The Authors Guild and its allies have recently appealed to the Department of Justice to investigate Amazon’s possible monopoly control of the book business. It is hard to quarrel with the fact that Amazon delivers more of the publishing output to consumers than any single account ever has and that they are, inevitably, changing the […]
Starter thoughts for publishers to develop new author marketing policies
In a prior post, we suggested that the time has come for publishers to have clear policies around what they should require from author web presences for an effective publishing partnership. This is a really complex and multi-faceted challenge for every publisher. The purpose of this post is to discuss that proposition in more detail, […]
What we are learning about making digital marketing accessible to a bigger group of publishers
Every conversation I have with a publisher about digital marketing sitting with Peter McCarthy is an education for me and for them. The dialogues are peeling away layers of an endless onion, working through levels of understanding of what it takes to have truly discoverable content, surfaced to the right people in response to the […]
Amazon might lose interest in total hegemony over the book business before they achieve it
The industry got the news that Amazon was probably reassessing its own publishing program a couple of weeks ago when it was announced that Laurence Kirshbaum was stepping down as the head of Amazon Publishing and being replaced by a 14-year veteran of the Seattle company, Daphne Durham. Whatever are Durham’s strengths and connections, they […]
We got lucky with the speakers we booked for Publishers Launch Frankfurt
Branch Rickey, the fabled baseball executive who gave us racial integration, farm systems, and a host of great teams over fifty years, used to say “luck is the residue of design”. I’d like to think he was right, because we have really been lucky with our Frankfurt show for Publishers Launch, which we present in […]