Our May 29 conference is built around the theme of “scale” in our business, which means something different than it did a very short time ago. Usually “using scale” means “employing the competitive advantages of size” but it can also be leveraging efficiency; the key beneficial characteristic of scale is that unit costs decline with […]
Two new initiatives to ponder as we end the year
Two announcements made in the last two weeks caught our attention. One was Simon & Schuster’s deal with Author Solutions, creating a new Archway Editions publishing imprint. This was the third such major deal with a publisher for ASI, following similar arrangements forged with romance publisher Harlequin and Christian publisher Thomas Nelson (now owned by […]
Rethinking book marketing and its organization in the big houses
Here’s a modest proposal about how marketers at big publishers should be organized. By audience segment, or, to use my own favored terminology, by vertical. Marketing demands it and entirely new business opportunities — beyond publishing — can arise from it. A publisher — even the most general publisher — should figure out which audiences […]
Will juvie publishing remain a book business as tablets take over?
This post will discuss a realization I had even before this morning’s news about the developing e-products scene. I’ve always been a skeptic about enhanced ebooks, based on seeing my hunch that they wouldn’t work come true 15 years ago with CD-Roms. But it is increasingly obvious that CD-Rom type thinking will work very well […]
Can big publishers compete if the coin of the realm is “names”?
In a conversation earlier this week I learned that the big Hollywood talent agencies have come to the recognition that “audience aggregation”, a component of what I have been calling a “vertical” strategy, needs to be incorporated into their thinking going forward. This was signaled very strongly recently when longtime publisher Steve Ross took his […]