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Category Archives: World of Books

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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Bush: The Sequel

Perseus, our distributor, unveiled a clever stunt at BEA. They gathered submissions for Book: The Sequel, a collection of humorous first lines from imaginary sequels at BEA, and, in 48 hours, released the book in a variety of mediums, from printed to audio to kindle (and many other ebook formats), all in one weekend. It was a nice demonstration of their excellent Constellation capability, …

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E-book Pricing and Denying Reality

I found the NYT article on e-book pricing to be somewhat disheartening, when it comes to the ability of the big publishers to adapt to even relatively minor changes in the marketplace.

Carolyn Reidy, CEO of Simon & Schuster, says ““The concept that because a book is an e-book it should automatically be priced significantly lower than a paper book is one we don’t agree with. …

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