I was brought up to believe in the virtues of a large field sales force. One of Dad’s early successes in his career as Director of Research at Doubleday was when he analyzed sales rep effectiveness to advise the company about the optimum number of reps to keep when they combined sales forces that had […]
Extending the life of bookstores is critical, but devilishly difficult
I’ll admit that I would have thought a few years ago that by the time we got to the point when more than a third of unit sales for major houses had gone digital — and perhaps more than half for fiction — that the future shape of the book business would be discernible. But, […]
The expected changes in the book business favor Amazon’s share growth
This post is the second that is contemplating two big questions facing the publishing industry: When will the growth in Amazon’s share of the consumer book business stop? Who will be left standing when it does? Amazon applies pressure and generates angst among publishers from two directions. As they grow to be 30% or more […]
Two questions that loom over the trade publishing business
A lot of people in publishing would pay a lot of money to get a reliable answer to these two questions: When will the growth in Amazon’s share of the consumer book business stop? Who will be left standing when it does? I won’t attempt to answer those two questions in this post. In fact, […]
Some things that were true about publishing for decades aren’t true anymore
Back when my father, Leonard Shatzkin, was active with significant publishers — the quarter century following World War II — he observed that very few books actually took in less cash than they required. That is not to say that publishers saw most books as “profitable”. Indeed, they didn’t. They placed an overhead charge of […]
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