ENTRIES TAGGED "Marketing"

Pride and prejudice and book trailers

Pride and prejudice and book trailers

How Quirk Books puts book trailers to use and measures their success.

The literati may despise them, but book trailers can be effective marketing tools when done right. Brett Cohen, vice president of Quirk Books, discusses the production and tracking efforts behind his company's trailers.

Does Digital Cannibalize Print? Not Yet.

One of the big risk factors publishers think about when it comes to digital books is that they will cannibalize print sales. Factor in the lower prices we're seeing for ebooks, and it's a quite reasonable concern. Looking at data on sales from our website, at first glance that would appear to be exactly what's happening. But that's not the full story. If there really was cannibalization happening, you'd expect to see our print sales underperforming the overall computer book market, but that's not what's happening.

Twitter Scorecard for Publishers

Recently Publisher’s Weekly published an article The Twitter Scorecard that showed which Publishers were using Twitter. I found the piece missing key elements that would provide more insight to their question “So who is twittering, and how effectively?”

Are Ebook Device Makers Missing the Market?

Over on Dear Author, Jane Litte suggests current ebook device marketers aren't effectively targeting what is likely the most influential segment of their market — women: The idea is to get women thinking that the vehicle fits into their lives, rather than the woman fitting her life around the vehicle. The most recent Kindle 2.0 ad shows a business man…

Extraordinary Piece on the Future (and Past) of Digital Books

Over on Ars Technica, John Siracusa revisits the history of the ebook, and explains why he thinks there's very much a future in digital reading

iPhone App Outperforms Most Print (Computer) Books This Holiday Season

Conventional wisdom suggests that when choosing pilot projects, you pick ones with a high likelihood of success. It's hard to argue that iPhone: The Missing Manual was a reasonable choice for testing the iPhone App waters. But while we knew it would do well, we've been quite pleased with just how well: If the iPhone App by itself had been…

Publishers Need to Get In on the Conversation

Kassia Krozser has a Cluetrain-like manifesto for publishers. From Booksquare: It's time to get your hands dirty, to dig into the real-world conversation. It's a weird thing, and sometimes awkward and uncomfortable, especially if you're accustomed to public relations-speak and the cheerleader behavior that accompanies marketing messages. When you talk directly to real people who read and buy books,…

How Should Authors Promote Themselves Online?

As the director of an organisation for writers I was curious about the announcement of Random House's new Web toolkit to assist RH authors to set up and maintain their own Web pages. booktrade.info reports: … the toolkit allows authors to customise their pages with a choice of backgrounds, fonts and colours. Authors can then select different types of content…

What We Talk About When We Talk About XML (Apologies to Raymond Carver)

Acronyms and initialisms are mysterious and potent, and frequently hide meaning and become shorthand for larger concepts. Just as ONIX became shorthand for "metadata,, XML (at least in book publishing land) is becoming shorthand for … well, a lot of things. Repurposing content, creating templates for book design, tagging — all of these are encompassed in the term "XML workflow."…

Visualizing the Advantages of StartWithXML

Here are two ways to think about why a StartWithXML workflow can be important and valuable: 1. Until very recently, we lived in a world where the book was the sun and everything else orbited around it. Now the CONTENT, the IP, is the sun, and the book is relegated to one of the satellite bodies (still often the biggest,…