titles. “We'd just purchased Surrey Books six months before. We had to do a lot of scrambling to collect all of their varied and sundry backlist production files,” Seibold recalled, describing how the files all had to be properly formatted. Producing e-book—ready files for all forthcoming releases is now a routine part of Agate's regular book production process.
“It's all about trying to figure out how to take advantage of being smaller, having lower overhead and being more flexible,” Seibold said. “How can we do things that are harder and costlier for a larger company to do?”
Though some might consider it risky to price e-books at a significantly lower price than print books and making both available to consumers at the same time, Seibold is confident this move will not undermine sales of Agate hard copies. He is adamant that e-books provide a complementary format to print, similar to that of audiobooks. While the majority of Agate's customers, Seibold believes, prefer hard copies, there are those who prefer e-books.
“The reasoning behind our pricing is to increase gross sales,” he explained, adding that Agate's development of its ProBooks customized digital textbook initiative informed the company's thinking on how to best add e-books to its publishing program.
“It's all about building readership,” Seibold said. “We're serving our readers while getting more readers.”
While it's too soon to determine whether Agate's effort to increase gross sales through e-books is paying off, Seibold reports that 2008's gross sales are on par with 2007, and that 2009 is “so far showing promise of improving on 2008—despite the economy.” In March, the online vending initiative's first full month of operation, Agate sold 30 e-books and hard copies, with, Seibold said, “zero publicity, just people finding us.”
Although declining to disclose specifics, Seibold is already contemplating taking advantage of yet more opportunities to further diversify his growing company, including the potential acquisition of—or partnership with—one of several organizations under consideration. “They're all really different,” he said. “They aren't even necessarily conventional publishing companies.
“We're just looking at this as an opportunity to do lots of different things,” Seibold added. “We're trying to explore ways in which consumers want lots of different things and how we can give it to them.”
