Partner Pete McCarthy pointed me to an article a couple of weeks ago that also introduced me to a website called Viperchill and its gifted, self-promoting SEO/Marketing creator, Glen Allsopp. The linked post, which I strongly urge you to read, enumerates quite painstakingly the techniques used by 16 online media companies with a large portfolio […]
Big data matters but textual analysis really does not
I was honored today with a lengthy response to a recent Shatzkin Files post on the Digital Book World blog from Neil Balthasar, who apparently uses techniques similar to those in a forthcoming book “The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of a Blockbuster Novel”. My post had been a response to a PW article announcing the upcoming […]
Full text examination by computer is very unlikely to predict bestsellers
PW currently has a story on a forthcoming St. Martin’s book called “The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of The Blockbuster Novel” in which authors Jodie Archer and Matthew L. Jockers “claim they created an algorithm that identifies the literary elements that guarantee a book a spot on the bestseller lists.” As readers of The Shatzkin Files know, […]
If the industry is changing, publishing house structures, processes, and budgets need to change too
A thought kept recurring — one I’ve written about before — while I was learning new stuff at Digital Book World last week. The structure of publishing houses and of the publishing process as it has developed over the past century make some of the challenges and opportunities of publishing in the emerging digital era […]
Now Kings of ebook subscription, what will impede the ebook share growth for Amazon?
With the news this morning that Scribd has thrown in the towel on unlimited ebook subscriptions, Amazon is the last player standing with an “all-you-can-eat” ebook subscription offer for a general audience. The juxtaposition of the publishers’ insistence on being paid full price for ebooks being lent once and the late Oyster’s and the now thrice-hobbled […]