About 15 years ago, my friend Charlie Nurnberg, then the Sales VP at Sterling (which was, then, an independent publisher not yet bought by Barnes & Noble) threw me a challenge. “For years,” he said, “I got the B&N green-bar report [by which he meant an Excel spreadsheet] every Friday. I had 800 titles on […]
The new Amazon offer to Hachette
I was at 8,000 feet on a mountain hike in Colorado when a reporter called my cell phone, told me about Amazon’s latest “offer” to “resolve” the dispute with Hachette, and asked for my reaction. My first thought was, “wow, what a brilliant move by Amazon and it seems, at first, like a win all […]
Publisher margins today may be enviable, but it will be a big challenge to keep them that way
The major publishers have apparently worked themselves into a very strong commercial position at the moment with the transition to ebooks. I say “apparently” because the data that gives the most recent rise to that understanding — a presentation by HarperCollins of the current economics — is somewhat incomplete. What Michael Cader reported in Publishers […]
Just because the author does a lot of marketing doesn’t mean the publisher can’t help
The growing (but still tiny) group of very successful self-published authors and those who believe that they are a harbinger of the future have a big stake in the notion that “social network marketing” will replace the “legacy” techniques established over many decades and still employed by many houses. In fact, the houses themselves are […]
Publishing in the Cloud is the next big important subject
Much of the change we are living through in publishing is plain as day to see. The shift from print to digital, like the shift from stores to online purchasing, is evident to all of us, inside the industry and out. But there’s another aspect of the change that is not nearly as visible and […]