Social Media

Pub Expo: Book Printers and Publishers Are Alive and Well—Full Speed Into the Digital Age!
March 23, 2012

An energized Publishing Business Conference and Expo, Book Business and Publishing Executive magazines’ annual event at the Times Square Marriott Marquis, March 19-21, was grounded in optimism and realism, and primed for a promising future in the digital age for book manufacturing and print-based book production.

Addressing the overflow audience at the Marriott's Astor Ballroom, our very own Joan of Arc at the ramparts, Editorial Director Noelle Skodzinski—fully armed with the arguments of comon sense and history to support her—sounded a much-needed balancing and defiant keynote to prevailing “stiff upper lip” scenarios about the decline of the publishing industry. She reminded us, paraphrasing from both Monty Python and the Holy Grail and the Encyclopedia Britannica blog’s notice that it had discontinued its venerable print edition, that publishing is not dead, change is okay, and that the future is alive with new opportunities in our pursuit of continued success and excellence in the publishing business.

How to Build a Successful Marketing Platform
March 2, 2012

Actors use a physical platform to raise themselves above their audiences, focusing the attention on themselves so that they can more easily be seen and heard. The concept of building a marketing platform is not dissimilar. Publishers generally assume that if their authors’ platforms are significant enough, potential buyers will either buy their book upon its publication or spread the word about it to others. But this is often not the case. Simply because people have heard of you or have befriended you on Facebook does not necessarily mean they will buy your book or support its introduction.

SEO Is Dead. 
CDO Rules
March 1, 2012

To all you publishers who are struggling and stressing about catching up on the latest techniques for search engine optimization (SEO) in the hopes that your books will become more easily discovered by searchers:

Stop. Take a breath. SEO is dead. We've entered the days beyond SEO. We're now playing a new game.

Since the earliest days of search (remember AltaVista?!), search engines have been locked in a battle with Web developers for control over their search engine results pages.

4 Tips and Tools for 
Tracking Your Web-Marketing Effectiveness
January 1, 2012

One of the obvious advantages of Web marketing over the traditional kind (print, TV, radio, etc.) is that nearly everything anyone does online is trackable and measurable. Each post on Facebook, each tweet fired off at the end of the day, every newsletter sent, and even every inch scrolled down a Web page can be parsed, segmented and measured.

TeleRead's Paul Biba on the Bibliotech Podcast
December 20, 2011

Our very own Paul Biba, Editor in Chief Book Business' sister site TeleRead, is the guest on this week's installment of Dquarium's Bibliotech podcast, talking about "e-books and e-publishing, the rise of Amazon, the future of libraries in the new e-content landscape, and why publishers hate libraries." Give it a listen.

6 Big Internet Trends to Watch for 2012
December 13, 2011

Amid the press of daily news, it sometimes helps to step back a bit to examine the larger Internet trends driving a lot of what we see crossing the tickers and newswires. At the AlwaysOn Venture Summit today in Half Moon Bay, AlwaysOn Founder and Editor Tony Perkins is outlining the big trends he sees with Kelly Porter, managing director of Woodside Capital. Here are the big ones they’re watching: Big Data + Cloud: More data has been created in the last three years than the previous 40,000. And with services such as Amazon Web Services, using that data is

Pirate a book and pay with a tweet – clever
December 9, 2011

From the Fortykey website comes this screenshot of a clever marketing idea: Actually, the book looks pretty interesting: ABOUT “CARDANICA” “A delicious steampunk nightmare dripping blood and oil from every crevice.”Graham Edwards, Fantasy writer “Not since Harlan Ellison’s ‘I Have no mouth and I must scream’ has there been a better depiction of man at [...]