Content Strategy

Press Release: Audible Introduces ‘Clips’; Save Your Memorable Listening Moments
March 18, 2016 at 11:28 am

NEWARK, N.J. — March 17, 2016 — Audible, Inc., the world’s largest seller and producer of downloadable audiobooks and other spoken-word entertainment, today announced the release of ‘Clips,’ a functionality that allows listeners to save favorite short passages and excerpts from Audible audiobooks they’ve downloaded for later listening, and also enables the sharing of these…

Startup Snapshot: The Owl Field
March 18, 2016 at 10:56 am

The Owl Field is about 3D Audio storytelling. We produce immersive audio dramas that place the listener as the story’s central character, and from a first person perspective, everything happens around the listener in a 3D audio soundscape. Characters, sound effects and music surround the listener just as in the real world. The listener wears…

Winning Strategies for Journal Publishers
March 14, 2016 at 2:19 pm

It’s three years now since I posted “The Inexorable Path of the Professional Society Publisher” and I thought it was time to revisit it. What’s always troubled me about that post is that it takes the view of the underdog — that is, of the small or mid-size professional society publisher — which is struggling…

Rand Fishkin: Effective SEO Comes Down to Good, “Amplifiable” Content
March 8, 2016 at 2:09 pm

One of the sessions I was most excited to attend at this year’s Digital Book World Conference & Expo was Rand Fishkin’s talk on search engine optimization (SEO) and book discovery. Fishkin is the CEO and founder of Moz, a leading SEO and content marketing software company. I anticipated this session would be filled with…

3 Creative D2C Marketing Campaigns Worth Imitating
February 19, 2016 at 3:24 pm

Trade publishers launched a number of new direct-to-consumer marketing initiatives this winter, all of which are efforts to make books more discoverable online and grow captive audiences. Recently three programs caught my attention: Crave, a romance fiction app launched in December by Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books; Signature, a consumer-facing site launched by Penguin Random…

Chantal Restivo-Alessi on HarperCollins' Digital Agenda
February 8, 2016 at 11:06 am

“It’s absolutely vital to stick to a digital agenda.” A voice of reason amid recent “print resurgence” hosannas, HarperCollins’ Chief Digital Officer and Vice President of International, Chantal Restivo-Alessi gave the keynote address at the Future! Publish conference event, which was staged in Berlin on January 28 and 29. Focusing on “mindflow,” workflow and networking,…

What’s Your Mobile, Snackable Content Strategy?
February 1, 2016 at 12:52 pm

Last week I highlighted some of the more interesting findings reported in a document Google published called Micro-Moments: Your Guide to Winning the Shift to Mobile. This week I want to focus on a couple of other important points in that document as well as provide an example of how publishers need to leverage the…

Three Publishers Changing the Comic Book Industry
January 25, 2016 at 2:14 pm

Over the last 10 years, Dynamite Entertainment, IDW Publishing and BOOM! Studios have done what few mid-size comic book publishers have been able to do: survive. The trio put out a wide range of series owned by their creators, but key to their success has been licensing well-known media properties — everything from "Transformers" to…

What's on the Horizon for Scholarly Publishing?
January 22, 2016 at 2:37 pm

January seems like the perfect time to look forward and think about what we might expect to see this coming year. Although none of the Chefs have claimed to be clairvoyant (at least not publicly), they all have slightly different views of the scholarly publishing and communications ecosystem. So this month we asked the Chefs:…

How Book Publishers Pivoted Toward Direct-to-Consumer Sales in 2015
December 29, 2015 at 12:48 pm

In 2015 many book publishers devoted significant resources to direct-to-consumer marketing and sales. These efforts went beyond social media and email marketing and led to the creation of dedicated platforms that engage and entertain readers as well as sell books. Simon & Schuster launched pop culture site Glommable, which offers book recommendations alongside articles covering…