Judge Florence Y. Pan ruled today that the acquisition of Simon & Schuster by Penguin Random House could not go forward. The ruling was explicitly to protect the “competition” for the “anticipated top-selling books”. In other words, the big books by big authors for which only the Big Five can compete regularly (with occasional bids […]
How book publishing has changed in recent decades and the puzzling question of what comes next
My book business career (on the fringes since 1958 and pretty fully immersed since 1973) has been spent considering the path from “intellectual property creator” to “book purchaser”. This is a world occupied by authors and packagers and agents; by publishers of various sizes and capabilities coordinating the many tasks and steps from the raw […]
Every publishing strategy should start with Amazon and Ingram
Having been out of the day-to-day of book publishing for a few years now, and — like most people — cut off from most routine commercial conversations in the nearly two years of the pandemic, I took a look at some recent opportunities I encountered online to catch up with today’s book biz realities through […]
Why books are different and why enterprises will be discovering they should be issuing them
My most recent post noted the rise of what I called “enterprise self-publishing”. It increasingly looks to me like enterprise-driven book publishing will become the dominant provider of books over the next decade. What distinguishes it is book publishing as a function in support of other efforts, rather than as a stand-alone business intended to […]
“Enterprise self-publishing” is coming: the third great disruption of book publishing since the 1990s
The book business is in the early stages of its third great disruption in the past quarter century. The first two both changed the shape of the industry and created winners and losers across the entire value chain: touching every step from how authors got money to how readers got books. Significant institutional players were […]
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