The digital transition of the trade book publishing business, which I would date from the opening of Amazon.com in 1995, enters its 20th year in 2014. Here are some of the ponderables as we close out the first two decades of a process of very rapid change that is far from over. 1. What’s going […]
Looking at predictions from here going back a few years
Prediction posts are common blog- and article-fodder at the end of a calendar year. I don’t think we’ll do one this time around, but I thought it would be fun to review some of the prediction posts from prior years. So pardon the highly self-referential post, but I think reviewing the predictions and reality from […]
No, Mike Shatzkin did NOT say that publishing is spiraling down the drain
As part of the promotion of the Digital Book World conference, I do some interviewing with the very capable Jeremy Greenfield, the editor of their blog. And Jeremy takes our conversations and chops them up into short pieces around the themes of our show. Since the focus of Digital Book World is “how digital is […]
Now HERE is an experiment that looks like it worked and is worthy of replication
The new opportunity to publish a book without printed inventory has been popularized primarily by self-publishing authors and by new fledgling publishing enterprises like Entangled and Byliner following in the footsteps of earlier pioneers like eReads and Ellora’s Cave and, more recently, Open Road. This changes the economics of publishing substantially, taking a very large […]
Book marketers need to rethink three things: time, timing, and budgeting
The three big shifts taking place in trade book publishing are very much interrelated. The fact that consumers are buying about half their books online is one. That means that publishers are not entirely dependent on books being placed at retail to make sales, which is the second. And the marketing that used to take […]