Finance

Add another happy beneficiary of the publishing powerhouse “Fifty Shades of Grey”: Barnes & Noble.

Sales of the erotic trilogy, which has dominated paperback and e-book best-seller lists for most of the year, along with the liquidation of the Borders chain in 2011, helped lift comparable bookstore sales in the fiscal first quarter at Barnes & Noble by 4.6 percent, the company said on Tuesday.

You can be more successful selling to corporate buyers if you have an ally on the inside. Find an employee who can provide you with the information you need to succeed. This information may be on purchasing procedures, buying needs or about colleagues who are for or against your proposal.

You should not seek private data or anything illegal; only relevant facts that you can use to support your position and close a sale that is in the best interest of the people and companies involved. People with the following characteristics are most likely to successfully promote your cause internally:

In the weeks that I’ve been putting together my ebook bestsellers breakdown, which examines the titles that are doing better in digital formats than in print and investigates how titles hit the bestseller list, one common key to success pops up over and over again: The power of a sale. A one-day Kindle Daily Deal can drive enough sales to propel a title onto the New York Times ebook bestseller list for just one week. And self-published authors’ low-priced titles are taking up more and more spots.

It all started with John Lehman’s call-to-arms to app developers: “Those of us in app development love to talk about how ridiculous it is that people will drop $4 every other day on a cup of coffee but will not ‘waste’ 99 cents on our hot new app. I hope by now we’ve learned something: This comparison doesn’t work.”

Three and a half years ago, I had an e-reader unwillingly thrust upon me.  I ignored it at first; shunned it.  Then one day I was packing for a long trip and it came on me in a flash that if I used the damned thing I wouldn’t have to limit myself to five pounds of books in my luggage. Since then I read more ebooks than physical books. I buy a lot more books, too. Last year I noticed that books were getting cheaper, but the writing was getting worse.

Google Inc. is acquiring the Frommer's travel brand from publicly traded publishing house John Wiley & Sons Inc.  for an undisclosed price in order to bolster its offerings of local reviews around the world.

The deal is expected to close shortly. Google hasn't yet decided whether the Frommer's guidebooks will continue to be published in print or whether they will eventually migrate entirely to online. It is also possible that the Frommer's brand could be melded into the Zagat brand.

All of us are familiar with the National Public Radio model of financing. What does it have to do with scholarly communication? Right now, not much. But recent developments suggest that it could come to have more relevance in the future.

I love books. I also love bundles. Typically, the latter consist of things like indie games and productivity software and give you some pretty serious bang for the buck. If only some clever developer would combine these two loves of mine. Done! The StoryBundle Big Bang Bundle lets you name your own price for five "indie" e-books. And if you pay at least $7, you'll get two bonus books.

We've covered a number of stories dealing with ebooks and their disruption of normal publishing. There have been a lot of growing pains in the industry as the ebook market continues to expand, replacing physical sales (and their associated margins and intentional bottlenecks) and knocking down a healthy number of barriers to entry. Allegations of ebook price fixing are still in the air, pending the Department of Justice's investigation. No matter the final decision, publishers will still be free to set ebook prices as high or low as they want to. But if they insist on pricing themselves out

Significant benefits accrue to the astute publishers that grow their businesses through non-bookstore marketing. Here are 10 reasons to sell books to these buyers:

1. Increased revenue. Increase your sales in a marketplace somewhat larger in size than the bookstore market. You could double your sales with additional marketing effort directed to non-bookstore markets.