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 […]
The publishing business as we have known it is not going away anytime soon
Regular readers, please pardon me for the unusual length of this post, but it covers a lot of ground that I think is necessary to make the point. A friend who has actually been working fulltime in the book business since I was still in college and who remains active was speculating at BEA about […]
“Scale” is a theme everybody in publishing needs to be thinking about, so we’ve made it the focus of our next Publishers Launch Conference
The overarching theme of our upcoming Publishers Launch Conference at BookExpo America on May 29 is “scale”. I thank my PLC partner, Michael Cader, for urging that we label that as a core concern worthy of being the centerpiece for a day’s discussion. (With that nudge, I identified “scale”, along with “verticalization” and “atomization”, as […]
Publishing in the Cloud is the next big important subject
Much of the change we are living through in publishing is plain as day to see. The shift from print to digital, like the shift from stores to online purchasing, is evident to all of us, inside the industry and out. But there’s another aspect of the change that is not nearly as visible and […]
Paying authors more might be the best economics for publishers in the long run
If you imagine the publisher’s business as one that divides most of the consumer’s dollar between two core stakeholders in the supply chain — the retailer and the author — you’d have a pretty accurate picture. The publishers, at least theoretically, decide what the retailer’s “working margin” will be with their discounts and agency agreements. […]