Brian Murray: When You Launch 12 Products a Day

HarperCollins is the third largest English language publisher. So we have operations in the U.S. canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, India, we have a small office in China. So we cover all of those English language markets. And we have teams, both creative teams, publishers, as well as sales, marketing and distribution in all those markets. So what's interesting, in the old days, our business was very much country by country based. And now with digital, it's really become language based. So for those in the English language, we publish 3,000 new books per year. That's first editions. That's not a paperback of a second book, or I'm not counting an ebook separate from a print book. It's 3,000 new product launches a year, which is about 12 new product launches a day. It's unbelievable, the scale. And so we have an unbelievable process that brings all of these books to market. And in the most efficient way, we do it now in print as well as in digital. And we have teams of people that are trying to position our author's books in the best possible light, whether it's working through B2B channels and working with the buyers of bricks and mortar bookstores and now going directly to social media sites, whether it's Facebook and Twitter. So a tremendous amount of volume goes through. And what we do is a lot of our values. We own the copyright in the books. And books will sell, good books will sell for decades. And so we build up this catalog. We have about 50,000. Our catalog print books is about 50,000 unique works in the English language. And then now our ebook catalog is getting up to around 40,000 copies. So we are in intellectual property business and we try to sell best sellers, but we also try to educate and inform. We have children's books, we try to have a book for everybody. And we publish very widely fiction, nonfiction, poetry, cookbooks, bestsellers and literary books. So we never know where the big book is going to come from next year. We have to reinvent the revenues every year. The majority of our revenues come from the new books. And if you think about a consumer packaged goods company where they have selling soap or cereal, that product doesn't change at all. And we do 12 new products a day. So there's not a lot of scientific experiment because every product is different, it's much more organic. A lot of gut feel and a lot of collective wisdom that comes from the group of creative professionals that work on those books. So we're the third largest. And I mean, I've lost track of the number of books published per year because now we have self publishing we have, you know, there's probably millions of books published a year. I once there was a stat a couple years ago that said 20 million Americans write a novel every year. So it's a shocking number of people that want to write a book. And I'm sure many of you know people or have written a book at one point in time. So. But we're not in that self publishing space right now. We are kind of curating and picking the books that we think we can make a difference with.

So I'm just curious, how many books does a book have to sell for you to think of it as successful? I mean, just because. To get some sense of scale.

Yeah, that's a really hard question to answer. And there are so many ways to define success. When we do our business planning, a book is successful when it sells more than we expected it to sell. That could be 10,000 copies. But if we bought a book and we thought that book was going to sell a million and it sells 100,000, it's unsuccessful. So it really has to do with our expectations when we take on a project and we take on projects of all different sizes.