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Market research used to be a silly idea for publishers but it is not anymore

June 2, 2015 by Mike Shatzkin 6 Comments

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 […]

Filed Under: Direct response, eBooks, Global, Licensing and Rights, Marketing, New Models, rights, Scale, Self-Publishing, SEO, Supply-Chain, Technology Tagged With: Amazon, Anchor Books, Andrew Weber, Dolphin Books, Doubleday, Jason Epstein, Leonard Shatzkin, Logical Marketing, Pete McCarthy, Pinterest, Random House, YouTube

The utility of examining the text of a book to find search terms for SEO

May 6, 2015 by Mike Shatzkin 7 Comments

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 […]

Filed Under: General Trade Publishing, Marketing, New Models, SEO, Supply-Chain Tagged With: "The Mayo Clinic Diet", "To Kill A Mockingbird", Amazon, Google, Harper Lee, Jim Bryant, John Grisham, Library Thing, Logical Marketing, Pete McCarthy, Publishing Perspectives, Trajectory

Advice for an author looking for a literary agent

April 28, 2015 by Mike Shatzkin 47 Comments

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 […]

Filed Under: Authors, General Trade Publishing, Licensing and Rights Tagged With: "50 Shades of Gray", agentquery.com, Geraldine DeRuiter, Jane Friedman, Logical Marketing, Moz Analytics, Moz Research Tools, Pete McCarthy, Publishers Marketplace, Rand Fishkin, The Everywhereist

No author website rules of the road in publishing contracts is a big fail for the industry

March 19, 2015 by Mike Shatzkin 51 Comments

The topic of author websites and what the relationship between publishers and authors around them should be is a big “fail” for the publishing industry at the moment. Nobody seems to have thought this through. Publisher policies are all over the lot, even within houses, and that demonstrates that agents haven’t figured out what policies and […]

Filed Under: Authors, General Trade Publishing, Licensing and Rights, Marketing, New Models, Scale Tagged With: Amazon, B&N, Facebook, Google, Google Analytics, Instagram, Jane Friedman, Logical Marketing, Pete McCarthy, Pinterest, SEO, Twitter

Doing SEO right requires research into the audience, not maximum knowledge of the book

February 17, 2015 by Mike Shatzkin 4 Comments

There is a core point that Pete McCarthy made clear to us when we first started working with him on digital marketing challenges a year or so ago, which, critical though it is, seems extremely difficult for publishers to take on board. For all our careers, descriptive copy — catalog copy, title information sheets, press […]

Filed Under: Authors, Direct response, General Trade Publishing, Marketing, New Models, Supply-Chain Tagged With: Apple, BookLamp, Logical Marketing Agency, Pete McCarthy, Small Demons, Trajectory

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Mike Shatzkin

Mike Shatzkin is the Founder & CEO of The Idea Logical Company and a widely-acknowledged thought leader about digital change in the book publishing industry. Read more.

Follow Mike on Twitter @MikeShatzkin.

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Recent Posts

  • Running a big publishing house is not as much fun as it used to be
  • Google knocked us out for a couple of days, but we’re back!
  • When a publisher might not do as good a job as a self-publishing author
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