When my father, Leonard Shatzkin, was appointed Director of Research at Doubleday in the 1950s, it was a deliberate attempt to give him license to use analytical techniques to affect how business was done across the company. He had started out heading up manufacturing, with a real focus on streamlining the number of trim sizes […]
Seven key insights about VMI for books and why it is becoming a current concern
Vendor-managed inventory (VMI) is a supply paradigm for retailers by which the distributor makes the individual stocking decisions rather than having them determined by “orders” from an account. The most significant application of it for books was in the mass-market paperback business in its early days, when most of the books went through the magazine […]
Better book marketing in the future depends a bit on unlearning the best practices of the past
[Note to subscribers. We have switched from Feedburner to Mail Chimp for email distribution to our list to improve our service. Please send us a note if you have any problems or think there’s anything we ought to know.] ************************************************************************* A few years ago, publishers invented the position of Chief Digital Officer and many of […]
Amazon channels Orwell in its latest blast
Anybody who reads Amazon’s latest volley in the Amazon-Hachette war and then David Streitfeld’s takedown of it on the New York Times’s web site will know that Amazon — either deliberately or with striking ignorance — distorted a George Orwell quote to make it appear that he was against low-priced paperbacks when he was actually […]
Marketing will replace editorial as the driving force behind publishing houses
One of the things my father, Leonard Shatzkin, taught me when I was first learning about book publishing a half-century ago was that “all publishing houses are started with an editorial inspiration”. What he meant by that is that what motivated somebody to start a book publisher was an idea about what to publish. That […]
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