I have finally come across the bookstore concept for the future and it’s not coming from Amazon or Barnes & Noble with their cross-channel pipe dreams. It’s Shakespeare and Co., which opened under new ownership in November 2015 and currently operates one store in the Upper East Side of New York, with more planned for…
The Digital Book World Conference & Expo (DBW) notably shifted its attitude towards major technology platforms this year. The platform giants Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google were ominously dubbed “The Four Horsemen.” They were referred to as such throughout the conference, and the language used to depict these companies matched the apocalyptic theme. Described as…
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…
Day two of the Digital Book World Conference opened with a focus on data, particularly data that examines industry-wide bookselling trends. Unfortunately, it’s clear that much of this data is largely incomplete and the conclusions publishers can pull from it are shaky at best. Michael Cader, creator of Publishers Launch, led a session that explored…
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…
Sophie Rochester asks in a recent article on The Bookseller, “Can publishing keep its soul in an increasingly data-driven future?” Rochester seems to have her doubts. She makes the argument that data-driven decision making conflicts with the creative intuition of editors and authors. If all book publishers do is chase sales data, then they will…
On Tuesday, Barnes & Noble CEO Ron Boire announced at the eTail West conference that B&N will be launching a long-rumored prototype store this year. Though Boire did not reveal the exact launch date or location of this store, he did say that the goal of the store would be to bridge the digital and…
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…
More than ever before, publishers are attempting to sell books directly to consumers. But, what if this trend plays right into Amazon’s hands? What if the effort to shift sales away from Amazon actually gives them more power? Could the direct-to-consumer (D2C) movement backfire and create a worse dynamic in the industry? We live in…
