Category Archives: Future of Publishing

Go read This | Jackie Collins to Self-Publish – GalleyCat

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Kind of telling how something like this can happen to so little fanfare, discussion or debate:

In our forthcoming So What Do You Do? interview with Collins, she reveals exclusively to us, that within the next three weeks she will release an eBook for The Bitch, a complete rewrite of her previous version of the novel, with a price point of $2.99 or less.

via EXCLUSIVE: Jackie Collins to Self-Publish – GalleyCat.

It’s a real sign that the industry is REALLY changing and that it is the authors that are driving much of that change (as I’ve written about before way back in 2006 and again in 2010).

Eoin

Why JK Rowling’s New Book Might NOT Be A Boon For Booksellers

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I’ve been seeing quite a bit of commentary about J K Rowling’s newly announced book along the lines of the tweet below(1):

The Bookseller also reported some great positive comments like:

Jonathan Ruppin, Foyles web editor, said: “It is clearly huge news, it is the talk of the office already. It will be the biggest selling book of that time, I am sure other publishers will move their books out of schedules to make room for it.

But the truth is there are reasons to expect that the book will NOT be a boost to booksellers. Many reasons in fact, but here are just four:

1) Supermarkets. Like they did with Harry Potter, it seems highly likely that supermarkets will attempt to attract buyers into their stores by selling the new book below cost. Such competition makes such highly hyped titles difficult to sell for independent booksellers and even chains have trouble competing with the likes of Tesco.

2) Ebooks. Well the truth is that booksellers will largely NOT benefit from ebook sales, rather Amazon, Apple and Kobo along with whoever sells the ebook editions will.

3) Online Sales. I suppose the online retailers will do well, but pre-orders, especially through Amazon and Amazon owned sites will probably be the key winner in this space, rather than through independent or chain bookstores.

4) The Economy. So J K Rowling will do well from this but in an environment where free cash is limited the likelihood is that the book will simply change purchasing patterns in the book trade rather than expand the market. Rowling’s big name will attract money and books released around the same time will do less well than they might have with the overall impact being neutral to moderately positive rather than massive. Thus isn’t, I stress, an attack on Rowling, simply the reality of how things go.

All told I’m fairly pleased to see Rowling move past Potter and I think it was wise to move publisher at the same time enabling a proper brand extension. There’s a big part of me hopes that I am wrong, but a bigger part that expects to be right!

Eoin

(1) And I am not picking on The O’Brien Press here!

Go Read This | New EPUB spec gives tech companies the edge | Arthur Attwell

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Arthur nails it. One of the many concerns I have for small and medium sized publishers is that they will simply lose the technical ability to service large parts of the market should that market start to demand more than just straight forward text:

But for publishers, these possibilities extend the technical skill level required to create market-wowing products. EPUB 3.0 has great bells and important whistles, but you’re going to need actual software-development skills in-house to use them properly. In other words, ebooks just took a big step towards becoming software, rather than elaborate text files.

This is huge for publishing businesses, many of whom are only beginning to get their teams’ heads around reflowable text. Add the need to cost for a software development process to compete in, say, the college market, and you’ve got instant editorial heart failure.

via New EPUB spec gives tech companies the edge | Arthur Attwell.

Sure that’s an alarmist perspective but it’s one worth planning to avoid!

Eoin

Bait ‘n’ Beer | A blog about books, publishing and their intersection with technology. Among other things.

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Don’s right on the money here and it plays nicely into the theme I was getting at with my last link too. Read this and think about these things after Christmas:

For example, it’s great to have new discovery tools, but for better or worse, actual book sales (both print and digital) still rely on identifiers and other metadata to facilitate an actual transaction. Subscriptions and rentals require the ability not only to ingest and display titles and the accompanying metadata, but also to serve content in multiple formats, to interface with accounting and royalty systems and to provide a data mining tools for publishers, among other things.

Direct-to-consumer businesses, both on the sales side and on the self-publishing side require skills not typically found in book publishing businesses, including customer acquisition, understanding the lifetime value of customers/users, customer service and the ability to deal with many small transactions rather than a relative handful of larger orders from more traditional wholesale and retail customers.

via Bait ‘n’ Beer | A blog about books, publishing and their intersection with technology. Among other things..

Go Read This | Bloomsbury Institute enters reader events market | The Bookseller

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This does not terribly surprise me, but it is an interesting move and marks a move forward in the pace of Bloomsbury’s determination to diversify its revenue streams away from books, especially trade books:

Bloomsbury has set up a literary events arm called Bloomsbury Institute, hosting literary salons, lectures and book clubs, as well as providing sessions for unpublished writers.

Claire Daly, previously festival co-ordinator for the Soho Literary Festival, has been appointed as Bloomsbury Institute events manager, with upwards of 30 events planned a year, in addition to new events and masterclasses expanding the established programme for unpublished writers offered under the Writers & Artists Yearbook brand.

via Bloomsbury Institute enters reader events market | The Bookseller.