Marketing

Barnes & Noble's sales fell 6.6 percent at its bookstores and online during the critical holiday season compared with last year. But the bookseller said a core sales figure was essentially flat.

The results were reported a day after the company announced that it promoted the head of its Nook business, Michael Huseby, to CEO. The post has been vacant since July when CEO William Lynch left the company.

Its stock rose in Thursday premarket trading.

Can it really be done? Can you take a brand that's well established in the print world and move it to digital?

You might think that's a silly question as it's already been done many times. I'll bet you can rattle off quite a few print brands that have made the jump to digital. But have these print-to-digital brands really been successful? Have they truly maximized their reach and revenue potential? Or have they actually diluted the original print brand? Would they have been better off doing something else instead of stretching the original brand from print to digital?

Smashwords today unveiled our first major website redesign since our launch in 2008. We made hundreds of changes large and small.  We also made technical changes behind the scenes that will lay the groundwork for us to introduce many new tools and features for authors and readers alike in 2014. 

Among the highlights of the redesign:
The Smashwords home page - We doubled the number of books listed on the Smashwords home page from ten to 20, added 27 new book category filters to increase discoverability, added live stats

WARSAW: The Polish Chamber of Books (PIK) has drafted a bill which is set to introduce fixed prices for new book releases for 18 months after publication, with an exemption for ebooks (which have the higher VAT rate of 23%, as opposed to the 5% levied on print books). The chamber sees the proposed regulations as a remedy to the continuing decline of book sales in Poland. But some local observers accuse the chamber of hampering competition and fostering protectionism in the publishing market.

In early 2013 Yahoo purchased social media website Tumblr, and many people thought it was a bold move. The a community of millions add 75 million daily posts about everything from politics to pets. Few people saw Tumblr as a promotional and marketing tool, but the online service turned Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes by Cory O'Brien into a viral sensation and overnight bestseller.

Publishers need to make decisions every day about promotion, which manuscripts to take on, editing, distribution, finances and employees. The concept of "social exploration"[1] can help you make better decisions. This is the process of gathering, examining, organizing and testing ideas from multiple sources so you can tap into the "wisdom of the crowd." Here are the Top Ten Ways to Make Better Decisions.

The government of Quebec has gone forward with a law that was months in the making, putting a restriction on book pricing. Retailers can not discount a book more than ten percent now, and that restriction applies to both print and ebooks. However, despite the celebration of the news from booksellers and publishers, there are several problems with the measure.

First, there is no word as of yet as to how this will affect foreign retailers, specifically those who operate strictly online.

It's the holiday season and present-buying, non-profit donating and general money-spending are in full swing. Likewise, kickstarters and other crowdfunding campaigns are asking for a bit of support this holiday season to publish new books that authors and presses can't release without The People's buy-in.

Crowdfunding is nothing new. With LeanPub, PubSlush, and the recently crowdfunded publishing company Unbound, crowdfunding has officially broken into the publishing world. Even large publishers like Macmillan have created their own platforms in order to gain feedback on possible future releases, like Swoon Reads.

Simon & Schuster UK has recently announced the launch of a genre-specific social media and blog site, meant to entice avid readers of its New Adult and Romance titles. Called The Hot Bed and curated by an in-house team of four Simon & Schuster UK professionals, the site aims to be the source for news about S&S’s top-selling and most well-loved romance authors, as well as a blog for those authors to make appearances.

For those of us who market authors for a living, we know that 2013, more than any other year, saw bigger changes in marketing books. More in fact, than any prior year. The changes are largely due to the number of books that have come online both in print and digital and, in some cases, in digital only. In fact, the latest figures for books published daily are staggering.