Clik here to view.
Full-service publishers are rethinking what they can offer
At lunch a few months ago, Brian Murray, the CEO of HarperCollins, expressed dissatisfaction with the term “legacy” to describe the publishers who had been successful since before the digital...
View ArticleClik here to view.
New publishing companies are starting that are much leaner than their...
“It’s become very, very clear to me that digital trumps print, and that pure digital, without any legacy costs, massively trumps print.” — David G. Bradley, owner of Atlantic Media, quoted in The New...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Business models are changing; trial and error will ensue
The announcement late last week that Random House is starting three digital-first imprints was just the most recent example showing that publishers are exploring new business models. Just days earlier...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How much time and effort should established publishers be spending on startups?
We are now in a period replete with startups that want to be the disruption in publishing. We see a lot of them in our office. Part of our business involves helping startups find relevance and contacts...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Atomization: publishing as a function rather than an industry
The announcement of what amounts to the first book publishing program spawned by Google demonstrates a paradigm we’re seeing repeatedly. It suggests a sweeping change in publishing from how we’ve known...
View ArticleClik here to view.
More on atomization: why the new publishers are coming
The most recent post here laid out a future for trade publishing that will be less and less about traditional publishers and more and more about non-traditional publishers delivering books into the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Further ruminations about the complex notion of scale in publishing
Our May 29 conference is built around the theme of “scale” in our business, which means something different than it did a very short time ago. Usually “using scale” means “employing the competitive...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Finding your next book, or, the discovery problem
A big flap has arisen this week — which I believe I would have been equally aware of had I been home in New York rather than in London — because the giant UK books-and-stationery retailer WH Smith has...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Three points worth adding to the excellent account of the Amazon story in The...
The publication of Brad Stone’s book about Amazon, “The Everything Store”, is the catalyst for a lot of new discussion about the topic most difficult for the book business to discuss. It is pretty much...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Examining the relationship between start-ups and publishers
We are in another high-funding era for digital start-ups. The book business has always looked ripe for disruption, but never any more so than now. With bookstore shelf space shrinking, ebooks growing...
View ArticleClik here to view.
All the Amazon-Hachette coverage doesn’t seem to cover some important causes...
A great deal has been written in many venues about the current tussle between dominant Internet retailer Amazon and one of the three smallest of book publishing’s Big Five general trade houses,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
New data on the Long Tail impact suggests rethinking history and ideas about...
For most of my lifetime, the principal challenge a publisher faced to get a book noticed by a consumer and sold was to get it on the shelves in bookstores. Data was always scarce (I combed for it for...
View ArticleClik here to view.
It is hard for publishers to apply even Harvard B School advice in their...
Harvard Business Review published an article recently by Benjamin Edelman called “Mastering the Intermediaries” which gives advice to businesses trying to avoid some of the consequences of audience...
View ArticleClik here to view.
This is a teamwork play that could really give Amazon a headache if they got...
I will admit that I have long been among those who believe that Amazon has what amounts to an enduring stranglehold on the book business. They have achieved a market share — which could be in the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Export sales is one of the few areas of predictable growth for book publishers
For a client meeting last week, I was shown a chart that came from Bookstats of channel revenue for publishers. Bookstats is the recent (and now no longer) partnership between the AAP and BISG...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Print book retailing economics and ebook retailing economics have almost...
There has been a lot of conversation lately about the differences between wholesale pricing and agency pricing for ebooks and about what constitutes a “fair” division of revenue between publishers and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The support infrastructure for entities to publish is growing but the most...
I remember a song lyric from the early 70s for which the opening line was: “we don’t need more sailors, we need a captain”. (I can’t find the reference in LyricFind and I don’t remember the name of the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Getting books more retail shelf space is going to require a new approach
That bookstore shelf space is disappearing is a reality that nobody denies. It makes sense that there are people trying to figure out how to arrest the decline. There has been some recent cheerleading...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Digital Book World program this year covers the waterfront of the digital...
(This is a longer-than-usual Shatzkin Files post reviewing the topics and speakers for the 26 breakout sessions at DBW 2015. It serves as a checklist of “things to think about right now” for book...
View ArticleBetter book marketing in the future depends a bit on unlearning the best...
[Note to subscribers. We have switched from Feedburner to Mail Chimp for email distribution to our list to improve our service. Please send us a note if you have any problems or think there’s anything...
View Article
