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Monthly Archives: June 2009

The Power of the Physical

The world is getting more virtual every day. We spend increasingly less time with newspapers and books and more time with our kindles and our laptops. This means that we all need to focus on online marketing and ebooks, on social marketing and powerful virtual communities.

But at same time, this means that opportunities are opening up to market creatively in the physical realm. …

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Three Ideas for Writing Your Book to Be Marketed…

…that will actually improve the editorial quality of your book.

One, establish alliances with key influencers while developing the book. This can take many forms. It starts with identifying the influencers. Who is in a position to speak with authority about your topic and has an audience that listens to what they have to say? …

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What is Quality?

I’m going to argue that success as a writer is going to get harder…unless you are very good, in which case it’s going to get easier.

Quality is going to become increasingly important.

Quality, by my definition, is the extent to which a book delights its target market.

Delighting one person is better than pleasing ten people, …

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Are Returns Really So Bad?

We hear a lot about returnability as the BIG PROBLEM in publishing. Everyone hates returns, including me. But a little analysis shows that returns are not publishing’s big problem.

Richard Curtis has a great post on the BEA session Stupid Things Your Publisher does, during which Bob Miller speaks about returns as one of the two things driving the death spiral of the industry (the other being unearned advances). …

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Digital Piracy and other Digital Thoughts

Once again, Kassia Krozser provides great insight, this time with her discussion of digital piracy. She points out that publishers are being pulled down the same road, kicking and screaming, that music company execs were not so long ago.

Our advantage, for now, is that the physical book is still a superior medium, …

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Jazzing up the Logo

Since the publishing world is changing so fast, we thought we’d jazz up our logo for the web 2.0 age.

Here is our new logo:

 

Here is our old logo:

Personally, I like ‘em both, but the new one, is more, well, 2009. In any case, …

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