YouSaid · the spoken record

Molly Barton

lines on the record: 79
first: 2019-01-07
most recent: 2019-01-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, so he came to the idea from the consumer experience. You know, he had graduated from Duke Law School and was working in the Obama administration and the Department of Justice on gun control policy. So he was like, God, this is a huge job. I don't have any time But somehow was managing to slip in a comic book or an episode of TV and kept thinking to himself, if someone would just deliver book content to me differently, it wouldn't feel like such a psychological lift. To start And so that made a lot of sense to him. He spent part of his childhood in Asia and serialized reading on phones as the dominant form of reading there and has been for 10 or 12 years. China literature is the dominant player in the space, but there are five or six other companies behind them.”
2019-01-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Serial Box CEO Molly Barton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he said, Molly, I've met this guy, Julian. He's working on serialized content, and you're the only other person that I know. So I figured you should meet him. I don't even know if he's smart. And so we got on the phone and he said to me, we had this really awkward call because we were competing. And so within a couple minutes, though, he dropped all pretense and said, you know, really my ambition is to be HBO for reading. And I started laughing. And he was like, well, I don't think it's that bad an idea. I was like, no, no, no. I literally have that phrase written in my deck that I've been sharing with investors. Wow.”
2019-01-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Serial Box CEO Molly Barton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then there's the It was a delight. Remember, so I had seen a lot of the mistakes. You know how to drive, try to drive innovation within the industry. So I felt there was a good opening because I had had the background, I had a mix of editorial experience, global experience, you know, digital and audio business experience. And I love working on product development. My team at Penguin had built a lot of apps in collaboration with other media companies. So I love being in a situation where I'm switching tasks all day. And so startup environment is great to me. So I left About four years ago. And interestingly, my business partner I didn't know at the time, he was working on the same concept. We were introduced by Evan Ratliff, who started the Atavis. Sure.”
2019-01-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Serial Box CEO Molly Barton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Within a big organization really made me feel confident there was something there. And I had sort of been bitten by the bug entrepreneurial bug. I sat on the board of three startups that Pearson and Penguin had invested in, which was what I had been all consumer-facing book retail platform. So one in New York called Bookish, which was the book industry's attempt at Hulu, one in Australia and Melbourne called Book World, and then one in London called eBooks by Sainsbury's. So I really sort of got in there with those teams because they were very small and up against a huge task that was much too ambitious. for what's possible for a startup. It's what happens when big companies start.”
2019-01-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Serial Box CEO Molly Barton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back with Molly Barton, the CEO of Cereal Box. How do you describe it? So you were doing this and seeing signs that people like this and you were actually doing something that had been done too in a different format, but you're just technologizing it, whatever the word it is. So what made you move to doing this? What was the impetus that got you there?”
2019-01-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Serial Box CEO Molly Barton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the cost of audio production was coming down, so the breadth of catalog was much richer. And so I was seeing that audiobook listeners were getting younger and younger and bigger and bigger audience, over 30% growth in audiobooks last year. You know, there's so much heat around podcasts and obviously it's a huge industry, but audiobooks is a paid industry that's been around for a long time. So that said to me, okay. We've got this growth in audiobooks, clear success in breaking books into pieces, and an environment where everyone feels overwhelmed. So let's take these obvious patterns and evolve the delivery of book content.”
2019-01-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Serial Box CEO Molly Barton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It worked really well. And so I thought okay, there's really an opportunity here. At the same time, I was seeing a lot of the data around the growth of audiobooks. Which happens lightly behind the growth of ebooks, but is perhaps a little bit more organic in its growth. Ebooks were driven so aggressively by device sales. And audiobooks just started to creep up and creep up. You know, so many people have a smartphone, so they didn't need a separate device.”
2019-01-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Serial Box CEO Molly Barton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of ideas. It did in a lot of ways. Actually, Tinder was born from a porn idea. Anyway, they are very creative people, let me just say, and they have got a lot of competition, so they know how to be creative. So taking it away back from porn, so you saw this and it worked really well. So what did that say to you?”
2019-01-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Serial Box CEO Molly Barton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whatever amount the paper was at that point. So there's this long history of sort of a tight relationship between weeklies, magazines, newspapers, and books, quote unquote. But it somehow fallen away. So I decided to run some experiments and ask authors to let us release. Pieces of their books out in conventional distribution through Amazon, Apple, Google. And four and five Xed'd the sales just through breaking people got a taste. You got a taste”
2019-01-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Serial Box CEO Molly Barton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In newspapers and weekly magazines And so I actually learned recently that everyone talks about Charles Dickens as the kind of grandfather of serialization, which is true, but the same year that he wrote the Pickwick Papers, which was his first serial. In France, a newspaper owner was looking to take his weekly newspaper and make it a daily paper. And he was trying to come up with a reason why people would buy the paper so much more often. And so he asked the writer, and I will butcher this pronunciation, but Honore de Balsek to write a serial so that each day a new installment was there in the paper and people had a reason to go and spend there.”
2019-01-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Serial Box CEO Molly Barton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quality suffers dramatically. So I was looking instead actually at what the music industry was doing with unbundling the album. And taking each piece of content and using it as a marketing tent pole in a really organic way. Like give yourself a real reason to go back out to the fan base. Right.”
2019-01-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Serial Box CEO Molly Barton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over and over, it's eight o'clock. So the traditional publishing response to that was to ask the most successful authors to write faster. So you could publish three books a year instead of one. Was like, well, that's a lot of work, and most authors can't keep up with that schedule. And then the quality.”
2019-01-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Serial Box CEO Molly Barton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of the work was around like how can we have more contact with the fans than waiting for two years from now when the next book is available. And the reason for that was I sat in 22 financial meetings a month looking at what drove success. And the clearest way to Improve your chances of success is to come back on a regular cycle with a similar book to what you released before.”
2019-01-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Serial Box CEO Molly Barton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something great to read. Yeah. So I was really inspired by the customer they are. Exactly. Yeah. And so I was inspired by that. I started playing around with short format and asking authors to write sort of prequels to their big upcoming novels so we could release a digital short”
2019-01-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Serial Box CEO Molly Barton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, Homer. Who would want a paperback and paper, you know, everything published in paperback is such poor quality? Sure, you can have these rights. And so he created the paperback format and he also really messed around with distribution. He built vending machines on railway platforms to catch people on their commute and make sure that they had”
2019-01-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Serial Box CEO Molly Barton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so it was a $300 million global business. And one of the ways that we were expanding it was through geographic expansion. I opened trade in 15 markets. But I was still really wrestling with format. And I was inspired by the history of Penguin. Penguin's a really interesting company started in the 30s in London by a guy called Alan Lane who felt that Felt really passionate about the idea that everyone should be able to buy a great book for less than the price of a pack of cigarettes. And he also was really interested in classics. Yeah. He was really interested. So he went around town and bought paperback rights to all these great books. And the publishers were like, oh, paperbacks.”
2019-01-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Serial Box CEO Molly Barton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so as time went on, I began to really focus on audio and ebook growth globally. I shifted away from working for the US company to reporting to the global CEO That was John Makinson who reported to Marjorie.”
2019-01-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Serial Box CEO Molly Barton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really tried to engage with self publishing. I actually applied for a million and a half in innovation funding from Pearson, the parent company, and started a platform called Book Country, which was essentially a highly professionalized version of WattPad where anyone could. So anyone could post their work in progress if they gave feedback to somebody else who already had their work on the platform. So it was basically a huge online writers workshop focused on science fiction, fantasy, mystery, crime, and thriller because those are the categories of writers who are really open to fan feedback. And so, from Penguin's perspective, the idea was we'll get a lot of data about what's Do a better job than the music industry had done, proving what their worth. Yeah.”
2019-01-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Serial Box CEO Molly Barton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those things, but also sort of how self important the industry was. And one of the basic problems is if you just look at the way that the editorial teams are staffed, those are the gatekeepers supposed to be sifting through everything that's out there and finding the best stuff. But if you make the salaries of those jobs so low that only children of privileged families can afford to take those jobs by your very nature of the structure of the industry really narrowing who you can address as an audience. So I really wanted to open things up. So around those years, I was working on”
2019-01-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Serial Box CEO Molly Barton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, yeah. No, I mean, a truly great editor or publisher does have a really special skill, which is Dialing deep into an individual's style and contribution and kind of honing that and shaping it and helping put context around it and help people understand why this is so important right now and how it relates to everything that came before and how it's going to shape what happens next year. And that's really important work. Yeah. It is a certain kind of wisdom and skill. But you're right. I mean, the sort of conglomeration and corporatization of publishing means that A lot of the acquisitions editors have very little time to actually do developmental editing and they're expected to attract works that are essentially done. And then it's a lot of the onus is on the writer to drive audience. And then the publisher gets 85%.”
2019-01-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Serial Box CEO Molly Barton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The editing of my book. It was really interesting. My second book, not the first one, the first one was I had John Carp doing it. He was great. He's sort of the older times. And so, and I had a great editor too. I just think she was hamstrung too. But like the speed and everything. And so I don't blame. the online the line editors essentially who are really trying really hard to shape things but it was it was a different experience completely and so i just think why would you write a book anymore like what would”
2019-01-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Serial Box CEO Molly Barton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I had a sense that things were going to go awry. And I talked about that a lot in the first book. By the second book, I sort of sat in a room. I remember sitting in a room. It was a different editor and saying, if I had to kill everyone here except for two people, like everyone involved in this book, the only people who would be left would be me and Jeff Bezos, as far as I could tell. Like I could hire an editor, I could hire a distributor. He would be the distributor. I could hire a copy editor, publicist and stuff like that. But y'all aren't, where is your value? You know what I mean? Because they didn't do a lot of editing anymore. There wasn't a lot of guidance, which is what you'd, and I remember thinking a thousand word Wall Street Journal article got more attention than my...”
2019-01-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Serial Box CEO Molly Barton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talk about this because there's a reason I don't write books anymore. I literally was sitting in a room, I think, maybe Random House, one of the random house divisions were my book. And the first experience was I was writing about the coming internet and what it was going to, how it was going to impact all media.”
2019-01-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Serial Box CEO Molly Barton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so there was a lot of work required to digitize all the files, to get contracts agreed to make sure that we had the rights to distribute digitally. And so I was sort of knee-deep in that, building the team and building the capacity to support this new business line and was really excited because I thought, oh, it's going to open up a whole new area of audience that maybe we're not reaching. And what we found was exactly the opposite. Same books that were selling on physical in the New York Times bestseller list were also selling an e-book. And so over time, I really began to focus on how we can grow the audience. I was really frustrated by a lot of the typical ways of operating in traditional publishing.”
2019-01-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Serial Box CEO Molly Barton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Amazon had taken hold in terms of delivery of physical books. But that was right around the time when the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle came out. So ebooks sort of became a real thing. And after earlier attempts with rocket books about 10 years before that.”
2019-01-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Serial Box CEO Molly Barton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So things had already gone far, like in terms of people, and Amazon obviously had made its impact on things in the mid-90s to the mid-2000s with selling a books and Google the same thing. With whatever they were doing there with their books.”
2019-01-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Serial Box CEO Molly Barton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had a great editorial job at Viking, and I worked with writers like Terry McMillan, who wrote How Stella got her groove back. And I also edited a book by Nick Hornby, who wrote about a boy in high fidelity. So I thought that's what I was going to do, but I ended up working for the president of the company. And so I ended up having this kind of ringside seat to digital transformation within publishing.”
2019-01-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Serial Box CEO Molly Barton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. I came to cereal box from traditional publishing, actually. I started as an editor at Penguin and I worked on your goal.”
2019-01-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Serial Box CEO Molly Barton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thanks for coming in. So, I want to talk, I'm really interested in this area and stuff. There's been a lot going on in it and different things have been tried and the sort of how we read and consume, I guess, books in a lot of ways has changed. So talk a little bit about how you got to this first. How did you create serial box? And start early. Like, how did you move to something like this?”
2019-01-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Serial Box CEO Molly Barton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT