The “Code Meet Print” blog by Glenn Nano recently reprised a subject I wrote about 18 months ago: the benefits that flow to publishers that sell direct. In that piece, I highlighted the disagreement that seemed to exist at that time between my advocacy of direct selling of ebooks particularly and Random House’s lack of […]
Book marketers need to rethink three things: time, timing, and budgeting
The three big shifts taking place in trade book publishing are very much interrelated. The fact that consumers are buying about half their books online is one. That means that publishers are not entirely dependent on books being placed at retail to make sales, which is the second. And the marketing that used to take […]
Don’t blame Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter for the fact that technology changes behavior
In the past week, we have seen the Louis C.K. rant against smart phones, the Jonathan Franzen deep intellectual swipe at what Amazon is doing to the world of publishing, and I had an exchange with a very dear old friend who does email (his wife doesn’t), but can’t handle texting or Facebook. Or thinks he […]
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 […]
7 starter principles for digital book marketing learned from Peter McCarthy
Times are changing in publishing and publishers know it. Almost every publisher recognizes that their value to authors, and therefore their future, is dependent on their ability to deliver effective marketing at scale. In this day and age, that means digital marketing, which also has the characteristic of being “data-driven” marketing. And not only is […]