I was brought up to believe in the virtues of a large field sales force. One of Dad’s early successes in his career as Director of Research at Doubleday was when he analyzed sales rep effectiveness to advise the company about the optimum number of reps to keep when they combined sales forces that had […]
Random House joining the (formerly) Agency 5, and what it might mean
Now the Big Six are all selling ebooks on the agency model. Random House has joined their five competitors. It is almost a year since Apple launched the iPad, opened the iBookstore, and delivered big publishers an opportunity to rewrite the rules of the ebook marketplace, at least for their books and at least for […]
Publishers, brands, and the change to b2c
I’ve been in the book business for a long time, more than 48 years since my first job on the sales floor of Brentano’s bookstore. For over 37 years it has been my fulltime occupation. My father started his career in books just before I was born, so I have been meeting publishing people more or […]
Where do we lose the shelf space and how much do we lose?
There are two questions about the impact of digital change on publishing that are just about impossible to answer. One is: how much of the sale of ebooks is incremental business and how much of it is cannibalization of prior print sales? The other is: what will be the fate of independent bookstores? The two […]