I'm an author. Late this year, I'll publish my tenth novel. Publish, that is, in the traditional way: with a Big 5 publisher and all that goes along with that. That sounds like a strong track record and, in a way, it is. Yet my strong advances haven't always been matched by stellar sales outcomes and, last year, I separated from Random House in the US, when we couldn't find a way to continue our relationship together.
Today's ebook subscription providers offer a nice value proposition for avid readers. It's great that the all-you-can-read models from Oyster, Scribd, and Kindle Unlimited provide consumers with something other than the print model where you buy one book at a time. Now the industry needs to think about how the subscription option can evolve further and enable even more interesting business models.
Publishers spend a lot of time and effort promoting their authors, plugging future bestsellers and courting new literary talent. But many struggle to dedicate that same level of attention to their own brand. One tried and true solution for publishers: Email.
The payoff to developing new markets for your content can be enormous. Consider the difference between Apple and Microsoft. Between 2001 and 2015 Apple has made significant moves to create or enter new markets by introducing the iPod, iTunes, the iPhone, the App Store, the iPad, and the iWatch (and soon, online television). Its sales and profits increased massively.
Yesterday I read a great post by Jane Friedman, advisor to authors on all things publishing, that had some helpful tips for authors trying to attract a wider audience on social media. You can read the full post here, but I thought I'd share some quick takeaways that publishers can use to improve their social media efforts.
The wall between publishers and their sales data is slowly but surely tumbling down. The latest retailer breaching the divide is Rakuten, the Japanese-based ecommerce company which recently announced the launch of its Books Dashboard in Japan. The dashboard allows publishers to track the sales of both print and ebooks sold through the Rakuten online bookstore.
Which is better at assessing your content interests: a display ad on a random website or the app you spend hours reading magazines or books in each month? If my recent experience is any indication, the display ad is the winner, hands down. I recently went on audible.com to explore audiobooks and picked one I thought I might be interested in. I was curious to experience the purchase process but I stopped before clicking "buy."
Home-shopping networks (QVC, HSN) reach millions of people every day with information on a wide variety of products, including books. Before you try to reach these buyers, consider your books' salability on television. Does your book ...
Evernote is an interesting platform to study from a content distribution point of view. There are plenty of users like me who rely on Evernote and interact with the tool a dozen or more times every day. Evernote realizes that and they're creating an entirely new content discovery ecosystem to make the tool even more useful.
Tired of dealing with the fragmented mobile marketplace that iOS and Android represent? The imagineers at Disney have come up with a terrific way to address that problem. It's both a much-needed solution for consumers and also a clever way for Disney to maintain a direct relationship with consumers who buy indirectly.
I'm referring to the Disney Movies Anywhere initiative, which lets you buy a movie on one platform and watch it on either platform.
