One of the great backlashes in our era of conglomerates is the steady growth of small-batch businesses. These are very small businesses that cater mostly to customers willing to spend more for a seemingly better and more controlled product offering. There are many happy consumers who will buy a four-pack of local brew for $16,…
Caleb Mason
The chart you see above is from Gallup and Pew measuring the percentage of adults in the U.S. who have not read a single book in the year measured. It was 8% in 1978 and has been hovering at 23-27% in recent years. This is not a trend one associates with a growth industry. Meanwhile,…
One would think well-educated, literate people, such as those who are attracted to and working in book publishing, would be able to write a rejection letter without using the dreaded “alas” word. But it’s always there, in letters written by veterans and rookies alike. I’d like to suggest we break the pattern and either use…
The 2016 publishing sales data shared by Author Earnings at Digital Book World reminded me of all the times I have been the sad-sack tasked with managing the “death squeeze.” I went through it in the consumer photo business, the paper atlas business, and then the CD-ROM mapping software business. Each of these industries relied…
I upgraded to the Apple iPhone 7 for Christmas and have already doubled my reading time. And most of that doubling is because my reading is now truly mobile. Let me offer some personal examples. My wife likes to shop. A lot. I do not. While she was shopping at Goodwill last week, I read…
No, I’m not here to trash paper. I’m here to discuss different usages of paper and the ones that are more likely to become quick trash. The recent Digital Book Printing Conference hosted by Book Business was a very interesting event with plenty of great presentations, facts, and figures. In particular, Marco Boer of IT…
Okay, so you’re sitting in a company meeting of fifteen people. Suddenly all fifteen people are trying to solve a problem that can only be solved by one person in the room, the head of IT. Why are we wasting the time of the other fourteen people in the room? This is an example of…
Let me preface this by saying I run a literary fiction micro-publisher operating much in the mold of how full-service traditional publishing has for years, although because my overheads are so low, I pay my authors 50% of print and 70% of ebook royalties, something I realize large publishers cannot do. As self-publishing continues evolving,…
An algorithm recently bought me a Father’s Day present I didn’t need or ask for, using my own money. You see, my wife was buying sheets from Amazon when they presented her with the book The Arm by Jeff Passan (HarperCollins) as a Father’s Day suggestion. $27.95 later my charge card was hit with the…
The news from American malls just keeps getting worse, with long-time anchor stores Macy’s, JCPenney, and Sears reporting ongoing closings and bad results. Yet, we heard a leak earlier this year from General Growth Properties, one of the largest mall operators, that Amazon might be opening 400 mall stores. They quickly retracted this leak, but…
How do you know if what you’ve created is worthwhile? In my experience, it has to pass the “good enough to steal test.” Business owners, authors, artists, and musicians don’t like to hear this, but it’s true. The fact is the majority of goods and services produced do not actually meet this benchmark of success.…
Now is better than later because later might never come. Among the many tragic losses related to the above wisdom, one of the most trivial revolves around the topic of shopping behavior. (Apologies to the Maharishi inside us all.) And this matters a great deal in the world of books, where we know from our…
One of the most fascinating aspects of new technologies is how they open doors for new business models. And this is very true in the evolving world of book publishing. The book publishing model has many challenges, most notably how the established system of author advances, large superstore preorders, and returns limits what will be…
I have finally come across the bookstore concept for the future and it’s not coming from Amazon or Barnes & Noble with their cross-channel pipe dreams. It’s Shakespeare and Co., which opened under new ownership in November 2015 and currently operates one store in the Upper East Side of New York, with more planned for…
Let’s pretend for a moment that there are no bookstores and as publishers we still need to sell books. How are we going to do that? For starters, let’s take a look at the recent trends for physical bookstore sales. There was welcome relief this year that sales at physical stores have stabilized, although I…