Company transformation is a major theme at this year’s Digital Book World conference. By “transformation” we mean substantial changes in a company’s business model or core competencies or revenue streams. We found eight worthy companies to speak on this subject. Six of them — Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Ingram, Quarto, Rodale, Sourcebooks, and Wiley — are […]
Ebooks change the game for both backlist and export
There are two aspects of the business that ebooks should really change. One is that ebooks can really enable increases in sales of the backlist. The other is that ebooks will really enable sales outside the publisher’s home territory. The second piece of this hardly even requires much effort. At a conference called Camp Coresource hosted by […]
New publishing companies are starting that are much leaner than their established competitors
“It’s become very, very clear to me that digital trumps print, and that pure digital, without any legacy costs, massively trumps print.” — David G. Bradley, owner of Atlantic Media, quoted in The New York Times on September 24, 2012. The magazine business isn’t the book business, but… For the better part of two decades, […]
Publishers adding value on the marketing side
Obviously my day job, consulting, informs a lot of what goes into The Shatzkin Files. I guess it is just as obvious that I can’t quote everybody who tells me something or attribute everything I want to write about to a specific company or individual. I don’t make a living writing this blog and I […]
True “do-it-yourself” publishing success stories will probably become rare
Getting ready for our eBooks for Everyone Else conferences, I discovered an author named Bob Mayer who impressed me with his self-publishing zeal and apparent success. Bob has written lots of military fiction, science fiction, even a romance novel, and some non-fiction: dozens of books over the years for major publishers. Most of it was […]