On Tuesday night, March 12, I’ll be enjoying a party thrown by my publisher Oxford University Press at The Strand Bookstore (email [email protected] if you want to come) for “The Book Business: What Everyone Needs to Know”, which I co-authored with Robert Paris Riger. This event follows our delivery of the complete manuscript by about […]
Amazon share grows and big publishers make more money
The financial reports of the major publishers have been following a pattern for some years now. Sales are about flat but profits have been steadily rising. One explanation for that fact is that the management of the major houses have been diligent about adapting their businesses to the new marketplace configurations or, as the saying […]
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 […]
New data on the Long Tail impact suggests rethinking history and ideas about the future of publishing
For most of my lifetime, the principal challenge a publisher faced to get a book noticed by a consumer and sold was to get it on the shelves in bookstores. Data was always scarce (I combed for it for years) but everything I ever saw reported confirmed that customers generally chose from what was made […]
A brilliant Conference Council helps make a great Digital Book World
We had a very successful debut annual conference for Digital Book World last January, even though we didn’t conceive the idea until June, put together a group of helpers (which we now call our Conference Council) until July, or draft the initial program until August. This year we’re way ahead of that schedule. We’ve put […]