BenBella Books recently announced the acquisition of Dr. Colin Campbell’s next book,  a follow-up to the bestselling The China Study, to be released in January 2013. On Thursday, several members of our staff headed to Ithaca, New York, headquarters of the T. Colin Campbell Foundation, to meet with Dr. Campbell, his wife, Karen, and his dedicated team.  Our trip to Ithaca solidified our goals for Dr. Campbell’s next book and we are very excited about our partnership with his foundation team members.  More developments to come!

Lindsay Nixon and the BenBella staff at Spiral Diner in Dallas.

Here at BenBella, opportunities for the entire staff to meet authors in person are rare. Last week we had the pleasure of catching up with two BenBella authors, both of whom made stopovers in Dallas during their busy travel schedules.

Lindsay S. Nixon, author of The Happy Herbivore Cookbook and Everyday Happy Herbivore, and her husband, Scott, presented the BenBella staff with insight into the growing Happy Herbivore brand and discussed goals for Lindsay’s upcoming book Happy Herbivore Abroad (to be released later this year). Lindsay’s first two HH books combined have sold more than 60,000 copies.

Melissa Giovagnoli Wilson, a leading expert in brand loyalty and network development, stopped by BenBella’s office to meet the staff and discuss details of her upcoming book Networking is Dead, co-authored with Larry Mohl. Melissa currently lives in Chicago — former home to several BenBella staff members.

Melissa Giovagnoli Wilson and BenBella staff enjoy lunch at Royal Thai in Dallas.

Mike’s posts always force me to consider whether we are experiencing the success of the turkey before thanksgiving, with Amazon as the executioner. We’ll see, but there are good reasons whey I don’t think so (some of which I’ll discuss in future posts). I do know that I don’t envy the executives running the big 6. The challenges they face are intimidating.

In his upcoming book But Now I See, to be released later this year, Holcomb discusses his battle with Keratoconus during the height of his career.

Congratulations to Steven and his partner, brakeman Steven Langton!

Publishers aside, everyone seems to agree that 25% of net isn’t fair. If the general intent of the established royalty rates is to split profits between author and publisher (an ancient but unsourced rule of thumb), then 25% of net doesn’t manage that, not without stepping up the royalty rate at higher levels of sales.

It’s certainly not true that publishing an ebook “costs nothing” as I frequently hear. Even at BenBella we have a person largely dedicated to working with epub developers and doing QA on various platforms. And we pay the epub developers and we pay Constellation to manage the vendor relationships. So there are significant fixed and marginal costs for us. And as ebooks eat into print, it does seem fair to include the other fixed costs that publishers pay to produce a quality book/ebook – editorial, design, copy-editing, proofing, indexing, cover design, etc.

But these are all fixed costs. A successful ebook that covers these fixed costs will soon be making a lot more money for the publisher than for the author. Is this fair? Publishers will argue that as hardcover sales drop, ebooks will need to contribute the same per book royalty in order to cover advances. But advances have been declining…and it does seem like publisher margins have been growing.

More to the point, perhaps, the growth of bestselling self-published ebooks is putting increasing pressure on publishers to raise their ebook royalties. Will it happen? At some point, probably. But most, if not all, of the big publishers have all agreed to “most favored nation clauses” in some of their contracts, which means that if they raise their ebook royalty for one author, they have to do it for all of the “most favored nation” contracts. So agreeing to raise the ebook royalty for one author could become very expensive, as it’s the most important authors who have the clout to get this provision in their contract. This creates an enormous disincentive for the big publishers to raise their rates – for anyone.

This makes BenBella’s third NYT bestseller in the last 18 months, but who’s counting.

To see what the excitement is all about, check out their interview on the Today show:

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