When I read the word perennial I immediately think about gardening. Doesn’t everyone? I don’t know a lot about gardening and I know less about perennial philosophy, but I do know perennials vs. annuals. Perennials come up year after year and so involve less labour and less investment. Annuals appear annually, are labour intensive and cost you money each year. The same applies to books, and a new research study by BookNet looking at Perennial Bestsellers attempts to examine those lovely perennials.
Do Sales Make an Author Overrated?
On Tuesday, Alex Good and Steven W. Beattie gave another good stir to the CanLit pot by listing who, in their opinion, are the ten most overrated fiction writers in Canada. Now, I’m not going to take sides; BookNet Canada officially loves all books equally. But working for BNC, whose SalesData service tracks approximately 75% of the Canadian book market, does make you wonder about “real value” in publishing.
Vending Machine Dreams
Something tells me that humans are sentimental beings or perhaps it is that when there is a disruption we like to hang onto something we think is undisruptable. The problem is we don’t really know what is solid enough to hold onto. Is a vending machine solid enough? The reason I am thinking this right now is thanks to an article I saw on a 100 year old butcher shop adding a vending machine so that they can serve their customers 24/7.
I began to think about the number of times I’ve passed my local bookstore in the morning on the way to the train. I stare in the window and think “I would buy that right now,” but I can’t because the store is closed.
Something for the Ladies
We in book publishing know that women make up a large majority of our market, but what do we do to cater to them? There are many ways for a publisher or bookseller to keep women in mind, but to cover them all today would be excessively long. You’re all busy people, I know. So I’ll focus specifically on packaging in this blog post.
Making Books Accessible = Finding New Readers
BNC 101: ISTCs
An ISTC is a new way of linking different formats of the same book. Unlike an ISBN, it is tied to the book and only the book, not the publisher. A simple example is using an ISTC to link the hardcover, trade paper, mass market, and epub versions of a title. Even though each format would have a different ISBN, they would share a single ISTC.
But why is it important? We’ll tell you.
(Old) Spicing It Up
There is no doubt that this summer’s biggest heartthrob was the Old Spice Guy.
The commercials were hilarious. And they would have been enough. But then the geniuses behind Old Spice guy took it up a notch and blew us away with their response campaign, making short YouTube video responses to personal messages, including tweets. It floored everybody.
What lessons can we take from this for our own social media and marketing campaigns?
Anthologize: Making Web-First Workflow Even Easier for Publishers
Anthologize grew out of One Week | One Tool—yes, one week—a project of the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University.
So, what’s all the fuss about? This is the extra step that’s been needed to make it extremely easy for any publisher to implement web-first workflow : all you need is WordPress and a plugin.
The Pages Turn Just Like... an E-Book
The Fight Over Formats: All or Nothing
Random House and the Jackal are going at it and I can’t blame them. They are fighting over some very valuable territory. We’ve all read lots about trying to claim backlist ebook rights, about the conflict of interest in becoming an agent-publisher, about single-channel exclusives being a bad idea, blah, blah, blah. This turf war has raised a bigger problem:
Does it make sense to separate ebook rights from print rights?
It doesn’t—at least not if you’re the one who only has print. Here’s why.
