White River Junction, Vt.-based independent publisher Chelsea Green received strong criticism from retailers, both large and small, last August after it made a deal with Amazon.com to exclusively sell one of its new titles, Robert Kuttner’s “Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency,” for the first few weeks of its release. In response, Barnes & Noble cut its initial order for the book, selling the title online, but not in its stores, while some independent booksellers vowed not to order from the publisher again.
Barnes & Noble
$0 Amount Massachusetts-based, nonprofit Concord Free Press charges consumers for its books, including shipping. In exchange, the publisher asks readers to make donations to a local charity or someone in need in their community, and to pass on the book. Concord plans to publish two titles a year as part of its effort to “expand the definition of publishing and re-invigorate the book” (according to its Web site). Each book will be limited to about 1,000 copies.
There is no doubt that the industry is in a period of significant transition. What can we expect 10 to 15 years from now?
The Internet has changed the way that publishing companies market books, providing a myriad of new opportunities. But marketers shouldn’t forget lower-tech methods of getting the word out. Here, some experts explain how they promote their books using both the latest and the more traditional methods.
Barnes & Noble.com (BN.com) has announced two new partnerships that further expand its capabilities in the digital world. These partnerships come on the heels of a redesign of the BN.com Web site (www.BN.com), which the online retailer unveiled at the beginning of this month. Mobile commerce service provider Digby will market books, CDs and DVDs on BlackBerry smartphones through a newly established Barnes & Noble Storefront, which is available as a free download to all current Research in Motion BlackBerry smartphone users. The Storefront is updated daily and includes rich content, such as product descriptions and images; a mobile shopping
Barnes & Noble.com (BN.com) launched a newly designed Web site this week, with a host of new features and an emphasis on interactive content and community. The site has been in the works for approximately six months, according to BN.com CEO Marie Toulantis. The world’s largest bookseller partnered with New York-based agency R/GA to bring the project to life. After speaking with a number of potential agencies, “We selected R/GA [because] we felt they had the best experience in the interactive field, and they had done some really great work [in the past],” says Toulantis. “We thought they had a
In Part I of this series, I described how supply chain thinking can be applied to business and career decisions. Correctly identifying your “value proposition” is the key to being able to diagram where in the chain of buying and selling relationships you can be most effective. Building on your core competencies, and recognizing that you need to manage your supply chain relationships becomes the business proposition. Chances are that when you first examine your supply chain, you will find that you have been a slave to it, rather than a master of it. I also noted that by rethinking and realistically recasting your