Nettwerk’s Terry McBride gave a great talk at Book Expo Canada two years ago. This vid (via PaidContent) shows how far his thinking then has got him now. Among the tidbits — seventy percent of their revenue is from digital. Wow.
If you publish in the current affairs category, the question of when to publish is a biggie.
Michelle Shepard published an account of the Omar Khadr case in May called Guantanamo’s Child. Judging by the covers of the major newspapers yesterday, the timing couldn’t have been better. Michelle has tirelessly followed Khadr’s plight. The book is [...]
The TOC blog points to Mindy McAdams’ 10 simple facts about the state of journalism. In the comments I took a stab at the equivalent for book publishing. I am cross-posting here…
It is different this time — just because the Rocket ereader didn’t take off doesn’t mean you can keep your head in the sand
Print [...]
So you have published your third novel. Oprah hasn’t called, but you are still confident your fourth novel will catch fire. Excited, you pack it off to your agent. Weeks pass and nothing. The market has gone soft. Your publisher isn’t interested. They don’t want to pin the long tail on their pinata. Your agent [...]
I once heard a leftie say Che Guevara turned his back on the man by leaving medicine. The leftie said “Che really wanted to help people instead.” Right. So being a doctor isn’t helping people? This hippie couldn’t see beyond his own bias.
Andrew Keen is similarly lost in the weeds of his own biases. He [...]
Jonathan Karp, editor-in-chief of Twelve, wishes for the days before Judith Regan in a piece at washingtonpost.com. Executives have to deliver growth year over year. To do that, Karp says, they can either..
Add more titles
Sell more copies of existing authors and titles
Increase output per author
Diversify the offering
Cut costs
The best bit is on traditional houses losing [...]
Not many readers out there, but there are sure are a lot of writers. Recently, I lamented Wiley’s missed opportunity to acquire a book by Mitch Joel. Today I was thrilled to see Andy Nulman is working with Wiley on a project due in February of 2009. It would be awesome if Andy’s company — [...]
I am a big fan of illustrated covers. The publisher I used to work for didn’t have any illustrators on staff, so covers tended to be stock photos and type-treatments. I am also a big fan of student work. It is often better than in-house work. The kids are hungrier. Here is my favourite from [...]
Christine Dunn, the head of marketing for Wiley’s European efforts, is interviewed at Book Business Magazine.
We’ve probably done more than 100 videos, and one of our more recent [videos] had more than 26,000 views on YouTube, so we’re excited about that. When you think about the impact of that versus a flyer or postcard or [...]
I just saw this post about Topspin Media on TechCrunch and it got me thinking about the new breed of book publisher. Topspin is essentially a distribution company for unsigned musicians — or more accurately musicians that choose not to be ’signed’.
Ingram and Amazon are falling over each other to fill the digital distribution space [...]
Seth Godin gives us his thoughts about the Kindle. Among them…
The pricing of books is whacked. $9.95 is a publisher-friendly price, not an author-friendly or reader-friendly price.
Is he being coy? He must know full well that is the Amazon-subsidized price. I wonder what the MSRP is on the e-version at his publisher’s site? No matter. [...]
Peter Kent is interviewed for a story at Book Business Magazine. Here is a line…
“I think the real concern is that we don’t want to go down the same road the music industry went,” he said. The solution, he said, is digital rights management (DRM) that works.
Ah. Hmm. Err. Argh!
DRM solutions normally work fine. It [...]
The Toronto Star’s Vit Wagner wrote a story about Bill C61 and the book publishing industry called ‘New chapter in copyright reform: Bill C-61’s impact on publishing a hot topic at expo‘.
There are a couple of choice quotes in this story.
M&S’s Doug Pepper…
“We’re doing everything we can to work with Google and Amazon and others [...]
Flash websites. Stay away from flash websites. Audio on websites. Let the users choose if they want to hear your audio — don’t have it play automatically.
Aleksandar Hemon breaks both those rules. The website for The Lazarus Project is one of those that tries to impose linear story telling onto a website.
That said, it is [...]
As has been widely reported, new copyright legislation was announced this week in Canada. The book publishers are for it. The librarians are against it.
There is a couple of interesting things in the bill.
It allows for recording television programs, but then you have to delete them. No time limit is given.
It requires ISPs to [...]
Sean Howard delivered the below presentation at today’s Book Expo Canada session
Another Country: Creative Borders, Globalism and the Age of Collaboration
| View | Upload your own
I have admired Harper Collin’s moves with digital often and out loud. A recent refugee from Harper told me the leadership in digital came from the very top. The New York Observer offers this inside look at Jane Friedman’s operation…
The meeting was about digital outreach, and offered an occasion to discuss ideas for how the [...]
I hadn’t heard of DNAML before I saw Peter Kent’s Q&A at the TOC Blog, but it sure got my attention and I wanted to learn more. It appears DNAML is a kind of ebook platform. I think ebook platforms are a mature technology in an immature market. Software to manage your library sounds good [...]
There is a great bit in Joseph Jaffe’s Join the Conversation where he rags on FedEX for not seeing the possibilities of a kid who builds furniture out of FedEx boxes. If I remember correctly FedEx sent the guy a cease and desist.
I thought of that story when I watched the video below. The team [...]
As the music industry looks to monetize the live performance and experiential side of band management, I have expressed skepticism that the book publishing industry can do the same. Would you pay $60 bucks to see an author in person? I wouldn’t but then again I am pretty cheap. The good stuff is on [...]
Tricia Duryee over at PaidContent notes that publishers may be getting uneasy about Amazon’s market dominance. Actually she is simply echoing the New York Times. The Times says publishers are scared Bezos is going to demand cheaper ebooks for the Kindle.
Am I the only one that thinks it is only natural that ebooks be cheaper [...]
There is a very successful author that does seminars across Canada. He has a couple of books. He sells them at his seminars and they are sold in trade bookstores.
A couple of months ago his publisher was keen to look at new products — to somehow bridge the gap between book and seminar. They decided [...]
I attended the Mesh Conference (#MESH08) last week. As expected, it left me with a lot to think about. I am a little late to the game with this recap, but here are my thoughts.
I have come to expect a cold open at the MESH conference. The conference is all about conversation. I have learned [...]
I have a Tina-Fey-level crush on Nora Young –in a respectful way of course. I was disappointed to miss her at the MESH conference last week, but was delighted to hear her on the radio talking publishing 2.0 with Malle Vallik. For the record Vallik was Nora’s guest. I don’t listen to the radio [...]
Robert McGrum is retiring from The Observer. He lists ten milestones from the past ten years in book publishing over at the Guardian.
New blood (aka the passing of the guard)
Amazon
Harry Potter
Jonathan Franzen
Festivals
Prizes
Ian Mcewan
Blogs Vs Reviewing (It is quaint he thinks these are opposed)
Lynne Truss
The Kindle
I bit my tongue a couple of times reading his story [...]
In the aftermath of the closure of Microsoft’s Live Book search program I was fascinated to learn there is an open source project that is trying to bring together out of print works, orphan works, public domain works and other available books all in one place. It is essentially a wikipedia meets IMDB for books. [...]
The 1000-fan meme was all the rage a month or so ago. Then it seemingly went away. I think it still is powerful. I think it is applicable to book publishing and I think it can be applied from the top down — i.e., it can be used by publishers not just by authors.
I was [...]
Inspired by hypebot’s Top 10 Issues Facing Music, I quickly jotted down the issues I see facing book publishing — there are 12…
Customer alienation. At best our readers are indifferent to us and our imprints. At worst, they think we are ripping them off.
Disintermediation. Google/Amazon will be to us what iTunes is to music labels. [...]
John Gall of Vintage gives his 5 rules of book cover design. (via Kottke)
Joe Wikert just wrote a post announcing the new Wrox chapter on demand service. My first reaction to the idea was “Neat. Way to go Wiley.” After a second I wondered “What about DRM?” Joe answers…
My favorite part of this: We’re selling all this e-content without the use of traditional DRM. I say “traditional” because [...]
Recently someone in the newspaper business asked me which newspapers I read. I wasn’t sure how to answer. I do read the paper everyday — not the same one, and not always in the same form. I forget or never notice in the first place which organization I am reading. I decided to say I [...]
The Independent Online Distribution Alliance — this is the kind of project Michael Tamblyn and the folks at BookNetCanada probably wouldn’t immediately embrace, but I think it would be a great compliment to what they are already doing — help authors directly in the same way they’ve been helping retailers and publishers.
(via)
Occasionally A-listers turn up in Toronto. Occasionally plebs like me are invited to meet them. Seconds before being introduced to Salman Rushdie I spilled red wine down my front. The time Martin Amis was in town my friends and I tried to outdo each other in turn at the signing table. I was going to [...]
I am really keen to see how publishers are updating their websites now that we are well into the web 2.0 swell. A tricky point is whether to sell direct. I am for it. But regardless of whether a publisher is ready for that step, they should still put the reader first in their site [...]
Mathew Ingram is pointing to a New York Times story on IDG. Their business was in trouble before going online. Now it is growing. Here is a couple of choice quotes:
“The excellent thing, and good news, for publishers is that there is life after print — in fact, a better life after print,” said Patrick [...]
When it comes to marketing books on the web — two lessons crystallized for me this week.
Pretend your product doesn’t exist. Sell content instead.
Pretend print doesn’t exist. It is an anchor. You will drown.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again. As Alex Lindsay points out on This Week in [...]
In a keynote at Book Expo Canada in 07, ad exec Terry O’Reilly urged publishers to rethink the book ad. He played a radio ad for the Guinness Book of World Records that holds the Guinness world record for being the shortest ever ad on radio. It was genius. O’Reilly urged publishers to simply look [...]
I came to the realization recently that The Globe and Mail is no longer my go-to resource for all things literary. It used to be. What the New York Times is to the literati in the US, the Globe and Mail is, with its dedicated Books section, to the discourse of books and those who [...]
The rush to give site creators a book deal continues seemingly unabated… Postcards From Yo Momma — it has six figure deal written all over it. Good for them.
Postcards From Yo Momma
Does your mom still have an AOL account? Does she email you her random, yet charming, thoughts on life and love? Does she wish [...]
Wow. If any house was going to escape the sippy-hole that is succession planning in Canadian publishing — I thought Raincoast would do it. Looks like they are throwing weight from the airplane. I am sure it is a good business decision…
Penguin Canada to Distribute Bloomsbury::
I recall seeing a story recently about how the UK is retaining Commonwealth rights, annoying publishers in Australia and the like. Now the UK houses are moaning about US houses retaining ebook rights. From bookseller.com…
Amazon and Sony have both committed to the PA that they will protect territoriality, and the school that says you can’t [...]
Yesterday I posted about turning your book commercial into a small tutorial — ads as content. I don’t think I was clear on that point. Teach me, please.
These two examples came over the transom. A business book in manga — looks like a hit — and a-little-too-long teaser ad.
Mitch Joel just posted a great video from Common Craft called Podcasting in Plain English. It reminds me of another video series Mitch put me onto last December — also on youtube. I shared that series with colleagues at work because I thought it was a brilliant way to do book promos — give me [...]
I started reading Michael Hyatt’s blog a year ago. I even passed around his system of managing email to colleagues. The tone of his writing was always positive and friendly. But blogging in good times as a CEO is a breeze. Blogging in bad times is when you test your mettle.
When Michael’s company, Thomas Nelson, [...]
Fans are looking for tour and next release dates — but that is not all you should deliver.
Ethan Kaplan (someone I’ve been following since Mesh07) espouses his philosophy on artist websites. His lessons are easliy transferable to author sites. Two of my takeaways:
Be open. Don’t be precious with the user experience. Use Drupal. Don’t use [...]
Author website dos and don’ts are one thing. Evaluating the success of an author website is another. If you want to be facile you could say a site with lots of traffic is successful and a site that gets no traffic is unsuccessful. Presumably, this would take into account how well it is SEO’d or [...]
After tracking down Neal Stephenson’s site — and being disappointed with it — I started thinking about author websites again. Who should own them? Who should control them? What platform should they be built on? Who should build them? And who should pay to have them built and maintained? Questions that have been [...]
In the it-was-only-a-matter-of-time-department — test prep gets crowd sourced. Encyclopedias. Travel books. Study notes. Text Books. Now test prep. Forget about learning from other industries, publishers need to start learning from examples within their own industry. Is there such thing as a Facebook app for the LSAT? There should be. The Princeton Review doesn’t [...]
What do you do when you want to find a business or service in your community? You google it. What do potential authors likely do when looking for a publisher or agent? They google it. If that is true, you would think that major publishers would be competing to be the top search result on [...]
Mathew Ingram pointed to Jeff Jarvis today. The sky is not falling. Stories (like this one from Adage) have the calculus all wrong — news rooms are here to stay, the news assembly line is going to change. He says…
But in this new ecology, I think newsrooms will need to be organized around topics or [...]
In its first phase adding “social” elements to book production has failed, but I am liking how round two and round three are shaping up.
Round One — The Wiki Trend. RIP.
Wiki-novels and wiki books are really interesting experiments. They are failed experiments but good ones. Kevin Kelly made the astute observation that maybe, just [...]
Don’t sell the book, sell the idea. Don’t sell the author, sell the passion.
Ehren Cheung wrote a post last week about changing the nature of marketing and publicity in book publishing. He noted that running on catalog cycles is stupid. I have been thinking about the end game of digital for book publishers. One of [...]
It is no secret that the process of getting published isn’t very transparent. This article at Time Out New York (via Maud Newton) about the cultural gatekeepers in publishing got me thinking about how to turn the process inside out.
In movies you gather the best creative team you can muster. The movie gets made. The [...]
What She Said Wasn’t That Bad
Both Mathew Ingram and TechCrunch came down hard on Tracy Chevalier — and the Society of Authors — for saying writers wanted to chuck the old business models and adopt new ones. Arrington and Ingram know a luddite when they see one. Chevalier qualifies in their minds for pointing out [...]
I am just catching up with last week’s news regarding MySpace’s music space.
As Arrington says..
In case it isn’t abundantly clear - the big labels are all but giving up on charging for recorded music. Instead they’re trying to grab equity stakes in the distribution channels that directly touch consumers.
This makes me think of why terrestrial [...]
I find myself scratching my head when I see marketing agencies/gurus without basic title tags on their own websites. That is why I thought the below was a breath of fresh air. Imagine the publisher equivalent — accepting that imprints mean little — completely foregrounding their authors and their authors’ work.
Ad agency unveils newest digital [...]
Ex-Googler and new chief at EMI, Douglas Merrill talks to Paidcontent.
Two quotes I liked:
The first principle is simple: Fans want to experience art and artists want to create. What the roles of the music labels are in connecting artists, helping artists create, to fans, helping fans experience, I think it’s TBD
“We need to question everything.” [...]
I am confused about this one. Penguin rights director Chantal Noel is quoted over at Bookseller.com as saying agents need to engage with the world of the rights director. Got it. She then talks about podcast serialisation and filmed interviews. This confuses me. Why would the author retain the right to be interviewed? Interviews aren’t [...]
PersonaNonData suggests publishers should be weary of having a single point of contact with their readers. He says…
publishers have hesitated historically to mess with the retail channel and I recall in the early days of the internet there was a lot of discussion about publishers creating channel conflict with existing retailers if the publisher set [...]
At BookExpo ‘06 Carly Fiorina pointed out that Kodak collapsed in 5 years. In the New Yorker, Eric Alterman chronicles the 4 year decline of the newspaper. The music labels? That business went in the crapper in about the same length of time. A good friend of mine who works in book publishing is skeptically [...]
The Message to Publishers from Grand Master Flash
Just yesterday, the first blog to book (blook) startup — the Friday Project — was officially liquidated. That demonstrates to me, not a failure in the idea, but merely the “well duh” factor of using the blogosphere as a feeder mechanism for publishers. It was silly of them [...]
I have been looking to Warner Brother Records — and Warner’s Ethan Kaplan specifically — for prognostications on the new order in label/artist relations. Their move with iLike is particularly well played. The Facebook interface is my lesson for the day.
Michael Cairns is reading the tea leaves at his PersonaNonData blog after Borders’ latest quarterly report. I have always understood “the rumors of a cross border combination” to mean Borders would buy Indigo. Indigo rescuing Borders is a new one for me. I can’t see there being any advantage for Indigo’s business in such a [...]
This post has been updated…see below.
Dundurn’s Blog
I am about a year late but I just found Dundurn Press’s blog — www.definingcanada.ca
Props to Dundurn for just doing it. How many bigger houses would have balked at the extra time investment? Dundurn used a free wordpress installation and a free (?) design template. All in all a [...]
Jimmy Guterman at O’Reilly takes Penguin to task for not going free with their out-of-copyright classics. The point about using the medium to your advantage is well taken, but unless I am mistaken O’Reilly has yet to set up a torrent tracker for their content. Penguin didn’t have the stones to go free, but Guterman [...]
The BNC Technology Forum 2008: Harnessing Digital Opportunity has wrapped. Morgan Cowie is catching her breath over at the BookNet blog. The Quill covered Tamblyn doing his Rich-Uncle-Pennybags-thing for the book-monopoly launch. Now what? Is the industry any closer to understanding, let alone harnessing, digital opportunities?
A Good Start but a Long Way to Go
I [...]
A year after the inaugural forum on digital innovation in Canadian publishing, I look back at some of my highlights from 2007…
Session #1 - A Conference About Technology?
It is about the customer stupid. I made the following scribbles during Tom Wujec’s keynote:
Ask yourself what do your readers want
Ask yourself what are your readers doing [...]
On the eve of the second annual BookNet Canada Technology Forum, I looked up my notes from the 2007 conference. Sadly the link to the 2007 agenda has been taken down so I am not exactly sure of the chronology.
The Watermelon Rant
By a long shot, the highlight of the 2007 BookNet Canada Technology Forum was [...]
But seriously, what the heck is he saying?
The publisher and chief executive of Faber and Faber, Stephen Page, waxes in the Guardian about the future of publishing. The elephant in the room is that none of what Page describes requires a publisher. Oh my. He says, “publishers can now build powerful online places to showcase [...]
Frank Rose over at Wired runs down the market-gap argument behind video piracy in a story called Dear Hollywood: Let my Video Go. The argument goes like this — consumers want the Wire or Battlestar on demand — making them wait for the DVD release makes Bittorrent more attractive. Music labels and now Hollywood, by [...]
Letting a work go out of print (OP), happens less and less often these days, but I bet there are hundreds if not thousands of titles languishing as OP (that aren’t out of copyright) that are worthy enough to be in circulation but can’t sustain a full offset run.
Bring Back the Titles from Macfarlane ,Walter [...]
With the latest cover story (issue 16.03) Wired continues to poke the sleeping giant that is the publishing industry. Will publishers wake up? Or will they continue to lazily swat, like a pestering fly, at Wired’s braintrust?
Hello Captain Obvious
In the The Long Tail, Wired’s Chris Anderson stated that profitability in publishing was about backlist. Well [...]
Audible.com is being hung out to dry when it comes to their position on digital rights management (DRM) on audio books. Audible’s new owner — Amazon — is already taking Apple’s iTunes to school when it comes to selling DRM-free music online. Then Random House — whose parent company also owns half of Song-BMG [...]