“I honestly can’t think of a single traditional book publisher who has led the development of a successful marketplace/marketing innovation in the last decade.” — Seth Godin
One publisher I can think of is Scholastic, who brought the writing room concept to publishing with 39Clues. An update on the Carolyn Keene model but still an innovation.
Seems to me the argument isn’t if what the publisher does adds value or not… it is how much is that truly worth?
Years ago when Borders launched ecommerce they did so with an Amazon.com-powered back-end. Then in 2008 they scuttled the Amazon alliance and built their own branded website. They had to build a customer base from scratch, ten years after most book readers picked their online retailer of choice.
Stupid. But they learned their lesson right?
Wrong. Their deal with Kobo two years later is the exact same thing. They have built a presence in the ebook space but they have no expertise — which will only foster a false sense of what is at stake. Techcrunch is right to only link out to Kobo — and not Borders — at the bottom of this press release. They are the only company in that post that matters.
I am curious if anyone has used Book Tour’s Press Finder and whether they have had success with it. In particular I am wondering what kind of filtering options there are on the press side? By signing up as a blogger are you essentially saying “Hey authors if you are in town please spam me”?
Missed this from last month. The authors of one of the more intriguing recent self-publishing projects — BusinessModelGeneration.com — signed a book deal with Wiley. You can now get a trimmed down version of the book through regular book selling channels.
I am surprised, seeing the popularity of Alex Rider and Charlie Higson’s young James Bond, that no one has riffed on/updated the Three Investigators Series. Make them computer hackers instead of investigators and have Richard Branson or Damien Hirst be their benefactor?
The iTunes store launched in 2003. Six years later — while hovering around 70% of the overall market — it went fully DRM free. If one assumes customer complaints are the main driver for a company to go DRM-free‡, how many readers does the Kindle need before Bezos issues a DRM memo?
The Kindle will be three years old in November. At age three, iTunes had 88% of the download market. Kindle is tracking behind iTunes’ progress at the same age, but probably not by much. They need to beat back more numerous competitors than iTunes did at this stage in life and the rate of adoption of the ereaders is no where near sales of digital music players. So let’s say by 2013, ebooks are 50% of the total reading market. Even if Amazon owns all of that, there still won’t likely be enough groundswell to crack open the AZW file format.
I expect it will be 9+ years before a comparable percentage of readers are in the Kindle ecosystem as there was in the iTunes universe in its sixth year. That is far enough away to abandon all hope we will ever see DRM-free Kindle books. I wish adoption was quicker, so Kindle could dominate sooner, so publishers would lose their minds faster, so alternate sellers would rise higher, so I could own more ebooks.
‡The audio book market must be nearly controlled by DRM-happy Audible (also owned by Amazon) so speculation about how Bezos responds to customer pressure is admittedly a spin in the dark.
If you are a professional writer, you should be building your email list. You should also consider $10 per reader as the magic number revenue-wise per year.
