Editor's Note: Tweet Dreams
“If 1 [percent] to 2 percent of sales are e-books … then 98 percent of our business today is the print book.”
—John Sargent, CEO, Macmillan, during BEA’s CEO panel
“Rather than fight it, you’ll see smart publishers following Amazon’s lead into genres and topics that otherwise might have been ignored.”
—Clint Greenleaf, founder/CEO, Greenleaf Book Group, in his Guest Column for Book Business
“I tried to tweet, and then I had a tweet ‘body double,’ which didn’t really work for me.”
—Marcus Leaver, president, Sterling Publishing, during Book Industry Study Group’s Making Information Pay (MIP)
“Successful digital content programs should be driven by market opportunities, not by technologies.”
—Andrew Brenneman, founder/president, Finitiv, in his Digital Directions column for Book Business (May)
“The time has come to ask ourselves: Are we still being well-served by the printed catalog?”
—Josh Marwell, president of sales, HarperCollins, during MIP
“As publishers, it’s very important to know what we are good at and do more of that.”—Marji Ross, president and publisher, Regnery Publishing, during a panel discussion at the Publishing Business Conference & Expo
“I think this Google settlement is a phenomenal thing. It is the world’s biggest book deal, and we should celebrate it.”
—Pat Schroeder, former president/CEO, Association of American Publishers, during the Publishing Business Conference & Expo keynote panel
“Lost in the doomsdayer debate about publishers’ future is that their unique role as intermediaries has always been about discovering and promoting talent and content—rather than printing and distributing.”
—Peter Olson (senior lecturer of business administration, Harvard Business School, and former Random House CEO) and Bharat N. Anand (Henry R. Byers professor of business administration, Harvard Business School) in their Guest Column for Book Business (June)
“Publishers need to be personally and organizationally engaged with the [social media] tools they are asking their authors to use. There are no wallflowers at this digital dance.”
—Carolyn Pittis, senior vice president, global marketing strategy and operations,HarperCollins, in her Guest Column for Book Business (May)
