ENTRIES TAGGED "Adam Salomone"
Three questions for…Adam Salomone of The Harvard Common Press
Startups offer the key ingredients of partnership and inspiration
1. The Harvard Common Press recently announced plans to open an office in San Francisco to become more closely aligned with the food startup community. The food industry probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when most people think of startups. Can you give us an example of some of the exciting startup activity you’re seeing in this space?
There’s a lot going on in food right now, and it’s a great time to be talking about food + technology. As you say, I don’t think food is the first thing that comes to people’s minds when they think of innovation and startup entrepreneurship, but unsurprisingly it is happening all around us. I bet many of those same people are avid users of Foodspotting (which, coincidentally, was recently acquired by OpenTable for $10M) or GrubHub or any number of other apps and digital platforms that make it easier, more efficient, or fun to discover and try new foods.
Three Strategies for Content Monetization: Part 1 of 3
Now is the time to develop a content chunking and reuse strategy
In digital rights circles, we hear more and more about publishers who are monetizing their content by reusing and repackaging it creatively. To us, this signifies a shift: publishers are getting more savvy about ways they can mine their intellectual property for reusable content. Content that is repurposed for different digital environments can build authors’ brands, generate cross-selling opportunities, and most importantly increase and diversify revenue.
In this series, we will look at three strategies that publishers are using successfully to build revenue, monetize content, and profit from sales of secondary rights in the digital marketplace.
Many of these revenue-building strategies employ “chunking.” Chunking is the process of pulling content from published backlist books and repackaging it. These smaller chunks of content become part of a new book or other digital product. Think of it as a kind of content aggregation based on a publisher’s own backlist.
One intriguing example: the way Boston-based independent publisher Harvard Common Press has used technology to facilitate chunking. HCP has two focused lists, cookbooks and pregnancy/parenting. The firm holds twenty thousand recipes in its backlist. Chunking allows them, say, to collect all the eggplant recipes for a book on Best Eggplant Recipes, or curate the most-loved slow cooker recipes into a new collection.
HCP invested in a partnership with Yummly, a new ‘digital kitchen platfom’ site that uses semantic search technology. Forbes called Yummly “poised to become the billion dollar digital kitchen platform” in an article about the recipe site’s $6 million in Series A venture funding this spring. Users will be able to pay for recipes or subscribe. Both options will potentially yield royalty payments for licensed recipes.
“Publishers need to see themselves as tastemakers and players in the new online world,” HCP associate publisher Adam Salomone told Publisher’s Weekly last year. “Not just as content producers but as curators, trend-setters, and brands in their own right. And we need to do it now.”
Taking a page from her publisher, HCP author (and Bon Appetit contributor) Dede Wilson is launching what looks to be a similar venture, Bakepedia.
These represent just one type of creative use of content. In the next installment, I investigate a second business model for monetizing “chunked” content. I will also begin to cover some of the tools needed to manage your rights and the corresponding royalties.