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Note: It’s been a while since anyone at Manning has posted in our blog space – we’ve all just been too busy trying to stay efficient :-) But there’s a lot going on at Manning and in the IT book industry as a whole, so Marjan Bace, Mike Stephens and myself will be blogging a lot more frequently in the weeks and months to come in order to explore and question all that’s happening, beginning with my post below regarding a friendly clash of views among a couple of our more successful competitors:

In a recent post about the state of the IT book market, Tim O’Reilly discussed the relative "efficiency," or otherwise, of various computer book publishers based on statistics derived from BookScan reports, which tracks sales from book retailers nationwide. One of the publishers he concluded was less efficient than others was Apress. Gary Cornell, the publisher of Apress, who feels Tim’s conclusions were misguided due to a lack of formal training in statistical analysis, posted his own provocative view of the market here, in which he claims, among other things, a superior ability to analyze the state of the market due to the PhD in Mathematics he holds.

I’m in charge of Manning’s sales & marketing, and like a lot of folks in publishing I also make it a habit to regularly check BookScan numbers to review how sales are going for us in the retail channel. I’ve only a B.A. in Modern Chinese History in my bag, and I likely skipped that statistics class Gary wished for me in favor of refining my ultimate Frisbee skills, but I can’t agree a PhD is required to harvest a few truths out of BookScan. Just a little business sense will do. In fact, some trends pop out quite easily. For example, one trend I found is that Manning has lately been more efficient than both O’Reilly and Apress, but more on that below.

What I found even more intriguing in Gary’s post was his claim regarding Apress’s remarkable ability to publish books so much more cost effectively than all of their competitors. This, according to Gary, enables Apress to affordably indulge those small communities of Alpha Geeks with a vast selection of niche titles, disregarding as meaningless the apparent operational inefficiencies Tim shined a light on.

Like many others, I had naturally assumed that Apress’s rapidly increasing list of titles was mainly a result of the generous support they receive from their corporate owner, Springer, just as the rapid rebound of the Wrox imprint is fueled by Wiley dollars – in other words, the Sugar Daddy affect.

But perhaps I haven’t been giving Apress enough credit? Perhaps they know something the rest of us don’t regarding how to save on development, editorial, production and print costs? At Manning, as with all small, independent publishers, working economically is an unavoidable mantra we must all repeat and shuffle to daily if we want to keep our gas tanks full and our blueteeth charged. Hearing that one of our competitors has broken through to another level of cost effectiveness naturally excites our interest, not unlike how I used to be amazed at how Barry Bonds could suddenly hit 70 home runs at the age of 37. What kind of magic is this?

But let’s get back to numbers and BookScan. I like to play with excel spreadsheets and charts too, and though I may lack both Tim’s quick intuition and Gary’s mastery of number theory, I can make it work. The simple numbers indicate Manning’s relative efficiency, at least as I see it, and since boasting, elegantly or otherwise, about one’s self-perceived strengths seems to ultimately be the point of this “objective statistical analysis” game that Tim and Gary are playing, then, hey, can’t I play too?

So here’s what I saw recently on BookScan. I looked at two reports – one was the final report for 2005, showing total sales for the entire year by title. The other report was the most recent one, Week 17 of 2006. In both reports, I counted how many titles BookScan lists by publisher. (For the purposes of this comparison, I only include Manning and 4 immediate competitors below). Then I added how many copies were sold – for all of 2005 in the first report, and year-to-date totals for the second. I divide that by the number of titles listed for each respective publisher, and I got average sales per title, which Tim calls "efficiency." (Regarding the column “Number of titles”, these are titles that have sold at least 10 copies during the week being analyzed. Also, this column includes both new and backlist titles – published this year or any year, as long as they sold at least 10 copies that week.)

Here’s how it looks:

2005 Bookscan Final Report

2006 Bookscan YTD Report (after 17 weeks)

What does this data imply? According to this report, in 2005, Pragmatic, O’Reilly and Manning were significantly more efficient than Wrox and Apress. Manning also had about 1/5 the number of books listed as that from Apress, yet we sold over 1/3 as many overall copies. (Note that all of Manning's 2005 new titles are included in BookScan's list but not all of Apress's are. If we had the data to include everything APress published their 2005 efficiency would be substantially lower.) In 2006, Pragmatic is on top so far, with Manning a close second. O’Reilly appears to be struggling a bit compared to 2005.

Gary argues that simplistic breakdowns like the table above are missing the point, and apparently intends to statistically prove that in upcoming posts. I look forward to that, but after reviewing the numbers, and pending deeper statistical enlightenment from Gary, I’m currently willing to believe Tim may be on to something, and that Manning is indeed efficient. Maybe if we can improve further, we can call ourselves Efficiency in Action? Not a bad thing to be, really.

But what else does my elementary table slice suggest? Wrox would seem to be growing rapidly, and is nearly even with Apress in terms of copies sold in 2006, despite having 14 fewer titles on the list. What’s that mean? Despite claims by some on Gary’s blog that Wrox will never again be the Wrox of old, sales are clearly happening nonetheless. Somebody is buying Wrox titles. Could this be a looming battle of the Sugar Daddies?

Another obvious revelation: Pragmatic is showing signs of becoming a player. Mainly on the strength of 2 bestsellers, they are at the top of both efficiency tables . Pretty impressive, and pretty darn efficient too (dammit!) Will they be but a shooting star? Will they inevitably level off due to the law of averages, as Tim thought most likely in his post, or will they be able to maintain their rapid rise? We won’t know that for a couple of years probably, but good show so far.

So we’re back to Apress, and what enables them to publish so many seemingly non-performing titles? Gary, what’s the truth here? We Frisbee throwing history majors really want to know. What’s the real secret to your new-style efficiency? Until convinced otherwise, I can’t help but give corporate largess a central nod, however mysteriously motivated, but perhaps I’m missing something? In any case, I hope it isn’t steroids.