Hachette Book Group

One of the most experimental and exciting areas of book publishing right now, especially in the trade market, is direct-to-consumer marketing. It's a topic that has been discussed extensively here on Book Business, but it's worth a deeper dive as all of the Big Five and many mid-size and small publishers have launched experiments in this field. Book Business had the opportunity to hear three forward-thinking leaders from Perseus Books Group, Hachette, and Rodale Books on the topic at our Book Business Live event in March. They offered a variety of strategies to driving greater sales, but the big lesson was that D2C marketing is really about content marketing and relationship building.

Hachette, Simon & Schuster, Worthy, Regnery, Beaufort and Dunham Books are among publishers test driving a new social media marketing tool for publishers called BookGrabbr.

The online marketing tool allows publishers to give away eBooks or sections of eBooks in exchange for a social share from consumers. The idea is that by giving consumers book excerpts and requiring them to post about it on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, that they will spread the word about the book with their networks and the books will take off virally.

is is an appropriate time to consider the power of Penguin Random House's position in the marketplace. It is very strong. If I were any of the other four major publishers, I would fear PRH more than Amazon as a potential disruptor of my business. When I put that proposition to a UK-based executive of one of those companies at the London Book Fair last week, he readily agreed with me.

When one considers what a segmented business publishing is, the Penguin Random House combination becomes that much more eye-catching.

HarperCollins has signed a deal with Amazon to sell its books, much like the contracts the online bookseller has reached with other publishers. Relations between Amazon and the New York publishers, always rather fraught, worsened last year when the bookseller and the publisher Hachette had a multimonth conflict over the price of e-books.

Amazon discouraged sales of Hachette books to pressure the publisher, and Hachette's writers and their allies took to the barricades. The impasse was broken when Amazon signed a contract with Simon & Schuster in October and then used the same terms

Hachette's new London headquarters Carmelite House will become a "talent magnet" for authors and publishers, but the move will not compromise competition between the adult divisions, c.e.o. Tim Hely Hutchinson has said.

In an interview with The Bookseller, Hely Hutchinson also addressed the issue of author contracts, and said Hachette UK would continue to buy other businesses, with its children's division in particular earmarked for growth.

The team at Book Business recently hosted a one-day, invite-only event in NY. I had the pleasure of attending as well as moderating the first panel of the day, "Transforming Your Company for the New Era of Book Publishing."

The day was filled with highly engaging discussions featuring panelists from McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Hachette, Cengage, Perseus, Rodale, HarperCollins, and Scribd. Here are a few of the most interesting points I took away from the event:

What is our core value proposition? It's a business jargon-y type of question that the editor in me shudders to hear, but it stuck in my mind -- in a good way -- when I heard it asked this week at our Book Business Live event on March 31st. Clancy Marshall, VP of core systems at Pearson posed the question during the day's first panel which discussed transforming publishing companies in order to thrive in the digital era.

At the Book Business Live: Executive Summit on Digital Publishing, held in New York City in March, leading publishers from the trade and education sectors gathered to share insight on how they’re managing change and working to reorient their organizations. During the panel “Transforming Your Company for the New Era of Book Publishing,” speakers were asked what maneuvers their organizations are making to thrive in an era of flux.

Depending on your point of view, digital technology has either undermined or enabled the book publishing industry. Either way, there's no denying that digital technology has changed publishing. Change is constant, inevitable, and often irreversible. So it goes.

The contract between "Big Five" book publisher HarperCollins and Amazon is about to expire, and HarperCollins is refusing to sign an agreement with the new terms that Amazon is asking, a source with knowledge of the situation tells Business Insider. 

The contract presented to HarperCollins was the same contract recently signed by Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan, Amazon confirmed.

If HarperCollins and Amazon don't come to an agreement, no print or digital HarperCollins books will be available on Amazon once its existing contract runs out "very soon," our source says.