As readers of this blog know, I’ve been on the “vertical” trail for a long time and I try to stay abreast of book publishers’ efforts to realize the advantages of subject specialization and community building. I wrote a whole post about the Sourcebooks initiative, Poetry Speaks, when it launched last Fall. I have often […]
A roadmap for the future: 6 suggestions for today’s publishers that many can’t follow
I had occasion during this past week to speak at the global strategic meeting of Harlequin. Often when I am asked to speak, even internally to publishers, I am explicit told “we want you to scare the hell out of them.” Since I think of myself as a pretty unthreatening guy, I’m always a bit […]
My advice is not always easy to follow, but sometimes it proves right anyway
I was interviewed a couple of weeks ago by a journalist who was working on a story about publishers and digital change. He was building something around my “Stay Ahead of the Shift” speech from last year’s Book Expo. “I was impressed by that speech,” he said. “You were very prescriptive about what publishers should do. So […]
With new opportunities come new challenges
This blog and my speeches contain frequent references to what we see as the big shifts the book publishing industry, and some publishers more than others, are feeling. The horizontal and format-specific product-centric media of the 20th century are inexorably yielding to the vertical and format-agnostic community-centric delivery environment for content that will soon predominate. In […]
The big guys don’t see the fundamental problem
The rapid series of developments in the digital book space and my rising profile mean that I seem to be in an interview with a journalist just about every day. As I was yesterday. The focus of yesterday’s conversation was the Baker & Taylor“Blio” platform that I wrote about last week. How widespread did I […]