What if the Game of Thrones characters were book publishers?
Similarities between the HBO series and our industry are remarkable
There’s no question that the publishing industry is going through a lot of changes. It’s the last industry to go digital, and as a result going through the fastest disruption. Watching the Game of Thrones is like watching a war between traditional publishing houses, startups, tech giants, indie publishers, and other players in the industry.
Current state of formats and platforms
A free SPI Global whitepaper summarizing industry trends
Remember the old days when PDF was pretty much the only way to distribute content and those PDFs were read on computer screens? PDF still lives, of course, but now we’re also faced with offering content in mobi and EPUB formats for consumption on a variety of platforms and devices.
A first-time author builds his team and starts writing the story
How do I find out who really knows what I need to know?
Last week I talked about the lessons learned from self-publishing boot camp. After the boot camp ended I knew I had a lot to learn. I liked the business challenges that I was seeing. For a guy coming in out of nowhere, it sure did seem great that I didn’t have to be held up to the mercy of a big impersonal New York publishing house. I knew at this point product was all that mattered. Everything else could be dealt with before the book came out, but didn’t require attention immediately.
Goodreads + Amazon: Winners and losers
Tremendous potential, but will Amazon take full advantage of it?
I decided to wait a few days before writing about Amazon’s acquisition of Goodreads. I wanted to let the dust settle before weighing in with my own opinion. Now that I’ve had some time to mull it over, here’s what I think: This has the potential to be a game-changer that could be the next, and possibly final, nail in the coffins of other ebook retailers…but only if Amazon actually does something with the Goodreads platform.
Libraries to become community publishing portals
The opportunity to help local writers become publishers
[Ed. note: The following first appeared on The Huffington Post. It has been reposted here with the author’s permission.]
Public libraries provide an essential community service by promoting literacy and a culture of reading.
With the rise of ebooks, public libraries are at a crossroads. Some book publishers, fearful that library ebook lending will cannibalize retail sales of books, are reluctant to supply ebooks to libraries at the very time that library patrons are clamoring for greater access to such materials.
Rather than standing idly by as publishers jeopardize their future, some libraries see an opportunity to take control by proactively cultivating a newer, more library-friendly source of ebooks. These libraries are developing community publishing initiatives in partnership with self-published ebook authors.
Publishing News: Goodreads readers are now valuable Amazon products
Amazon buys Goodreads, book blind dates, bailouts for French indie bookstores, and U.K. libraries will join the digital era.
Amazon marches on toward global retail domination
The whiplash-inducing headline this week was Amazon’s announcement late Thursday that it has acquired book discovery and sharing site rival Goodreads. Industry response to the announcement was “swift and laced with skepticism,” Leslie Kaufman reported at the New York Times. She quoted Edward Champion tweeting, “Say hello to a world in which Amazon targets you based on your Goodreads reviews. No company should have this power.” Kaufman also noted part of the bigger picture: “The deal is made more significant because Amazon already owned part or all of Goodreads’ competitors, Shelfari and LibraryThing.”
Wired’s Marcus Wohlsen expanded on the targeting issue Champion mentioned. He highlighted Amazon self-published success story author Hugh Howey, who was quoted in the Amazon press release saying, “I just found out my two favorite people are getting married. The best place to discuss books is joining up with the best place to buy books.” Wohlsen pointed out that “even as Amazon provides Howey an ‘independent’ platform to spread his work, his success also makes him a valuable Amazon product” — and now Goodreads readers will become valuable Amazon products as well.
Inspired by children’s ebooks
Bologna Ragazzi digital award winners break free of print constraints
The third TOC Bologna took place this past Sunday on the eve of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair. It was a terrific show and closed with a session announcing the winners of the Bologna Ragazzi Awards for digital publishing. You’ll find all the details about the finalists here and I’ve also embedded a short video below where you can see the winners in action.
Author by necessity
Documenting my journey from clueless newbie to published author
So what am I doing here? As President & CEO of LabMD, Inc., a uropathology medical laboratory in Atlanta, Georgia, (we test blood, urine, and tissue for cancer and other medical issues), this is not my normal venue. However, shockingly, I am writing a book about battling the Feds while I continue to fight the Feds and learn about writing and publishing a book all at the same time.
Dangerous ideas from the world of startups
The art of exposing our ideas to the world and listening for their response
Dustin Kurtz, marketing manager at Melville House, wrote a piece last week about the incursion of startup vocabulary in the world of book publishing. He says:
[N]ow the models and the metaphors of the tech industry are, full-throatedly, without embarrassment, being used to talk about not just the methods of publishing books, but the books themselves, and this is a grand and wondrous idiocy, a diminishment of art, a gravity well of stupidity so deep that we cannot even talk about it properly, only study its effects.
As someone who has helped without embarrassment to bring those models and metaphors to the industry, my interest was piqued.
Mobile native publishing: The rise of dynamic content services
Why our concept of content must evolve in the post-PC era.
One reason that industry disruptions prove so vexing to market leaders is that disruptive waves simultaneously barrel through assumptions about customer needs, industry economics and operational best practices.
Consider the case of the motion picture business, an industry that was disrupted when the “talkie” — once derided as a costly gimmick — subsumed the silent picture in the 1920s.
The takeaway from the film industry’s transition is instructive. The talkie not only changed how movies were made and the economics of the business itself, but critically, it changed our concept of what a movie could be. Read more…
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