There are two aspects of the business that ebooks should really change. One is that ebooks can really enable increases in sales of the backlist. The other is that ebooks will really enable sales outside the publisher’s home territory. The second piece of this hardly even requires much effort. At a conference called Camp Coresource hosted by […]
The Audience Information Sheet is more useful than the Title Information Sheet for marketers (and for publicity and sales too)
The core principles and workflows around marketing books really require change in the digital age, and perhaps more radical change than many people thought. The time-honored process was to somehow communicate knowledge of what was inside a book to book reviewers and bookstore buyers so they could decide whether it was suitable for their audience […]
No post here today, but one on BookMachine
I’m trying something new today, having posted about the basics of an online strategy for authors over at BookMachine. As usual, I focus at the end on how publishers could be abetting such a strategy. I’m not the guy to write a manual for the self-published (although I think there are some helpful ideas in the post […]
Another wake-up call from Amazon as they serve author interests better than publishers have
The Authors Guild and its allies have recently appealed to the Department of Justice to investigate Amazon’s possible monopoly control of the book business. It is hard to quarrel with the fact that Amazon delivers more of the publishing output to consumers than any single account ever has and that they are, inevitably, changing the […]
A 10-point strategy for mini-vertical creation
The last post here, where I suggested that publishers should reconsider how they handle first serials, begs a number of follow-up questions. Two people commenting on the post raised the concern that HarperCollins wouldn’t have been able to handle the traffic the “Go Set A Watchman” excerpt would generate. My IT advisors say that is […]