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 […]
The establishment seems very unworried about being toppled by indies, and 5 other learnings
Programming Digital Book World and the kind of consulting we do require that we spend a lot of time in our office trying to figure out what the industry should be thinking more about. On that topic, there was this recent post with my thoughts about what should be top-of-mind for publishers these days as […]
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 […]
The utility of examining the text of a book to find search terms for SEO
The first two things to understand about optimizing book copy for SEO that I’ve learned from Logical Marketing partner Pete McCarthy are: 1. Copy always used to be written based on “knowledge of the book”. It should now be written based on “research into the audiences”. 2. Copy from publishers was almost always B2B, intended […]
Advice for an author looking for a literary agent
Until last week, I hadn’t stopped to think about how often I’m advising authors about how to deal with the publishing business. I would imagine this is something that most of us in the industry find ourselves doing very frequently. There are, after all, a lot of aspiring authors in the world and when one’s […]