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 […]
Changes going on around here
This post is personal, but it is also business. It’s about the shifts taking place in my personal corner of the publishing world, but which will soon enough touch the marketing of many books. For the past couple of years, I have been building a digital marketing business called Logical Marketing with Peter McCarthy and Jess […]
Supply chain analysis could get even more important as store sales diminish
http://mikeshatzkin.wpengine.com/a-coming-new-obsession-how-to-handle-a-smaller-print-book-business
One thing that has changed considerably in the last 20 years is the amount of information publishers have about what is going on in the supply chain: that is, they can track the books between their own warehouse and the end consumer purchase. The Big Kahuna of information, of course, is provided by BookScan, based on cash register capture of data as books are sold at outlets all over the country. BookScan not only lets its