Klopotek's Information ViewPoint

Two weeks ago we saw Klopotek’s Information ViewPoint product and were amazed. Its modern, easy to use and customizable for the user. In our view, its a clear competitive advantage vs. products offered by other vendors.

What is Information Viewpoint? In a nutshell it’s a web based customizable view of information that users want to see. Users select the fields that they want to see and position them by dragging them on the screen. It has a modern clean look, similar to that of Microsoft Outlook.

An example of a report created using ViewPoint is a Title Revenue Analysis. It shows sales by year with a drill down to sales by month and sales by Order type. You can access it online via the web and control access by user or user group.

Information Viewpoint integrate with most Klopotek modules including; Product Planning and Production, Contracts Rights & Royalties, Book Sales & Distribution, Journal Sales & Distribution, Customer Care Management and Advertising Sales and Management.

For screen shots have a look at the ViewPoint brochure.

A lot of companies focus on adding new features, but they overlook the need to make the information easily accessible to the end-user. From our point of view Klopotek’s management has focused their R&D on information accessibility. We saw this first with Production Cockpit, then Authors Online, Business Objects Universe for Production and now ViewPoint. Its a focus that is really setting their solution apart from the competition.

Quality Solutions Now Firebrand Technologies

Its been a long time coming, but Quality Solutions is now FireBrand Technologies.

New technology, new software, web based applications, and an updated website for the 21st century.

The first release, Title Management 7.0 will allow a publisher to link together information from all the different aspects (texts, chapters, videos, etc.) of a title or titles to one property.

An article in the the April 21st issue of Publishers Weekly reports that purpose is to help the publisher manage all of their digital workflows.

The new website is: http://www.firebrandtech.com

Acumen Webinar

Today we had the opportunity to view an Acumen webinar of their new features.

Acumen's webinar was different from that of knkPublishing in that they used a fictional business to demonstrate their new functionality.

Thus use of an imaginary business case really made the webinar come alive for attendees and lead to a lively question and answer session at the end of the demo.

knkPublishing Webinar

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to view the knkPublishing webinar for book publishers.

It was a good introduction to the software but it could have been much better as there was little exchange between the presenters and the webinar viewers.

From my perspective;

1. I would have liked to seen current knkPublishing users commenting on how the knkPublishing software has helped their business. There are some really large publishers using knkPublishing, and their participation would have brought a level of shock and awe to the webinar for they have some pretty dramatic stories to tell.

2. There was too much emphasis on the accounting functionality of the core Microsoft Dynamics NAV product, and not enough on each of the publishing specific modules. Sure its great that you can instantly save reports to word or excel or reformat reports, but it would have been more informative if they walked you through a case of a publisher actually using the software to manage the production schedule for a title instead of just showing your screen after screen with a multitude of fields.

Prices are Negotiable

For most vendors, prices are negotiable. Show them that a competitor is offering a lower price and "some" vendors will adjust their prices if it is for a "comparable" system.

How large can these adjustments be?

In the past we have seen vendors adjustment their prices by 10% to 33%.

Which firms are most likely to offer the largest price adjustments? Its new vendors that are entering the market and need references to obtain future sales or vendors that are desperate for a sale.

eBooks 103

Once you are using POD to monetize your back list and are providing digital files to DARs (Digital Asset Resellers) its time to create new products from existing intellectual property, as that is where you will maximize income.

In this area publishers are using many strategies.,

1. Some such as Harlequin are selling eBooks by subscription. Readers get access to books before their published release.

2. O'Reilly is selling whole book PDFs along with short article based PDFs.

3. Random House is experimenting with the sale of individual chapters.

The key for success is to define digital products that will maximize revenue for your products. What works for one publisher may not work for another due to differences in content, the size of their back list and the number of new titles they produce each year.

eBooks 102

Following up on my last post where I suggested that publishers signup with DARs, digital asset resellers;

1. Each DAR specializes in a specific area of the market. NetLibrary does best with professional books accessed by university students. Ingenta excels at the marketing of journal articles. Sony eBook is great for works of fiction. So target your efforts at the DARs that excel at handling your type of book.

2. How much can you expect to earn? At the time this article is being written a small publisher with sales of about $5M in New York gets 3% of their sales from digital resellers.

3. To faciliate the tracking of digital sales one should assign a new ISBN to your digital products. Some authorities recommend a seperate ISBN for each digitsal format, but for most publishers a single new ISBN for all digital formats (Sony eBook, Mobipocket, Adobe Digital Book) of the entire book is sufficient for sales analysis purposes.