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The reality of publishing economics has changed for the big players

September 19, 2016 by Mike Shatzkin 28 Comments

A veteran agent who was formerly a publisher confirmed a point for me about how trade publishing has changed over the past two decades, particularly for the big houses. This challenges a fundamental tenet of my father’s understanding of the business. (And that’s the still the source of most of mine.) I had long suspected […]

Filed Under: General Trade Publishing, Licensing and Rights, Marketing, New Models, Publishing History, Scale, Supply-Chain Tagged With: Amazon, B. Dalton, Barnes & Noble, Hillary Clinton for President, Leonard Shatzkin, Publishing People for Hillary, Roy Campanella, Senator Amy Klobuchar, Senator Cory Booker, St. Martin's Press, Tom McCormack, Walden, Yogi Berra

Book publishing lives in an environment shaped by larger forces and always has

January 10, 2016 by Mike Shatzkin 15 Comments

(Note to my readers. This longer-than-usual post is really two. The first half is a recital of what I believe is very relevant history. The second half is about how things are now. Although I am personally fascinated by the historical context, if you get bored with the history, the bolded text below marks the […]

Filed Under: Digital Book World, General Trade Publishing, Global, Industry Events, Marketing, New Models, Publishing History, SEO, Supply-Chain, Technology Tagged With: "Four Horsemen", Aer.io, Amazon, Andrew Carnegie, AOL, Apple, B. Dalton, Baker & Taylor, Barnes & Noble, Bing, Borders, Copyright Clearance Center, David Young, Facebook, Fred Argir, Google, Google Plus, Hachette UK, Hachette US, Jeff Bezos, John Ingram, Jon Taplin, Jonathan Kanter, Microsoft, Moz, Putnam, Rand Fishkin, Roy Kaufman, Scott Galloway, Simon & Schuster, Virginia Heffernan, Waldenbooks, Yahoo

Getting books more retail shelf space is going to require a new approach

December 4, 2014 by Mike Shatzkin 24 Comments

That bookstore shelf space is disappearing is a reality that nobody denies. It makes sense that there are people trying to figure out how to arrest the decline. There has been some recent cheerleading about the “growth” of indie bookstores, but the hard reality is that they’re expanding shelf space more slowly than chains are […]

Filed Under: General Trade Publishing, Marketing, New Models, Supply-Chain, Technology Tagged With: Above the Treeline, B. Dalton, Barnes & Noble, Deborah Emin, Doubleday Merchandising Plan, Ingram, Leonard Shatzkin, Publishing Perspectives, Sullivan Street Press

New data on the Long Tail impact suggests rethinking history and ideas about the future of publishing

June 25, 2014 by Mike Shatzkin 66 Comments

For most of my lifetime, the principal challenge a publisher faced to get a book noticed by a consumer and sold was to get it on the shelves in bookstores. Data was always scarce (I combed for it for years) but everything I ever saw reported confirmed that customers generally chose from what was made […]

Filed Under: Atomization, Authors, eBooks, General Trade Publishing, Marketing, New Models, Scale, Self-Publishing, Supply-Chain Tagged With: B. Dalton, Baker & Taylor, Barnes & Noble, Booknet Canada, Borders, BP Reports, Brentano's, Cambridge University Press, Collier's Encyclopedia, Crowell-Collier, Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, HHI, Ingram, Kindle, Leonard Shatzkin, Lightning, Macmillan Publishers, Marcello Vena, Noah Genner, Oxford University Press, publishing history, RCS Libri, Two Continents, Walden

Borders Crosses the Last Frontier

July 21, 2011 by Mike Shatzkin 6 Comments

The end of Borders took place within a larger context. I was in Italy for the IfBookThen conference last February when Borders’ impending bankruptcy was a rising expectation. Somebody in the audience asked me if I attributed Borders’ difficulties to ebooks. I said: “When the flu hits town, the old and sick die first.” Ebooks […]

Filed Under: General Trade Publishing, Publishing History, Supply-Chain Tagged With: Amazon, B. Dalton, Barnes & Noble, Bertelsmann, BN .com, Borders, Bowker, category management, Ed Nawotka, IfBookThen, K-Mart, Publishers Lunch, Publishing Perspectives, Waldenbooks

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Mike Shatzkin

Mike Shatzkin is the Founder & CEO of The Idea Logical Company and a widely-acknowledged thought leader about digital change in the book publishing industry. Read more.

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Recent Posts

  • Running a big publishing house is not as much fun as it used to be
  • Google knocked us out for a couple of days, but we’re back!
  • When a publisher might not do as good a job as a self-publishing author
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