This post began being written a couple of weeks ago when I recalled some specific misplaced expectations I had for the self-publishing revolution and started to ponder why things happened the way they did in recent years. It turns out a big part of the answer I was looking for provides clarity that extends far […]
Rethinking book marketing and its organization in the big houses
Here’s a modest proposal about how marketers at big publishers should be organized. By audience segment, or, to use my own favored terminology, by vertical. Marketing demands it and entirely new business opportunities — beyond publishing — can arise from it. A publisher — even the most general publisher — should figure out which audiences […]
Technology, curation, and why the era of big bookstores is coming to an end
I stumbled across a Sarah Weinman post from a few months ago that posits the notion that the chain bookstore (by which it would appear she means the superstores of the past 20 years, not the chain bookstores in malls that grew up in the prior 20 years) perhaps had a natural life cycle which […]
Ebooks are making me recall the history of mass-market publishing
The ebook revolution is really beginning to remind me of the mass-market papeback revolution. The mass paperback was really “invented” by Sir Allan Lane when he created Penguin in Britain before World War II. (Wikipedia credits a German publisher with the first cheap paperbacks a few years earlier, but Lane was certainly the first in […]