About 15 years ago, my friend Charlie Nurnberg, then the Sales VP at Sterling (which was, then, an independent publisher not yet bought by Barnes & Noble) threw me a challenge. “For years,” he said, “I got the B&N green-bar report [by which he meant an Excel spreadsheet] every Friday. I had 800 titles on […]
Frankfurt is still vast, but it seems to be getting smaller
I’ve spent more than half-a-year of my life in Frankfurt, one week at a time. My first Fair was 1976 so this would have been my 39th if I attended them all. I think I missed two, so that’s 37. I love it and I get enormous commercial benefit from it. I can’t understand people […]
Publishers need to rethink their marketing deployments and tactics in the digital age to take advantage of their backlists
Well-articulated complaints about the way traditional publishing compares to self-publishing have recently been posted by two accomplished authors, one who writes fiction and one who writes non-fiction. These point to what most publishers really should already know. Some fundamental and time-honored truths about publishing need to be reexamined as we continue the digital transition. And […]
Marketing will replace editorial as the driving force behind publishing houses
One of the things my father, Leonard Shatzkin, taught me when I was first learning about book publishing a half-century ago was that “all publishing houses are started with an editorial inspiration”. What he meant by that is that what motivated somebody to start a book publisher was an idea about what to publish. That […]
Peering into the future and seeing more value in the Random Penguin merger
So now in addition to the Random House and Penguin merger that is being reviewed by governments far and wide, we have the news that HarperCollins is exploring a tie-up with Simon & Schuster in a deal that hasn’t been made yet. That leaves Hachette and Macmillan, among the so-called Big Six, still on the […]