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Things are calmer than they were in the book business, but change is a constant

May 25, 2016 by Mike Shatzkin 12 Comments

Among the shifts that have been taking place in publishing houses over the past decade is an increase in the head count dedicated to marketing and a decrease in head count dedicated to sales. This reflects the reduction in the number of bookstore accounts and the transfer of “discovery” from store shelves to digital search. […]

Filed Under: Atomization, eBooks, General Trade Publishing, Marketing, New Models, Scale, Self-Publishing, Supply-Chain, Unbundling Tagged With: Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, Borders, CreateSpace, HarperCollins, Ingram, Kindle

Four players in the book business with the power to rewrite some of the rules

May 3, 2016 by Mike Shatzkin 10 Comments

The news came last week that ReaderLink has purchased Anderson News. Those two companies have been the leading suppliers of books to the mass merchandisers: primarily Wal-mart, Target, and Sam’s Club. There are other players selling books in the space, including Ingram, Baker & Taylor, and smaller distributors like the less-well-known American West. But most […]

Filed Under: General Trade Publishing, Licensing and Rights, Marketing, Scale, Supply-Chain, Technology Tagged With: Aer.io, Amazon, American West, Anderson News, Baker & Taylor, Barnes & Noble, Big Five, BN .com, Books-a-Million, Follett, Ingram, Penguin Random House, ReaderLink, Sam's Club, Target, Wal-mart

It is being proven that smaller bookstores can work commercially

October 25, 2015 by Mike Shatzkin 10 Comments

Sometimes it takes a decade or more for an insight to be validated, but it is always nice when it happens. Around the turn of the century, I was developing a business called “Supply Chain Tracker”, which had a nice client base for a few years. What we did was take the data feeds — […]

Filed Under: Digital Book World, General Trade Publishing, Marketing, New Models, Publishing History, Supply-Chain Tagged With: Amazon, Anna Borne Minberger, B&N, Baker & Taylor, Barnes & Noble, Bonniers, Books-a-Million, Borders, Brentano's, Cambridge University Press, Charles Nurnberg, Frankfurt Book Fair, Ingram, Leonard Shatzkin, Lorraine Shanley, Market Partners, Pocket Shop, Sterling Publishing, Steve Clark

Four of the big five have new deals with Amazon and only the biggest is still to negotiate one

April 24, 2015 by Mike Shatzkin 5 Comments

A reporter called earlier this week focused on what he figures are the upcoming negotiations over trading terms between Amazon and Penguin Random House. I had observed when Amazon was throwing sharp elbows at Hachette during their contractual dispute that Amazon wouldn’t try similar tactics with PRH. Since then, with HarperCollins and Amazon having announced […]

Filed Under: Direct response, eBooks, General Trade Publishing, Marketing, New Models, Subscriptions, Supply-Chain Tagged With: Abrams, Amazon, B&N Nook, Big Five, Big Six, Bloomsbury, Books-a-Million, Cambridge, Chronicle, DOJ, Egmont, Following Four, Google Play, Hachette, HarperCollins, Harry Potter, iBookstore, Justice Cote, Kindle Unlimited, Kobo, Macmillan, Oxford, Oyster, Penguin Random House, PRH, Quarto, Running Press, Scholastic, Scribd, Simon & Schuster, Tor.com

All the Amazon-Hachette coverage doesn’t seem to cover some important causes and implications

June 3, 2014 by Mike Shatzkin 132 Comments

A great deal has been written in many venues about the current tussle between dominant Internet retailer Amazon and one of the three smallest of book publishing’s Big Five general trade houses, Hachette Book Group. Although neither side has been particularly explicit about the precise points of contention, both what I read and what I […]

Filed Under: Authors, eBooks, General Trade Publishing, Licensing and Rights, New Models, Supply-Chain Tagged With: Amazon, Apple, B&N, Baker & Taylor, Books-a-Million, Borders, Charlie Stross, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Hastings, Ingram, iPad, James Patterson, John Green, Kindle, Macmillan, Malcolm Gladwell, Michael J. Sullivan, Nook, Simon & Schuster, Walmart, Zola

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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
  • What the ruling against the PRH-S&S merger means for the publishing business
  • “Automated ebook marketing by Open Road; can anybody else do it?”

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  • Running a big publishing house is not as much fun as it used to be
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