From Publishers Weekly:
In a year-end letter to staff, Open Road Integrated Media CEO Paul Slavin praised ORIM employees for a year of “consistent and continuous revenue growth,” marked by a 23% increase in fouth quarter revenue and a 14% increase in gross profits.
Praising staff for performing “tremendously,” Slavin wrote that Open Road Integrated Media, an e-publishing and digital marketing operation, “showed better-than-expected earnings across the board in revenues from e-books, print, distribution, subsidiary rights, and affiliate.” The company reported an average quarterly revenue growth of about 8.5% and “year-over-year gross profits increased by nearly 14%,” Slavin said.
ORIM specializes in publishing, marketing, and distributing a backlist of e-books by a distinctive group of acclaimed authors. Slavin highlighted “17 backlist e-books hitting the Wall Street Journal and New York Times bestseller lists.”
Pointing to ORIM’s founding principle—“you can bring great backlist to the forefront again”—Slavin said: “Our acquisitions selection process has been honed to a highly competitive edge, and thousands of backlist titles have undergone a complete transformation of descriptive copy, metadata, and cover design.”
. . . .
Early Bird Books, ORIM’s daily deals e-book newsletter, generated the biggest growth in revenue, increasing by 232% year-over-year, which was 40% over budget. ORIM newsletters reach more than 650,000 consumers, and the company has more than 3 million social media followers. Direct-to-consumer businesses, Slavin said, contributed 7.6% of total revenue in 2016, and those businesses are expected to continue to offer “significant” growth in 2017.
ORIM also operates a network of genre-focused websites, among them the Line Up (True Crime/Horror) and the Portalist (science fiction/fantasy), that attracted 22 million users in 2016.
Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly
I buy almost exclusively from Open Road now. Why?
Because they have the best freaking books out there!
The quality of their list is unsurpassed. If they are doing well, it’s because they are putting content over marketing.
They have slowly been bringing back into print every single author or series or individual book I ever wished was available as an ebook.
Their list prices are relatively high ($8-ish, I think) but they have a daily newsletter with 6-10 books at 1.99 or 2.99 (and one of their public domain books, normally 99 cents, available free — very well formatted and worth getting from them rather than Gutenberg). Eventually, you can get a whole series for a better price.
I used to get Book Bub, but I soon realized that the only books that were any good on the lists they sent me were from Open Road — and Open Road has MORE books on their list.
If Book Bub is carrying more Open Road books, it could well be because they know they sell, or they have vetted them for quality.
I bought books from Open Road Media (ORM) early and late, so I suppose I can speak to the quality of their production.
I bought Fehrenbach, This Kind of War, when ORM was new. It was missing pages of text, sections of text, and had repetitions of text all in the first third of the text. The last two thirds were fine. The poor quality discouraged me from buying from ORM again.
Last year I bought Lord, Day of Infamy, from ORM. I had no issues with their production this time.
It appears that ORM has overcome their teething problems.
Oh, and I should say that the few issues I’ve seen (such as typos and missing words) were identical to the print edition I had on my shelf for some books.
I suspect they were using OCR from the print edition, and perhaps weren’t as good at it at first. (Also, if the author was no longer alive, or too old to edit, they chose to depend on the print edition for accuracy.)
I can’t speak to the quality of the actual production of Open Road’s ebooks (not having bought any), and it doesn’t look to me like they spend a lot on cover design. However, just looking at their women sleuth mystery collection, I can say that although many of them don’t have many reviews (since there wasn’t the big push to get Amz reviews back then) I know that many of these authors sold quite well in the 1990 and early 2000s but have been out of print until recently. So it is quite possible that these books are being picked up by BookBub based on the reviews the mass paperback books got decades ago, which makes sense when you are talking about reissued back lists.
And I can imagine that quite a number of people who were fans of these authors are delighted to discover they can get discounted re-issued ebooks to see if the author’s work has held up over the decades and if they would like to buy more at the regular price.
And I don’t know that we can assume that Open Road is necessarily paying more than anyone else (i.e. paying extra)–since what I have noticed is that trad publishers are the ones who are willing to pay the very steep price for a 1.99 or a 2.99 promotion on BookBub (something that few of us indies can afford).
That may be all that is happening (not a special deal.) What is discouraging, of course, is that the more slots taken up at these higher prices, harder it is to get a 99 cent or a free promotion from BookBub.
But I doubt that BB will keep promoting these books if they discover their customers don’t like them. Like Amz, their whole business model seems devoted to making customer happy…because that is what has distinguished them from competitors.
Amazon’s paying customers are readers and the product being sold is the books.
Bookbub’s paying customers are the publishers and the product they sell is readers. Same business as Google and Facebook, same business as Groupon.
Quite a few of the Bookbub slots I see are taken by Open Road Media books. Dare I say a disproportionate amount, with books that have not many and overall low star reviews, bad covers and blurbs, etc. Open Road have obviously struck a deal with Bookbub and pay more to have their books featured. I guess that’s just business.
“Slavin said: “Our acquisitions selection process has been honed to a highly competitive edge, and thousands of backlist titles have undergone a complete transformation of descriptive copy, metadata, and cover design.” ”
I wonder how much they get for ‘honing those backlist titles’ and if they or the writers are springing for any ads.
“you can bring great backlist to the forefront again”
Or you can just post it on Amazon I’d guess.
Bookbub: “Our expert editorial team sifts through thousands of titles, selecting only the best to feature.” So “best” obviously includes companies willing to pay more to be featured. The featured SF book I saw last week with only one review wouldn’t have made it through this selection process if it existed.
Follow the money and add the missing words:
“… selecting only the best ‘paid’ to ‘be’ feature’d’ …”
And they can then tell the truth in their advertising.
Well they are telling the “truth”.
The books have been vetted by a real, honest to goodness publisher. They have been chosen! Because publishers only choose the very best work.
I’ve been doing some BB research and I agree, there are FAR too many of their books for it to be by merit-based selection only. Particularly since many of them are very poorly rated in comparison with others.
I asked a person associated with a different small press and was told they simply filled in a spreadsheet with all the slots they wanted each month. So…apparently, SP and TP don’t actually have to apply, just make their monthly orders.
Just another thought here — every one of the books in Open Road’s list are time tested classics.
I suspect indies, most of us coming from the realm of “unknowns” put an undue emphasis on ratings and reviews. They flog for them, and talk about them and encourage their readers to rate and review in general….
But reviews and ratings are only needed for unknowns. Known, and well established properties — classics — tend not to have that many reviews nor do they have as many good reviews.