Strategic Innovation in Book Publishing: Start With the Strategy, The Innovation Will Follow
When I see the ‘new business models‘ tag on blog posts relating to book publishing, the conversation is invariably about new sources of profit not new types of models. Those are different things.
I think we are all aware that the industry is changing. Who gives us money, how much we get, and what we provide in return is going to be different in ten years than it is today. That is a given. But ultimately the name of the game will be selling content* — either to readers or advertisers or companies that add additional value (like movie studios) or whoever.
So talking about new products or new pricing strategies or new sales channels or new contract terms or new marketing tactics all seem short sighted. We should be talking about the entire model — the framework, the org structure, the business design, the ecosystem, whichever — not the component parts.
Yesterday Seth Godin told publishing people to develop their own “tribal” networks to reach readers. Great. But how do you actually execute that? You don’t. It is not a strategy. It is not a framework. It is a behaviour. It is more bafflegab about how publishers need to change or else. It is FUD.
Instead we need to have a level-headed conversation about reorganizing the publishing company. Identify strategies. Identify outcomes. Make decisions. In short we need to model an alternative business. There are tools and methods for doing that. Is anybody using them? Am I crazy thinking no one is?
*selling content versus selling a service will have to what for another post
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