Press Release: Peter McCarthy and Mike Shatzkin Announce New Digital Marketing Services for Publishers

April 7, 2014 - NEW YORK - Peter McCarthy and Mike Shatzkin have joined forces on a new venture, The Logical Marketing Agency, a digital marketing services-provider for publishers and authors. The company is offering a range of title- and author-optimization and research options at prices scaled to fit publishing budgets. The founders expect to provide solutions both for individual authors - mainly through a web portal - and for the largest companies.

Peter McCarthy is among book publishing's leading digital marketers with nearly two decades of experience with The Reader's Catalog, The New York Review of Books, Penguin, and Random House, all of it at the cutting edge of nascent "web editorial," web development, digital publishing, eCommerce, marketing and distribution. At Random House his explicit charge was to invent new techniques for reaching readers, which enabled him to experiment with all the available data-mining technologies (McCarthy calls on over 125 different tools to do his work), to work with every conceivable type of book and audience, and to work with a world-class team and trading partners on a highly collaborative basis.

Mike Shatzkin, Founder and CEO of The Idea Logical Company, a consultancy, is one of book publishing's acknowledged thought leaders on the impact of digital change. Along with Michael Cader, he runs Publishers Launch Conferences, which does programming and marketing for the renowned Digital Book World as well as conferences at other industry gatherings including the Frankfurt Book Fair. His blog, The Shatzkin Files, has a wide readership among the movers and shakers in the global book business. Shatzkin began his career in books more than 50 years ago on the sales floor of NYC's legendary Brentano's Bookstore.

Shatzkin explains the story behind the start of Logical Marketing. "It becomes clear pretty quickly if you talk to him that Pete McCarthy just knows more about how to identify and efficiently reach audiences for books and how to establish an author's digital presence than anybody else you've ever met. I see my job as figuring out how to 'scale' him: how to get digital marketing jobs done under his direction with a relatively inexpensive staff. We have trained a small and talented staff pretty quickly and believe we can grow that number as fast as we have to in addition to developing proprietary tools to improve efficiency. We're pretty sure we can deliver best-of-breed digital marketing capabilities for lower costs than even the largest companies can for themselves. Publishing is an incredibly complex business - it is not the case that just any digital agency can properly serve it, neither from a cost nor an expertise perspective. We believe that we have both covered quite nicely."