The Book Industry Study Group, or BISG, is a book publishing trade organization now headed by Brian O’Leary that was formed to be pan-industry. They were preceded by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and the American Booksellers Association (ABA), but those were two “sides” of the book trade with their own interests, and they […]
Dick McCullough was a great client for me, a great boss for many, and a great guy for everybody
I hadn’t seen Dick McCullough, who was my most-fun-to-work-with client of all time and the best leader I ever met in the corporate world, for at least a few years when I got a phone call from him at 7pm last New Year’s Eve. He was calling to tell me that he had just had […]
Changes going on around here
This post is personal, but it is also business. It’s about the shifts taking place in my personal corner of the publishing world, but which will soon enough touch the marketing of many books. For the past couple of years, I have been building a digital marketing business called Logical Marketing with Peter McCarthy and Jess […]
If the industry is changing, publishing house structures, processes, and budgets need to change too
A thought kept recurring — one I’ve written about before — while I was learning new stuff at Digital Book World last week. The structure of publishing houses and of the publishing process as it has developed over the past century make some of the challenges and opportunities of publishing in the emerging digital era […]
The Audience Information Sheet is more useful than the Title Information Sheet for marketers (and for publicity and sales too)
The core principles and workflows around marketing books really require change in the digital age, and perhaps more radical change than many people thought. The time-honored process was to somehow communicate knowledge of what was inside a book to book reviewers and bookstore buyers so they could decide whether it was suitable for their audience […]