Skip to main content

Home/ Publishing in the Digital Age/ Group items tagged launch

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
whoelscher

Somebody please tell me the path to survival for the illustrated book business - The Sh... - 0 views

www.idealog.com/...-the-illustrated-book-business

publishing ebooks book illustrated

shared by whoelscher on 06 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • When they’re illustrated to better explain, such as showing you how to knit a stitch or make a candle or a piece of jewelry, wouldn’t a video be a better option most of the time?
  • Books are illustrated for two reasons: beauty or explanatory purpose, more the latter than the former.
  • But the illustrated books are in the single-digit percentages most of the time, with some of the more successful categories in the very low double-digits.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • This is in the US — two years or more after the launch of the iPad and Nook Color and nearly a year after the launch of the Kindle Fire. Poor sales of illustrated ebooks can no longer be attributed to a lack of devices that can deliver them effectively.
  • If the book you’re reading on an iPad or Kindle Fire or Nexus 7 gets boring or you get tired of it, you can switch to a movie, The New York Times, your favorite song, or Angry Birds with the same device. Or the chime on your iPhone will ring taking you out of your book to answer an email.
  • For the publisher of illustrated books, the book also must compete with media accomplishing the same purpose (how many new instructional videos of knitting stitches or jewelry-making techniques are posted to YouTube every day?) But they can’t do it for the same price, because that price is free.
  • So the illustrated book publisher not only has to learn how to make videos (a skill they were never previously required to possess), they also have to come up with a business model that enables their videos to be part of a priced commercial product, competing with legions of them that are free. And they have to finance a substantial creative component that isn’t contributing value to the print version at all.
  • Relevant piece of anecdata: I remember being told by somebody at Wiley a couple of years ago that a large portfolio of photographs added measurable revenue on their travel sites. For very little cost, they could make a selection of photographs available for browsing. People clicked through them pulling up a new ad each time they did. That’s the “illustrated book publishing” of the future, but it starts with having the audience.
whoelscher

GigaOm's Michael Wolf Launches Digital Publisher BSTSLLR | paidContent - 0 views

paidcontent.org/...ches-digital-publisher-bstsllr

ebooks social media publishing

shared by whoelscher on 19 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Book publishers have long attested that short story collections don’t sell; Wolf would respond they’re not trying hard enough. “Traditional publishers don’t do a lot of marketing for the midlist authors today,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s that they’re too busy trying to survive or they don’t have the budget.”
  • “I’m organizing and coordinating all the different authors and having them all communicate to their specific niches and audiences. I’m driving them to a common landing page and we created a book blog. We’re leveraging social media and talking to the press.”
  • it’s true that, with limited marketing budgets, publishers often have to focus on the big titles, and smaller authors must pick up a lot of the marketing work themselves for a shot at success.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 true fans” principle, the idea that an artist needs 1,000 true fans, “who will purchase anything and everything you produce,” to succeed.
  • that principle can be multiplied for a short story collection. “If you take a collection of mid-list fiction authors and put them together, you potentially have a culmination” of their thousand true fans, he said.
    • whoelscher
      whoelscher on 19 Oct 11
       
      Very true. It worked for the "Machine of Death" anthology, which was written by largely unknown authors.
  • This is the democratization of publishing, Wolf says.
    • whoelscher
      whoelscher on 19 Oct 11
       
      This is an over-used and grossly inaccurate term for what's happening in the industry. Democracy in publishing would spell disaster for all parties involved. There will also be a need for curators of content. So I think it might be more akin to a republic.
  • whoelscher on 19 Oct 11
     
    "If you take a collection of mid-list fiction authors and put them together, you potentially have a culmination" of their thousand true fans
whoelscher

The rise of writer/fan collaboration - 0 views

www.theliteraryplatform.com/...ise-of-writerfan-collaboration

fan writer collaboration

shared by whoelscher on 17 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Perhaps the most radical example of this was the World Builder project launched in conjunction with Adam Christopher’s superhero noir novel, Empire State in 2011. The idea was to not just encourage fan art, but to give it the publisher’s seal of approval.
  • Collaborations between writers and fans are nothing new, but a new wave of projects are revisiting the concept with modern technology
1 - 5 of 5
Showing 20▼ items per page