Because of a couple of panels I spoke on last spring and because of the development of FiledBy, I have had more and more conversations lately with agents. They are part of the General Trade Publishing ecosystem. So their lives are getting more difficult and more complicated, like everybody else’s in Book Valley. The agents’ […]
Archives for June 2009
Family businesses
The New York Times had a story on Tuesday morning about an advantage the Ford Motor Company had over its competitors at GM and Chrysler: it is still family-owned. As the Times explained, the family ownership was able to take a longer view than their competitors. In fact, we still don’t know whether the re-tooling […]
The need for critical mass is why verticalization is a process
I had the good fortune to spend a couple of days last week in Toronto to speak at a conference on “Giving it Away”, how the culture of “free” is affecting the book business. My workshop sessions were called “Giving It Away with a Purpose”, by which I meant using content as “bait” to build […]
The emerging opportunity for today’s publishers
Last week I went to a “brown bag lunch” session organized by Daily Lit featuring Gail Glickman Horwood, head of digital strategy for Martha Stewart Living and a veteran of nearly 15 years in the web business for magazines and for AOL. Gail was an engaging and knowledgeable presenter and she stressed two points, one […]
What replaces charging for content? Does anybody really know?
Do you know “Newser”? It’s a news aggregation and filtering service that is, in its way, even more threatening to the established order than things like Google News or Memeorandum. The latter two services are entirely automated: they find and organize news stories from all over the web and quote just a snippet of the […]