Len Vlahos of the ABA is the latest to take on the noble but very difficult task of encouraging independent booksellers in the digital age. Independent booksellers face a challenge similar to that of publishers adjusting to the change we’re facing: the skill sets and predelictions that are useful for what they’ve been doing don’t […]
The author-publisher deal needs tweaking
I just want to riff briefly on a challenge; I am still thinking about what might be a solution, or even an approach to a solution. Here’s the challenge. We need some creative dealmaking between authors and publishers. The partnership is getting more complicated. Publishers (will always) need authors and (most) authors (still) need publishers. […]
Enhanced Ebooks, Part 3
This is the third and final post of a series which spells out a new ebook strategy for trade publishers, expressed in the form of a letter from the publisher to its authors. The first post — the beginning of the letter — expressed the publisher’s intention to invest in a database of digital assets […]
Shifting Sales Channels, and What Publishers Are Doing About Them
We (Ted Hill of THA Consulting and I) are working with BISG again this year on their Making Information Pay conference. Last year we did a project on “Experimentation and Innovation” where we used both an online survey and interviews to surface the issues we captured in a research paper and then formed the backbone […]
If you could fix something, what would you fix?
The question asked on an email list of digerati-types was: “On the trade side of the business, what are some of the unmet challenges, the unsolved conundrums, at the intersection of books & technology? If you could fix something, what would you fix?” 1. Enhanced ebooks. Nobody seems to have developed a standardized way to […]