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 […]
The utility of examining the text of a book to find search terms for SEO
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 […]
Advice for an author looking for a literary agent
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 […]
No author website rules of the road in publishing contracts is a big fail for the industry
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 […]
Doing SEO right requires research into the audience, not maximum knowledge of the book
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 […]