How do you know if what you’ve created is worthwhile? In my experience, it has to pass the “good enough to steal test.” Business owners, authors, artists, and musicians don’t like to hear this, but it’s true. The fact is the majority of goods and services produced do not actually meet this benchmark of success.…
There are a number of key attributes successful publishers will be known for in the future. These core capabilities will be very different from the ones that have led to the modern empires of the Big Five. Some attributes will remain the same, of course. For example, it will always be crucial for publishers to…
Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL) and the Center for Informational Development (CIDM) asked publishers how they are developing and publishing their content in our 4th annual survey, “Following the Trends.” With close to 350 participants ranging from writers to content strategists, information architects, and publishers, the breadth of knowledge and insight was prodigious. Each year this…
In today’s book business environment, teamwork and collaboration is more important than ever. We are often working with teams around the country and around the world. These days publishers, authors, agents, editors, PR, and marketing people are often in different locations. The new economy has opened options for creative schedules, work-at-home options, and working with…
Creative industries are often hesitant to embrace data-driven strategies, fearing that the numbers might supplant creativity. Online publishing platform Inkitt holds the opposite view and was founded on the conviction that data can discover the next bestseller. Inkitt describes itself as the first data-driven digital publisher. The platform has a built-in algorithm that analyzes reader…
One of the sessions I was most excited to attend at this year’s Digital Book World Conference & Expo was Rand Fishkin’s talk on search engine optimization (SEO) and book discovery. Fishkin is the CEO and founder of Moz, a leading SEO and content marketing software company. I anticipated this session would be filled with…
In the age of mobile, digital, social, and online shopping, brand and marketing messages are increasingly interpreted and catalogued by computers. As a result, metadata is taking on a new and important role for authors and publishers. It is becoming a crucial foundation for successful direct-to-consumer marketing and discoverability. We all know that content consumption…
Scholarly publishing is a technology business. That’s been true for some time, of course. Yet the technology-driven approach to business is profoundly and fundamentally different from traditional publishing practices. How can scholarly publishers reconcile that dichotomy? How should a publisher utilize today’s technology in order to drive innovation? Those were the questions recently put to…
Trade publishers launched a number of new direct-to-consumer marketing initiatives this winter, all of which are efforts to make books more discoverable online and grow captive audiences. Recently three programs caught my attention: Crave, a romance fiction app launched in December by Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books; Signature, a consumer-facing site launched by Penguin Random…
Publishers who sell ebooks direct to consumers typically do so in EPUB format. That’s because most publishers are still wedded to the false sense of security DRM provides and EPUB offers a popular DRM solution. Contrast that with Amazon’s format, mobi, where Amazon is the only company who can apply and manage mobi’s DRM’d files…
