Both the supply chain and book marketing are forever changed by Coronavirus
Just before the world changed, about five months ago on February 18th, we wrote in this space about two initiatives that made sense for all publishers to employ to raise revenues and profits. One was...
View ArticleWhat James Daunt did and did not say about Barnes & Noble’s future
In what has to be considered a bit of a coup, BISG Executive Director Brian O’Leary scored a lengthy interview with B&N head James Daunt as the feature of BISG’s annual meeting which took place on...
View ArticleThe end of the general trade publishing concept
My brilliant friend Joe Esposito has written a piece to explain why Penguin Random House would want to acquire Simon & Schuster. I have also been thinking about why PRH, or any of the other three...
View ArticleThoughts about what Covid and 2020 mean for book publishing
A team of independent publishing consultants with broad and deep experience in the industry have produced an excellent report on the effects of the past year’s pandemic on the book publishing business...
View ArticleAmazon has done so many smart things that some of the best ones get forgotten
There’s quite a bit of publishing about publishing going on in the next few weeks. British academic John B. Thompson has written a solid scholarly history of book publishing in the past quarter century...
View Article“The Family Business” is Ingram: the global infrastructure for the book industry
The global infrastructure for the book business that is not Amazon is owned and operated by the Ingram Content Group. In fact, a lot of the global infrastructure of the book business that is identified...
View Article“Enterprise self-publishing” is coming: the third great disruption of book...
The book business is in the early stages of its third great disruption in the past quarter century. The first two both changed the shape of the industry and created winners and losers across the entire...
View ArticleWhy books are different and why enterprises will be discovering they should...
My most recent post noted the rise of what I called “enterprise self-publishing”. It increasingly looks to me like enterprise-driven book publishing will become the dominant provider of books over the...
View ArticleEvery publishing strategy should start with Amazon and Ingram
Having been out of the day-to-day of book publishing for a few years now, and — like most people — cut off from most routine commercial conversations in the nearly two years of the pandemic, I took a...
View ArticleDoubts about the Department of Justice’s objection to the PRH acquisition of S&S
There are, at this moment, still five US commercial book publishers of mega-size. Penguin Random House is the biggest; HarperCollins is 2nd; and Hachette, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster round out...
View ArticleHow book publishing has changed in recent decades and the puzzling question...
My book business career (on the fringes since 1958 and pretty fully immersed since 1973) has been spent considering the path from “intellectual property creator” to “book purchaser”. This is a world...
View Article“Automated ebook marketing by Open Road; can anybody else do it?”
Open Road Integrated Media has been an active client for the past couple of years. I have been intrigued by their claim of having the only really automated ebook marketing system in existence. I can’t...
View ArticleWhat the ruling against the PRH-S&S merger means for the publishing business
Judge Florence Y. Pan ruled today that the acquisition of Simon & Schuster by Penguin Random House could not go forward. The ruling was explicitly to protect the “competition” for the “anticipated...
View ArticleGoogle knocked us out for a couple of days, but we’re back!
I was very pleased with my post of last week, about how my friend Ed Rogoff could possibly self-publish a book about health called “Scary Diagnosis” better than it would be delivered to the public by a...
View ArticleRunning a big publishing house is not as much fun as it used to be
The idea that general trade publishing and general trade publishing houses were going to have to change or die was first floated here in a post in 2007 and then expanded upon in a post called “The End...
View ArticleThe problem with bookstores is the problem for bookstores
Three decades ago, if you wanted a trade book, you went to a bookstore or a bigger merchant like Wal-mart or a department store with a book “section”. It was actually hard to get a book any other way....
View ArticleBindery Books: A Way to Restructure the Book Publishing Model
The case has been made here repeatedly over years that the business and operating model of book publishing as it has been throughout my 50+-year career is irretrievably broken. And it is increasingly...
View ArticleChecking facts with players who are still in the game
It is four years since Covid and eight years since I have had staff helping me serve consulting clients. My insight into the commercial world of book publishing is no longer informed by daily contact...
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