Marketing

It's no surprise that there's a lot of confusion around metadata for books. It's complicated. If only they hadn't used the "M" word—metadata. It reeks of digital complexity. And then you read the standard definition: "Metadata is data about data." Gee, thanks. As if your eyes hadn't already glazed over.

Growing up doesn't really end at age 20, so why should young adult fiction stop there? The New Adult genre, a growing subset of young adult lit, aims to give voice to the post-high school experience and its implied transition to independent living: college, moving away from home, traveling, starting first jobs and even sex. The content may be darker and more mature than what is traditionally found in YA, and the protagonists range from late teens to early 20s, but the stories offer many of the same kind of identity challenges and coming of age narratives as their YA brethren.

I refuse to participate in recessions. While I'll readily admit that it is tough to break even, let alone increase sales, in this economy, trust me when I say that there are still plenty of opportunities for creative bookselling.

Technological developments are regularly presenting a raft of new challenges and choices. Through it all, publishers are continually being asked to demonstrate their utility. With self-publishing a click away, authors ask publishers, "Do we still need you?" If printing and distribution can now be accomplished at a much-reduced cost and degree of complexity, must publishers redefine their raison d'être? Are publishers having an identity crisis?

San Francisco’s counter-culture atmosphere has contributed to the artsy and free-thinking essence of a number of the many publishers located there, giving two of them, Chronicle Books and McSweeney’s, more in common than locale. Both are known for meticulous and original design and packaging. Be it high-quality paper-over-board bindings, embossing or die-cuts, or be it never-before-thought-of content and formats, each keeps innovation at the forefront.

Companies across the globe are full of executives who believe in the traditional model of digital marketing and may need a little convincing to recognize that times are changing. You may also find that these executives are a bit jittery because their once tried-and-true tactics are becoming less effective. The well of consumer patience for constant interruption is exhausted.

Do you think that having a recognizable and consistent look to your books helps with sales? Elda Rotor: Yes, particularly with our signature black spine editions for Penguin Classics, the uniformity helps consumers, students and book lovers spot our editions more quickly, and with that comes the understanding that the titles are in line with our overall vision for the series, a broad and diverse list of titles, carefully edited, translated and produced.

 Ryan "Dinosaur Comics" North writes in with the improbable tale of his amazingly successful Kickstarter for a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style adaptation of Hamlet, which has made him a fortune and prompted him to release the whole thing under a Creative Commons license:

    There's a little under two days left on the project for my chooseable-path version of Hamlet called To Be Or Not To Be. You can play as Ophelia, Hamlet, or Hamlet's Dad, but if you choose him you die on the first page and play as a ghost.

For 36 years, an undaunted Irwin Zucker, himself a public relations professional, has been hosting bi-monthly meetings of the Book Publicists of Southern California, bringing together at each event a hundred or so published authors and authors on the way: to share ideas, display their works, and to learn how to sell more books.

As with IBPA -- which started a few years later as the Publishing Association of Southern California (PASCAL), with then former PW Publisher Dick Bye as President and Jan Nathan as Executive director. It then became PMA and is now IBPA, a 3,000-member strong national organization -- Zucker reveled in the trenches of book publishing outside the mainstream channels. He brought enthusiasm, hope and know-how to equip authors with the tools to work around barriers to entry and, eventually, if they found a strong enough audience, to find their way into the mainstream; or, more often, to stay independent and pocket the proceeds and the glory on their own.

The Hobbit earned nearly $85 million in theaters this weekend, setting a new record for December box office performance.

Capitalizing on Hobbit-mania, Tor/Forge Books played a book trailer for The Wheel of Time series before The Hobbit in some theaters. A Memory of Light comes out January 8, 2013, the fourteenth and final book in Robert Jordan‘s beloved Wheel of Time series.