The Business of Publishing

Blogging In The 21st Century

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I swear this is going to be my last TOC 2008-related post*. There is one more topic that has been rattling around BSHQ and, well, it’s time to get it out in the open. Blogging. It’s good, it’s bad, it’s ugly, and it’so misunderstood. We need have some frank discussion. There is no such thing as a blogging imperative Scott Karp, during the “Blogs as Books, Books as Blogs” session, made a comment that, sadly, was overshadowed by the bizarre twists and turns the discussion took. As a starting point, I want to highlight what he said: blogging systems are […]

Marketing For Introverts, Perennials

Putting The Multidirectional In Conversation

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Last night, I missed my bookclub*. My fault. I hate missing my bookclub meetings, but, well, someone screwed up her calendar. No names. When I first joined, I was a paranoid newcomer who thought it was about intellectual discussion and critical analysis. I read some serious dreck before I caught on. Maybe your bookclub trudges through slog, but, wow, mine is about the social. And the books. You’re reading but are you particpating? Reading is a beautifully solitary activity — I’ve mentioned before that my elementary school, a school based just outside Vandenberg Air Force Base, had a program called

The Future of Publishing

What Have You Done For Me Lately?

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I am not worried about the future of the book. I am not worried about the future of reading. I am not worried about the future of spelling (I am almost-but-not-quite ready to accept the “spelling is relative” argument, !@#$ British and their extraneous use of “U”). I am worried about the future of publishers. Your competition is not who you think it is. By publishers, I mean traditional, bound-copy based, royalty-paying publishers. Oh, I don’t think they’re going away for a good long time, but I do think we’re seeing the beginning of a serious challenge to the status

The Future of Publishing

Cranky, Cranky Post About People Who Don’t Think Before They Write

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Way back in the day, I was all hot diggety dog (is there a correct spelling for diggety?) about defenders of traditional media dismissing the blogosphere as nothing but a bunch of noise. Since even I can hit prey when shooting fish in a barrel, the sport of exposing holes in logic grew wearisome. I get sucked back into the fray from time to time — sheer ignorance should not go unremarked — but I let most of it pass me by. Recently I linked to an article that I retitled “On Conclusions Without Proof”. It was typical article that

Reviewing Reviewing

Tools of Change: Next Week, For Everybody

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Imagine, if you will, a bright, cold Tuesday morning in New York City. But you don’t mind the chill outside because you’re inside, attending Day 2 of the second annual O’Reilly Tools of Change conference. In fact, at this moment, the only worry on you mind is what fantastic session to attend (don’t worry, I’m here to help). For those members of the publishing industry who still haven’t registered for next week’s conference, it’s not too late. For those members of the book community who are eager to learn more about the future of publishing, ditto. Recall, if you will,

The Future of Publishing

A Little Friendly Bragging

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One of the privileges of being me (as opposed to one of the privileges of living with me) is that I have brilliant, smart, creative friends. And I don’t brag about them (brag on them? I am told this is proper English, but my people don’t speak this way) often enough. And I should. So I am going to is get all excited about a friend, just because I can. My friend Jill Monroe, who just happened to write of the BS’s most popular perennial posts (which she needs to update, hint, hint), is one of the funniest people I

Marketing For Introverts

2008: The eBook Goes Mainstream

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Though I hesitate to make predictions, I’ve always been a bandwagon sort of girl, so here is mine for 2008 (what? too late? never.): 2008 will be the year that ebooks go mainstream. In the ten years I’ve been writing about epublishing and ebooks, the dual stories of the ubiquity of ebooks and the death of the novel have made headlines, the latter surely more than the former. People outside the publishing industry are talking about ebooks. In 1996, Hardshell Word Factory was established as an epublisher. In 1998, I wrote a profile of Mary Z. Wolf, the former author

Non-Traditional Publishing

Search & Sensibility

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Since Santa didn’t bring me a Kindle (probably fair on his part since I didn’t bake him any cookies), I have no choice but to worry about the future of the world. Or rather publishing. Or rather aspects of publishing. To sorta paraphrase Captain Jack Harkness, the 21st century is when everything changes, we have to be ready for it right now. Ask your mother to try your search engine. To my mind, the most important aspect of our future (media) culture is discoveribility. If you can’t be found, you won’t be found. This means, plain and simple, that —

The Future of Publishing

What Price Entertainment?

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Bubbling under the surface of various discussions about entertainment media is the question nobody in the industry wants asked: what is the value of what we’re selling to our customers? With physical media, it’s easy enough to point to a book and say, “You get all that and more!” The device I choose today might be different tomorrow. With digital media, consumers are scratching their heads. Especially since the fashion is to make the use of digital media less flexible than physical media. It’s a particularly interesting question for the book business — how do you go from a culture

Non-Traditional Publishing

Don’t Blame The Kindle For Piracy

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I am cranky. You’ve been warned. So I’m minding my own business, or, rather, minding other people’s business as I cruise the Internet when what has to be one of the dumber notions to cross my screen appears. Given the stuff I read online every day, this is really saying something. Devices don’t make pirates. Unreasonable barriers make pirates. In what has to be a desperate attempt to find a new angle on the now-waning Kindle story, a few writers have speculated that the Kindle can spark book piracy. Yeah. That’s what the world needs to worry about. The Kindle

Non-Traditional Publishing
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