Marketing
June 25, 2012
"Oh, you mean this week," she says. "I haven't sold any this week. Two is what I have sold in total." Surely not? I thought suburban Britain was supposed to be a hotbed of key-swapping swingers who would glory in EL James's erotica. "Who do you think is buying this book if not your customers?" I ask. A look of inner confidence washes over her face. "Silly mothers," she says with absolute certainty. "The giggly sort, not the type who would normally read a book." At which point a previously unseen presence makes itself felt…
June 20, 2012
Media Source, the company behind review publications like Library Journal, School Library Journal and Horn Book, is launching a subscription-based site, BookVerdict.com, that aggregates over 300,000 reviews from its publications. The site is aimed at book-buying librarians, though anyone can subscribe. It includes over 20 years of reviews, including starred reviews, “best” lists and Junior Library Guild selections. “This website extends the value of our reviews beyond print, offering librarians one highly functional yet agile tool to support collection development efforts, while bringing online access to professional reviews of books and media to avid readers everywhere,” says Ian Singer, group
June 20, 2012
The children of Boston will reap additional benefits as People's United Bank, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and professional pitcher Jon Lester, who serves as the bank's Massachusetts marketing spokesperson, up the ante in supporting ReadBoston, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to ensuring that Boston children are proficient readers.
Adding to an existing relationship with ReadBoston, People's United has committed to make a $31 donation - matching the number on Lester's uniform - to the organization for every Lester strikeout up to $5,000.
June 11, 2012
Our man-on-the-street Jim Sturdivant captured some of the flavor of Book Expo America on video, encountering celebrities and fellow book junkies along the way.
June 8, 2012
What makes a book a winner? There are several critical factors that cannot be missed. Discover how you can avoid the top mistakes most untrained authors make.
- Successful marketing starts with a high-quality book. Use professional designers and copy editors, even if you have a relative or friend who can do it less expensively. Good marketing will kill a bad book quickly.
- Find a need and fill it. Your content should address a market need. A conversation that begins “I read about a new trend…” will usually yield a better product than will a conversation beginning,” I saw a great manuscript today.”
June 8, 2012
If you have anything to do with the book industry, you are probably nauseated by the mere mention of that industry's annual tradeshow, which started on Monday and wraps up today. But not everyone is some sort of book fanatic—some people just read books and are innocent about the disgusting process that brings them into being, like little children who don't know that babies are generated via
May 25, 2012
Much of the discussion about Steve Jobs’s biography centers on his management style, or lack thereof. But after reading the book, I found information that is relevant to the publishing industry. I will offer my interpretations of Steve Jobs’s philosophies and actions as they could apply to book publishing in two parts.
May 23, 2012
Former Apple software evangelist Guy Kawasaki thinks that Google+ has a lot in common with Apple.
“When I saw Macintosh for the first time it was somewhat of a religious experience for me,” said Kawasaki during a talk at the Google+ Photographer?s Conference Tuesday. “Fast forward about 25 years and I had a second religious experience — which is when I saw Google+ for the first time.”
May 18, 2012
The most expensive part of publishing is a mistake. If you can avoid the most common traps into which unsuccessful publishers fall, you increase your chance of success significantly. You may be on the right path to publishing success… but heading in the wrong direction. Let these tips be your GPS to becoming more profitable.
- There is no “one way” to market a book. There is no formula for book-publishing success. Learn what works best for you and your circumstances, create your plan and then give it your best effort.
- Understand marketing. Marketing is a process that begins with recognizing the needs of your potential customers, and then moves to developing, pricing distributing and promoting products and services to build profits by creating and expanding demand.
- Know your target reader. No book is saleable to “everybody who likes [your topic].” Use a PAR (Problem-Action-Result) statement to define the typical reader as carefully as possible in terms of gender, income, age, education and shopping preferences. This will help you focus your marketing activities.
May 11, 2012
At the BISG ninth annual Making Information Pay Conference, held at the McGraw Hill auditorium on May 3, seven expert presenters took the assembled 200 industry professionals through a fast-paced three-and-a-half-hour session slicing Big Data down to manageable bites.
Not for the faint of heart, the event was focused on the message that Angela Bole, BISG Deputy Executive Director opened with. Citing a McKinsey Institute study’s warning of a critical shortage of expert analytical information workers she said that “It’s our belief that, as an industry, we need to harness the awesomeness of ‘deep analytical expertise’ in order to create the kind of book industry that’s truly capable of the innovation necessary to stay relevant over the coming years.”
Big Data, she said, “refers to the act of ‘taming’ the volume, variety and velocity of massive datasets.” It is what takes us to a place where we’re now able to develop holistic approaches to full-scale strategies that are analytical in the deepest sense of the term.”
