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, […]
It is not news to publishers that they have to engage directly with their readers
Since the merger that has created Penguin Random House, there has been precious little speculation (except by me, as far as I can tell) about what this new behemoth in trade book publishing could do to exploit their scale in new and innovative ways. Their scale advantage is huge. PRH has something in the neighborhood […]
Everybody in Hollywood Needs an eBook Strategy
As a result of spending my college days at UCLA, I had a handful of contacts in the Hollywood community when I came back East to live in 1969. When I started becoming familiar with New York publishing in the 1970s, I found myself, on occasion, shopping movie or TV tie-in projects. Armed with a […]
Should trade publishers start ditching their B2B imprints for a B2C world?
I spent last Friday at the On Copyright 2012 conference staged by my clients at Copyright Clearance Center. CCC is an organization dedicated to generating revenue for content creators from what is referred to as “secondary” licensing, or uses that are not core to the publisher’s revenue stream and which are often impossible to manage […]
By one benchmark at least, we are probably halfway through the (r)evolution
A couple of major (Big Six) publishers have acknowledged that ebook revenues for them have passed 20% of their revenues. Of the 80% that remains print, I think it would be conservative to estimate that 20% of that is sold online. That’s an additional 16 percent of their business. Adding those together tells us that, for at […]