I was brought up to believe in the virtues of a large field sales force. One of Dad’s early successes in his career as Director of Research at Doubleday was when he analyzed sales rep effectiveness to advise the company about the optimum number of reps to keep when they combined sales forces that had […]
Should trade publishers start ditching their B2B imprints for a B2C world?
I spent last Friday at the On Copyright 2012 conference staged by my clients at Copyright Clearance Center. CCC is an organization dedicated to generating revenue for content creators from what is referred to as “secondary” licensing, or uses that are not core to the publisher’s revenue stream and which are often impossible to manage […]
What’s the greater fear for publishers? Amazon or piracy?
Pottermore changed the game this morning. Congratulations to Charlie Redmayne, their CEO. The “aha” moment for me was when somebody on a listserv mentioned they’d bought Kindle editions of the seven Harry Potter books which, it had been announced, were available only from the Pottermore site. Penny drops. First thought: Hnh? How did that happen? […]
Extending the life of bookstores is critical, but devilishly difficult
I’ll admit that I would have thought a few years ago that by the time we got to the point when more than a third of unit sales for major houses had gone digital — and perhaps more than half for fiction — that the future shape of the book business would be discernible. But, […]
Thinking more about ebooks and libraries and what big publishers should do
The reluctance of most big publishers to make ebooks available through library lending is a topic of widespread attention and concern. The AAP turned a chunk of its annual meeting over to the topic and Dr. Anthony Marx, the President and CEO of the New York Public Library, used his time to volunteer his institution […]