Changes going on around here
This post is personal, but it is also business. It’s about the shifts taking place in my personal corner of the publishing world, but which will soon enough touch the marketing of many books. For the...
View ArticleDigital marketing and coping with Amazon are the two big challenges for...
I am getting ready to attend my first Digital Book World as a “civilian” (having programmed and moderated the first seven), Thinking about DBW entails recognizing how different the book publishing...
View ArticleIntroducing a tool to help tackle the critical marketing challenge in digital...
Every publisher with more than a handful of published titles has a daily challenge to assign the marketing resources available to where they will do the most good. Efforts no longer have to be...
View ArticleAre the tech giants too big to be good partners for book publishing?
An online discussion forum that includes publishers and librarians and tech people usually sends me several emails a day. About 10 days ago, a conversation evolved about Google Book Search and the...
View ArticleThe written word is losing its power and will continue to
If there were a futures market in literacy, it would be dropping. It is a sad fact that the value of written words, in relation to spoken words and still and moving pictures, is sinking like a stone....
View ArticleThe dominance of Amazon needs to be addressed but it is far more attributable...
As things evolve in an era of rapid change, it is human nature to assign credit or blame for any drastic alterations in circumstances. And so we have the book business, with its last remaining chain...
View ArticleMedium publishes a book and gets some big PR
The New York Times carried a story on the front page of its Friday Business section about a book. This book is a novel entitled (appropriately for this piece) “The Big Disruption” by Jessica Powell. Of...
View ArticleWe’ll see how what I actually learn compares to what I expect to find out
Australia and New Zealand have always been the far outposts of the English-speaking territories for book publishers based in New York and London. But the logistics and economics of managing inventory...
View ArticleGetting an award and getting caught up with innovation with BISG
The Book Industry Study Group, or BISG, is a book publishing trade organization now headed by Brian O’Leary that was formed to be pan-industry. They were preceded by the Association of American...
View ArticleA lot has changed in book publishing in the last ten years
I am returning this September to speak at Digital Book World, a conference I helped to found and then programmed for its first seven years. (One motivation to go back is to promote my new book.) The...
View ArticleTwo pretty easy ways to add revenue that most publishers are missing
The biggest publishers today are regularly delivering improved profit performance on a flat or declining sales base. This masks a troubling truth about today’s book business. The core asset base of a...
View ArticleWhat James Daunt did and did not say about Barnes & Noble’s future
In what has to be considered a bit of a coup, BISG Executive Director Brian O’Leary scored a lengthy interview with B&N head James Daunt as the feature of BISG’s annual meeting which took place on...
View ArticleThoughts about what Covid and 2020 mean for book publishing
A team of independent publishing consultants with broad and deep experience in the industry have produced an excellent report on the effects of the past year’s pandemic on the book publishing business...
View Article“The Family Business” is Ingram: the global infrastructure for the book industry
The global infrastructure for the book business that is not Amazon is owned and operated by the Ingram Content Group. In fact, a lot of the global infrastructure of the book business that is identified...
View ArticleBig disruption hit book publishing before AI showed up
Publishers Weekly recently hosted a stimulating and smart online session about AI and publishing, thanks to the organizing and moderating skills of Peter Brantley and Thad McIlroy. The day began with a...
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