Cader Offers Book World Free Lunch Daily

In the course of his publishing career, Michael Cader has done a lot of business over countless lunches. Since the spring of 2000, he's been making his own "Lunch," PublishersLunch, an aggregation of book-related news and links along with Cader's informed, but jocular, commentary. The comprehensive e-mail goes out each weekday morning free to over 24,000 editors, publishers, librarians, writers, movie scouts, booksellers, and other bona fide participants in the book business. PublishersLunch offers not only a palatable digest of the wheelings and dealings of publishing, but, harking back to the early days of book publishing and bookselling, it creates a convivial cyber-table around which colleagues can discuss offers, authors, and the latest industry chatter.

Cader has long trafficked in books and information. Beginning at Workman Press in the mid-1980s, where he acquired and developed the two million-seller, The Book of Questions, he went on to found Cader Books in 1988, a highly successful book packaging company. Packagers begin with raw ideas for a book and end with a finished manuscript that is then sold to a publisher who adds its logo and has it printed. According to Cader, over the years, Cader Books has packaged a few hundred books, calendars, and related print merchandise. Sample Cader titles include Mad About Martha (a Martha Stewart parody), Bad as I Wanna Dress: The Unauthorized Dennis Rodman Paper Doll Book, and Meditations for Cats Who Do Too Much, which are described by the company as "unusual, high-profile, nonfiction works."

Cader told BTW that he "accidently began PublishersLunch three-and-a-half-years ago and added the [fee-based], PublishersMarketplace, www.publishersmarketplace.com/, about two years ago.

"It began as a natural evolution of my business as a packager -- I did a lot of popular reference books. There was a period in time when you could suddenly get real information on the Internet -- so -- I was spending a lot more time on the Internet. It was that same moment in time when, if you were a book packager, you wondered if you might wake up tomorrow and be a content producer."

While licensing material to dot.com startups in the early heady days, for "10 to 20 times what anyone should pay for a license," Cader recognized the import of the Internet. "I felt I should be spending more time figuring out what this is all about," Cader explained. "I was naturally spending much time on the Internet and I found there was a lot of valuable information there everyday about the business I'd been in for 15 years and loved. And I also wanted to learn more about electronic publishing, what it all meant, and what all the formats were. I was thinking about different ways to distribute and sell books, and to interact with customers. As I talked to colleagues, [I realized that] much of the information I found [on the Internet] they didn't know about, didn't understand, or didn't know how to get at."

Surprised that no vehicle existed to disseminate this kind of information, Cader decided to teach himself the mechanics of Web production and began producing a Web page. "So I noodled with that for a little while. I told maybe 25 friends in the business, 'I don't really know what this is but maybe it'll be interesting -- check it out'. I learned two important things: a) The feedback was very positive; and, b) No one went to check it everyday. They'd come back in a month and say, 'Oh, you've updated it already.' As interest began to spread, Cader elected to send the daily message out via e–mail.

Those initial 25 people were the only ones who ever received PublishersLunch at Cader's behest. "Everyone else gets it because they signed up for it. Now every single person who gets Lunch gets it because somebody other than I told them about it. I have not spent a single dollar on marketing -- I haven't promoted it at conventions. I haven't flogged it at seminars. It's all about people telling each other about it and telling me that I have to keep doing it because they want to keep getting it."

Overnight, Cader recalls, people began finding out about Lunch and began requesting it. He preferred the feedback loop and electronic relationships he could establish with an e-mail publication, and "more or less it took off from there." His epiphany occurred about six months into the project when he realized, "it wasn't just about a newsletter, it was an opportunity to create an electronic meeting point within a business that always thought of itself as very friendly and localized, one in which everybody knew each other. In fact, it [publishing] was becoming increasingly diffuse -- everybody knew a few people that they had known forever, but suddenly there were people all over the place that you wanted to know. That sent me chasing the much larger vision of having the newsletter be the central meeting point and then figuring out all the other things you could do to help people find each other. After that, they could go off and exchange more information and do business together or take the next steps on their own. Lunch provides the frame and a reference point with some interesting information everyday."

Cader points to the research ascertaining Lunch's extremely high "open rate," the industry term for how many times a particular e-mail is opened. "We found that our open rate was in excess of 100 percent, meaning that people continue to forward it, recirculate it, and the readership continues to exceed the number of e-mails that we send out. In today's world of e-mail clutter, marketers are thrilled with an open rate of anything over 50 percent."

PublishersLunch subscribers attribute its popularity to the reliability of the information, almost all of which is gathered by Cader himself and presented with sources; the 'insider' feel of the content; Cader's own charismatic style; and the announcements of recent book and movie deals with dollar figures. Cader has developed a vocabulary of deals indicating ranges rather than specific numbers.

In Lunchspeak a "nice deal" is $1 to $100,000, a "good deal" is $101,000 to $250,000, a "significant deal" is $251,000 to $500,000, and a "major deal" is $501,000 and up.

Has the publication of these terms posed problems for Cader or readers?

"Lying and exaggeration gets found out pretty quickly, and there is nothing like putting something up in front of everyone's noses to make things transparent and trigger 'community policing' -- in this case making sure everyone knows about it and sees it," Cader said. "You know if there is something wrong, and, to my knowledge, it happens very rarely. There are lots of instances in which the popular press will report dollar figures [for book and movie deals] that often prove to be grossly inaccurate. I've had unnamed reporters for dailies run figures in their papers and then e-mail me later for the exact dollar figure. Part of the fairly innocent ethos I started with casually three years ago has sort of become institutionalized. The exact dollar figure doesn't matter -- it's more about putting the deal in a certain range that makes any difference at the end of the day.... Transparency is a force unto itself. To me that is mostly what I'm providing, and people do different things with it. Some people find it encouraging, some people find it depressing. Lots of people find it useful. In my case, I find it neutral but powerful. And it is what everyone does with the information when it kind of takes on a life of its own.

The first-person quality of PublishersLunch is often mentioned as one of its strengths. Cader noted, "Early on, I kind of thought [the informality] would go away, but people liked it and encouraged me to keep it. It helped us to establish electronic relationships with each other -- made them relate to the information in an interesting way. Readers have encouraged me to speak my mind. At the same time, I try not to type anything that I wouldn't express face-to-face to friends and colleagues, and I rarely say anything that I'm not pretty sure other colleagues are already thinking. I also don't make remarks simply for the sake of attracting attention or being flip; I try to ensure that my opinions and tone are considered."

Cader acknowledges that as his circulation has grown dramatically, he may have softened his tone a bit over time: "Let's put it this way: there are things you can say to a small group of people that you wouldn't shout out in front of a crowd. I used to be in a small room, and now I've got a crowd."

The crowd, referring to readers from every segment of the publishing business, including booksellers, "regularly respond with passion and enthusiasm," Cader noted. "I would say its impact is at least as great as that of any other stream of information available to people in the business, if not greater, since we supply greater amounts of information. We provide original information and perspective about what's happening in the business, plus we efficiently cover and reflect what the mainstream press across the country is saying about books and the business. Beyond that, people consistently say it's fun and interesting to read even when the stories aren't directly relevant to them. For independent booksellers in particular, I'd say Lunch embodies the same kind of passionate, spirited, and thoughtful independence that is an essential characteristic of your membership."

Cader's passion for books is apparent when he describes his role in "shining a light on an overlooked book." He recalled a number of Book Sense 76 titles highlighted in PublishersLunch that had not found paperback publishers but were successfully sold through "the combination of our attentive readership, Carl's [Lennertz, formerly of Book Sense] well-regarded taste, and the proof of booksellers' instincts."

One such book was Steven Sherill's The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break. After its mention in PublishersLunch, it was resold and the paperback edition (Picador) was reviewed, for the first time, in the New York Times Sunday Book Review. The foreign rights were also sold and about six months later Sherill made a "pretty sizable deal with Random House… There are a bunch of instances like that in which the small trigger created all kinds of ripples," Cader said.

Currently Cader produces PublishersLunch, PublishersMarketplace, and writes five columns a week for the New York Sun, which he describes as "kind of a consumer's Lunch." Add an active family life to that full plate and the burning question is, Is he still able to "do lunch" with friends and colleagues?

Cader assured BTW, "Definitely! Probably even more so. One of the best things about Lunch is the way it's expanded that circle of friends and associates to include many marvelous people in the business." --Nomi Schwartz

[To subscribe to PublishersLunch, go to www.caderbooks.com/.]