It is a safe contention that few people whose primary career motivation is “to get rich” go into book publishing. What attracts folks to our business are other life objectives. Over the six decades I’ve been interacting with publishing professionals, I have come to see that reality as a feature, not a bug. It is […]
Crafting a publishing strategy to address a very specific need
Lena Tabori is, like me, a book publishing lifer who wants to work on climate change. She was an executive at Abrams when I met her and went on to be a founder of illustrated book publisher Stewart Tabori & Chang and then Welcome Books, the book publishing arm of her Welcome Enterprises. (Lena recently […]
Learned (or figured out) at BEA 2012
BookExpo America, trade publishing’s industry-wide gathering, just completed what must be considered another successful year at Javits Center last week. Attendance was pretty much what it had been last year and the lines for autographs on the convention floor certainly gave off the feeling of enthusiasm and excitement that publishers want to see. Convention roundups […]
For big publishers: what scales and what doesn’t?
The last post I did got more attention than anything on the blog in quite some time, but for somewhat different reasons than I intended. My central point about what increasingly common ebook growth predictions would mean for brick-and-mortar sales (that they’d decline sharply over the next five years) was that it diluted the core […]
BEA will be a shame to lose, but can it be saved?
Dinner Saturday night. 12 of us. Three spouses who had no particular interest in the BEA. Eight of us with one interest or another in the book business, but no possibility of personally being an exhibitor. And one publishing company CEO with a stand. Of course, I got my money’s worth. I got in free as […]