The passing of publishing giant Tom McCormack makes me recall the interaction he had with my father, Leonard Shatzkin, from the very beginning of Tom’s publishing career. The bios say he was hired as an editor at Anchor Books, Doubleday’s pioneering trade paperback imprint, in 1959, that being McCormack’s first job in publishing. The Anchor […]
Market research used to be a silly idea for publishers but it is not anymore
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 […]
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 […]
Ebooks are making me recall the history of mass-market publishing
The ebook revolution is really beginning to remind me of the mass-market papeback revolution. The mass paperback was really “invented” by Sir Allan Lane when he created Penguin in Britain before World War II. (Wikipedia credits a German publisher with the first cheap paperbacks a few years earlier, but Lane was certainly the first in […]
A new perspective on some old family publishing history
After Making Information Pay on Thursday, I had lunch with Michael Cader. One of our topics was some statistical research he is doing on the question “how many orphans”? This is his research to reveal, but I will only tell you “not nearly as many as I thought.” Part of what I learned from Michael […]