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Declarations and forecasts of Great Change in the book business need...
A recent post here that incited a long comment string and another on FutureBook that was quite unrelated from the estimable Brian O’Leary have helped me formulate some thinking which I hope can be...
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Sometimes one more calculation can make what looked first like revolution...
Author’s warning: this post is largely wrong! The following post was written based on a fundamental misunderstanding, assuming that Mark Coker’s post was talking about ebook sales in units when he was...
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Getting Mark Coker right this time and agreeing with him up to a point
On Tuesday, for the first time in the five years I have been writing this blog, I did a post I would like to take back. (But in the interest of the public record, and because there were several...
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It is not news to publishers that they have to engage directly with their...
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...
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Some things I will be looking to learn more about at London Book Fair
The London Book Fair is an every-second-or-third-year thing for me, going back many decades. From an English-centric perspective, it is like a mini-Frankfurt. All the UK players are there and a lot of...
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Peter McCarthy and I have a new business and publishing has a new digital...
Today Peter McCarthy and I are formally announcing a new business which is a partnership between us: The Logical Marketing Agency. What we’re doing is applying the most modern and sophisticated digital...
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When an author should self-publish and how that might change
There is a question that every agent and publisher is dealing with, because authors surely are. And that’s this: when should an author self- (or indie-) publish? The answer is certainly not “never”,...
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The book world keeps changing, so Digital Book World has to change too
This post invites you to help us shape the agenda for Digital Book World 2015. It was five years ago this summer that David Nussbaum and Sara Domville of F+W Media took me out to lunch and said they...
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The disruption of the disruption is temporary
There’s little doubt that the digital (r)evolution, to the degree it is measured by the shift by consumers from reading on paper to reading on a screen, has plateaued, at least temporarily. The most...
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Wondering whether printed books will outlast printed money, or football
When you’re trying to figure out what will happen in the book publishing business in the years to come, any prediction depends on how things work out that are beyond the control of the business, and...
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Inevitable consequences follow from the new hierarchy of power among publishers
The current very public battle over trading terms taking place between Hachette Book Group and Amazon has brought forth surprisingly few recollections by those reporting it (an exception here) of a...
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Subscription services for ebooks progress to becoming a real experiment
My long-held conviction that broad-based subscriptions for ebooks were not likely to work is partly based on facts that are now changing. It is still by no means a slam dunk that ebooks must go where...
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All the Amazon-Hachette coverage doesn’t seem to cover some important causes...
A great deal has been written in many venues about the current tussle between dominant Internet retailer Amazon and one of the three smallest of book publishing’s Big Five general trade houses,...
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Not all books and not all subscription services are created equal
Digital change has forced many book publishers to rethink the mix of their lists. The most obvious aspect of that is the need for increased vertical-, topic- or audience-consciousness. In the days when...
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Much as I like Hugh Howey, I disagree with just about all of this recent post...
I need to say couple of things at the outset here. The first is that I really like and admire Hugh Howey and the fact that I disagree with almost every paragraph of this post of his shouldn’t suggest...
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New data on the Long Tail impact suggests rethinking history and ideas about...
For most of my lifetime, the principal challenge a publisher faced to get a book noticed by a consumer and sold was to get it on the shelves in bookstores. Data was always scarce (I combed for it for...
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It is hard for publishers to apply even Harvard B School advice in their...
Harvard Business Review published an article recently by Benjamin Edelman called “Mastering the Intermediaries” which gives advice to businesses trying to avoid some of the consequences of audience...
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Subscriptions are in the news this week
Subscriptions for ebooks are certainly in the news this week. Amazon just announced their Kindle Unlimited offering, taking its place beside Oyster and Scribd as a “one price for all you can eat”...
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Publishers need to rethink their marketing deployments and tactics in the...
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...
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Amazon’s clarifications always come when I’m on the road
Amazon’s recent brief “clarification” calls for some brief annotation, which is all I can give it while I’m traveling this week. The material below that is not bolded is the complete statement Amazon...
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