The Business of Publishing

Chelsea Green And The Great Big Mistake

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Here we are in 2008 and Chelsea Green, a small publisher, took a chance. It thought, “Hmm, offer an exclusive window to Amazon for our new book on Barack Obama, or choose broad distribution? We choose Amazon, and Amazon alone.” Which, of course, angered all the other booksellers in the world, the booksellers who see Amazon as both usurper and competition. It was a calculated risk that smacks of someone forgetting to carry the ones. On paper, this probably seemed brilliant. Amazon has great distribution. By working with BookSurge, a division of Amazon, print runs could be managed. The problem, […]

The Future of Publishing

Random Ebook Thoughts From A Jetlagged Mind

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So here I am, in London, part of a country with neither the Sony eReader nor the Amazon Kindle, yet dinner conversation turned, as conversations often do, to the fact that the Sony eReader will soon be available in the UK. I think that’s just cool, even as I think, “What’s taking so long, Sony, Amazon?” Let me tell you: awareness of the Kindle, particularly, is great, and people show great interest in the concept when they see an ereader in the wild. I’ve been gone more than I’ve been home for the past few weeks, and I’m getting lots

Non-Traditional Publishing

Not Ready For E-Time: Meyers Ebook Release Delayed

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Last night, I had dinner with the digital team from Harlequin — one of the most, if not the most, forward looking publishers when it comes to migrating to a digital future — and came away feeling positive about the mindset of the industry. Today, I’m feeling like we’ve taken two steps back. The fine folks at Hachette, the parent company of Little, Brown, have decided to delay the ebook release of Stephenie Meyer’s Breaking Dawn until 24 hours after the print edition went on sale.

The Future of Publishing

Once More With Feeling: The LATBR Publishes Its Last

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Rumor has it that I’m going to be on News Hour with Jim Lehrer tonight. I’ll be talking about the demise of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Eight minutes isn’t near long enough to cover a topic this broad; it’s barely enough to get started with the conversation. Yesterday was the last day for the dedicated book review, and it makes me sad to know it’s gone, but if you didn’t see it coming, you weren’t paying attention. To blame the Internet for the demise of the LATBR is to address part of the problem. Yes, book lovers are

Reviewing Reviewing

Sittin’ Here, Watching The Market Go By

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Associated Press headline: “Apple sells 1 million iPhones in first 3 days”. Add to that the six million phones already in the hands of customers (all of whom, I should note, chose to update their software…right when I was updating mine). Doing some quick, nearly caffeine-free math, that’s 7 million web-enabled, application-ready phones in the wild. Now is the time for bold, decisive, maybe even counterintuitive action. And counting. In March of this year, Apple released the Software Developer’s Kit (aka SDK) with hopes that people would create cool tools for the iPhone. This wasn’t a clever ploy to gin

The Future of Publishing

Why Publishers Should Blog

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Let us begin with synopses and cover copy: both are fine bits of information that only begin to convey the character of a book (although cover copy sometimes lies!). These snapshots of information are nice, but, well, not prime examples of great writing about books. Publishers are bizarrely hands-off when it comes to talking about their products. If there’s one thing we know about today’s online market, it is that, collectively, they do not respond well to packaged marketing pitches or the absurdly inauthentic public relations voice. So many publishers treat the copy on their websites like it exists in

Perennials, The Future of Publishing

BEA 2008 – Basic Web 2.0 Takeaways

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The BS team spent the first full day of 2008’s Book Expo America watching booksellers, publishers, agents, authors, and everyone else get religion. In 2006, Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics, spoke to what should have been this crowd about the future and how the publishing business needed to move forward quickly…sadly, Tapscott spoke a large contingent of well-wired bloggers and a few other bodies. That room should have been packed to the gills. At this year’s Book Expo, held in unbelievably gorgeous Los Angeles — city of beautiful weather and clear skies (yes, the skies are clear) — the educational

Marketing For Introverts, Perennials

The eBook Problem and The eBook Solution

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I am increasingly convinced that ebooks are not going to be the next big thing. While every pundit waits eagerly for signs of an ebook “surge”, ebooks will increase market share in a slow and steady way. By the time it’s noticed, ebooks will simply be part of the mainstream reading mix. It’s closer to reality than you think. I worry about that lack of consumer input in the epub standards debate. I remain ever-convinced that the publishing industry doesn’t really know what’s going on out there in consumer-world; if they did, then they’d see how ebooks are being purchased

Non-Traditional Publishing

Microsoft Ends Live Book Search

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Wow, usually it’s the government dumping news on Friday; you don’t expect it from Microsoft, but here you have it: they’re discontinuing their Live Book Search project. Effective, well, now. They say: Today we informed our partners that we are ending the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects and that both sites will be taken down next week. Books and scholarly publications will continue to be integrated into our Search results, but not through separate indexes. This also means that we are winding down our digitization initiatives, including our library scanning and our in-copyright book programs. We recognize

The Future of Publishing

Life On Venus: Authors Do Market

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Dan Green is one of my favorite bloggers — smart and provocative — even though we see the world from very different perspectives. I would rather read a 1000 of his words over 10 of most bloggers, even when he takes exception to one my recent comments, one where I was baffled about authors who shun marketing: Why should this be baffling? If writers wanted to be marketers, presumably they would have become. . .marketers. Instead they chose to be writers, presuming that marketing was the job of publishers. If one wants to be a “writer” and just write, that

Marketing For Introverts, Perennials
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