Archive for the ‘Amazon’ Category
The Slow Death of Author Royalties
Over the weekend the NYT published an Op-Ed by Scott Turow, best-selling novelist and current head of the Authors’ Guild (“The Slow Death of the American Author”). Turow tends to rant and rail about the evils of the publishing industry with questionable reasoning. This piece seems like more of same. There’s been a lot of push back from a variety of fronts, including at Forbes and the TechDirt blog.
Can Indie Bookstores Matter?
The book business has always struck me as a bit bipolar, prone to bouts of dire pessimism followed by flights of exaggerated optimism.
Can Publishers Matter?
This Monday, Bowker published a report that offers a fascinating picture of the migration of book sales to online retailers. (Bowker is the industry’s key source of bibliographic data and market research.) For publishers, this data isn’t really news. They know full well just how dramatically online sales are growing.
What Are We Doing and Why Are We Doing It?
If you’re involved in direct-to-consumer marketing of books you already know that your central challenge is time management. There is simply no end to what you can spend your time doing. So how do you prioritize your efforts? Of course, there’s no one answer to this question. It all depends on where your readers and customers are and what works best in connecting with them. And, naturally, what works changes over time and at least somewhat depends on what book genre we’re talking about.
I see this general topic of prioritization come up all the time in my work with publishers. So, I’ve been trying to come up with a list of simple questions that that I would want to ask myself to help keep my marketing efforts on point:
Who’s #3 In Online Booksales?—And Why It Matters
Who’s the number 3 most popular online bookseller? The answer is surprising and it says something really important about what motivates people to buy books and where.
First, Define Your Terms
As my grade school social studies teacher used to say, let’s define our terms.
- By most popular I wish I meant sales or units but that information is closely guarded. Instead, the measurement I came up with is website traffic only, specifically unique monthly visitors as reported by Compete.com.*
- Bookstore also wants some definition. New, used, textbooks, eBooks?–I decided to go with all of the above.
- What about online? Online where? United States, India, China? I decided to focus on dotcoms registered to companies based in North America. Continue Reading…
Nobody Knows Anything—But Let’s Not Let That Stop Us
During a very long highway drive to northern Maine, I remembered something a philosophy professor said to me when I was in school: “Most philosophical problems are caused not by having the wrong set of assumptions,” she said, “but by having assumptions you’re not aware of.” Later on this week, I’m meeting with some friends to lay the groundwork for a new publishing model I’ve been kicking around for a while now. That got me thinking about my own assumptions. Here are a few of the most essential. Some may see obvious or too abstract, but they do lead in a direction.
- As the volume of content that is available increases, both delivering and determining content of quality will become increasingly difficult and valuable. Delivering, here, does not mean only producing but having the content discovered, used, engaged in some way. Quality includes relevance and context. Continue Reading…
You’re Gonna Have to Serve Somebody (Sorry, Bob)
Peter McCarthy–a keen and experienced digital marketing expert–recently quoted a friend who once told him:
The only two constants in the publishing value chain are authors and readers. Authors create, readers consume. Everyone else in the middle serves merely to make that exchange as efficient, scaled, and pleasurable as it can be.
Whether you agree or not is likely to turn how the word merely strikes you. I expect it would cause many literary agents, editors, publishers, marketers, and publicists to scoff. The arbiters and gatekeepers of what counts as worthy of publication naturally feel that their role is crucial. It is. I’d say the function they provide is more essential to the vitality of the author-reader relationship than ever before, but it’s migrating away from the domain of traditional publishers in myriad different directions and taken up by: Continue Reading…
The Future of the End of Bookstores
First off, accept my apologies in advance for the length of this post. Over the past several weeks, I’ve been ruminating about the future of bookstores, if there is one, what it might be. This is the likely the last post on bookstores that I’ll write for a while, for reasons that will become clear.
Kepler’s 2020
I just recently attended Kepler’s 2020, an unusual gathering of nearly 80 booksellers, publishers, book industry service providers, librarians, and members of the Menlo Park community in Silicon Valley, where Kepler’s Bookstore is located. The gathering took place over two-and-a-half very packed days of conversation and debate. Publishers represented included Sourcebooks, Chelsea Green, Chronicle Books, and Workman Publishing. Also represented were folks from Village Books (Bellingham, Washington), Book Shop Santa Cruz, and Booksmith and City Lights (both in San Francisco).
The End of the Beginning of the Future of Bookstores
I have the great good fortune of living in Cambridge, Mass., a city where there are still quite a few fine bookstores. There’s the Harvard Bookstore, Grolier (dedicated to poetry) the Harvard COOP (operated by B&N), and Schoenhof’s Foreign Books–all near by in Harvard Square. And there’s the excellent Porter Square Books a bit further off in North Cambridge. There are also a few very good used bookstores: Raven Books (in Harvard Square), the fabulous Lorem Ipsum Books, near where I live in Inman Square, and Rodney’s in Central Square, in mid-Cambridge, and two or three other smaller used bookstores.
To Sell or Not to Sell?
In a recent post on “Writing on the Ether,” Porter Anderson suggested that we (folks in the publishing industry) might take advantage of the lull this time of year offers–what some call “the silly season”–to “do some wising up.” While Porter is mostly talking about Amazon, I’d frame the “wising up” that’s needed more broadly. What business are we in, exactly?
The reflexive answer to this question is often “the book business.” This orientation emphasizes the creative role authors, agents, editors, designers, marketers, and publicists all play in producing a book and making prospective readers aware of it.
Somewhere on the other end of the spectrum (not often voiced) is the response, “No, we’re not in the book business–that’s incidental–we’re in the business of connecting people to content that matters (to them and to us).” This emphasis is at odds with the linear concept of the publishing process , focusing as it does on relationships, user experience, and on what’s valued and why.
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