Blogs

A Game of Monopolies: Two Giants Carve Up the Publication-Printing Business

Their proposed merger fell apart, but megaprinters Quad/Graphics and LSC nevertheless are looking more like monopolies.

Coach Approach Leadership: 3 Steps to Make Your Teams More Effective

As a leader, a large part of your role is to be a coach to your people. I call this coach approach leadership.

What Are the Top Strategic Issues Facing the Book Value Chain?

Here are five areas of strategic impact that both publishers and printers need to look at and plan to work with.



Printing & Manufacturing

Their proposed merger fell apart, but megaprinters Quad/Graphics and LSC nevertheless are looking more like monopolies.

Here are five areas of strategic impact that both publishers and printers need to look at and plan to work with.

Decades of historical precedent suggest that, now that the shortages and price increases of 2018 have ended, publishers should soon benefit from lower paper costs. But don’t hold your breath waiting for history to repeat itself. Prices for publication papers have stabilized since late last year, and the usual post-peak glut and price slashing don’t…

Business Strategy

As a leader, a large part of your role is to be a coach to your people. I call this coach approach leadership.

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,…

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…

Sales, Marketing & Data Intel

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,…

How do you judge an author’s ability to sell books? Social media stats are a flimsy measure. Use these four metrics as a better guide.

Hundreds of bestsellers are unnoticed by shoppers on retail websites, which costs publishers a lot of book sales. There’s an easy fix.

News

On March 20, the Book Industry Guild of New York (BIGNY) got straight talk on the state of printing technologies from three printers.

Ebooks & Digital Media

Plagiarism in the scientific community is not new, but has become a recurring theme in the past few years due to a few scandals both in STM journals and in publications that are more general. Why now? I can offer a few explanations. For one, there is greater pressure in the academic community to publish…

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…

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…