I read a great article today by Matthew Ingram where he explains the current difficulties facing the news media as a 'barbell' problem--entities on either side of the barbell are going to be just fine, he argues. It's the people in the middle who are going to get squeezed! Ingram's theory is this: If you are a top gun, like, say, the New York Times, you'll be fine, because you have both resources to fund new ventures and cash flow to wait it out until you see which of those ventures stick. Similarly, if you are a small-town paper--the other end of the barbell--where "forces...

Rich Adin, a professional editor, has a thoughtful essay up about Read an E-Book Week. He says he has seen many complaints on author boards that authors' sales did not appreciably benefit from the RAEW sale, and he offers some reasons for why that might be (e.g., authors choosing too-small discounts; doing little-to-no promotion; not tagging their books so the right readers see them; choosing the wrong books to promote). The point that most interested me, though, was the issue of complacency. Stores don't promote author, Adin argues. And he's right: Smashwords had a special section for Read an E-Book Week,...

From Torontoist comes this interesting little tidbit: The Toronto Public Library has partnered with Indigo (Canada's major book chain) as an affiliate in yet another effort to raise a bit of cash. I reported earlier about another out-of-the-box experiment they're running, involving advertising on the due date slips. In that story, a library official said they would be exploring multiple revenue ideas. It seems he meant it! As Torontoist illustrates, users who browse the TPL catalog will now see a box encouraging them to buy the book if they want to, as a way to support the library. They can click through to...

"The new BlackBerry Z10 is designed to keep you moving," reads the copy on the website of a new promotional campaign for the recently-launched smartphone. "So we've given it to three people who never stop. These incredibly talented and ambitious people are always looking for the next exciting challenge." Yeah, that's pretty corny. But I was certainly surprised to learn that one of the three people involved in the Z10 campaign was the author (and longtime TeleRead favorite) Neil Gaiman. (The campaign's other two artists are the singer-songwriter Alicia Keys, and the filmmaker Robert Rodriquez.) But here's the interesting bit: As the promotion's website explains,...

We've been writing quite a bit lately about book publicity tactics, which is probably why a recent tweet about a Pan Macmillan promo caught my eye this morning. The promotion couldn't be easier: You post a pre-written tweet about a new Richard House series called The Kills, and then the first book of the series (there will eventually be four, and the first is titled Sutler) is automatically downloaded onto your computer, tablet or smartphone. (I just gave the promo a test run myself, and was surprised when I was offered my choice of a Mobi or EPUB file.) The Kills, as the book's...

Thanks to Nate over at The Digital Reader for alerting me to this great blog post by author Lindsay Buroker. Buroker runs through a number of Amazon 'tricks' which, for various reasons, are losing steam as powerhouse author tools. Some tools, such as tagging and keyword manipulation, never worked that well anyway because people don't tend to search for books using those methods. Others, such as freebie promotions, are less potent than they used to be because of Amazon's restrictions on these practices. So, what was Buroker's perhaps surprising conclusion? She points out that authors should not lose heart when these things...

We recently had our Family Day long weekend, and the Beloved and I spent some of it at the home of his sister. She's the mother of a toddler and a newborn, and while we were visiting, the subject of books came up. I enjoyed having the opportunity to pick the brain of a parent on this particular subject. (What did this mom think were the biggest mistakes children's book publishers are making? What does she look for when she shops for her kids?) Some of her comments surprised me. 1. Children's Book Advertising Why aren't they doing this? That was her biggest...

Good e-Reader ran an interesting post earlier today about Oklahoma’s Metropolitan Library System, which took the unprecedented step back in December 2012 of advertising its e-book lending services on broadcast television. According to the post, the 60-second spot was developed by the library system's own IT department. It ran for about two weeks on the area's Fox and CW affiliate stations, and for roughly a month on local cable channels. And as the library system's marketing director, Kim Terry, explained, "over 1,700 new customers began using our eMedia site since the commercial started running, which was a 22 percent increase over the previous month.” Perhaps not surprisingly,...

I learned an important lesson today about attracting readers who are new to e-devices: marketing matters. Case in point: A co-worker who came in this morning, and proudly told me she'd bought one of those "e-book things" over the weekend. Which one? The Kobo Arc! I guess that I, with my gadget-loving background, had forgotten that this was supposed to be the Arc's intended purpose. It looked, to me, like a somewhat cheaper version of the Nexus tablet, which I saw as more of a computer than a reader. But consider this newbie consumer's point of view: It's sold in the...

“Showrooming.” While I can’t say I’d heard the specific term before, it’s easy to understand what it’s talking about—the practice of using a physical store as a “showroom” where you can examine something and then go buy it online. This is one of the trends many pro-agency pricing comment submitters noted in their comments to the DoJ, though in the DoJ’s response it was largely referred to as “free-riding.” As I mentioned the other day, a lot of people do “showrooming” in bookstores with their Kindles. However, it’s also long been a popular activity on smartphones for general-purpose...

I had never heard of this Ewan Morrison person before blogging that story quoting him the other day, but all of a sudden it seems like he’s coming out of the woodwork everywhere. I saw a mention on the E-Book Community Mailing List of a column by him on The Guardian. It says it’s third in a series, but I’m not sure what the other two are because there aren’t any links to them there. In this column, Morrison basically pooh-poohs the idea of social networking to sell self-published books, pointing out that if you’re spending 80% of...

When author Penelope Trunk wanted to publish a book about the American Dream, she writes in her blog that she was blown away by how inept her traditional publisher was when it came to marketing it. (She does not name the publisher, but says it’s a major household name.) This publisher had already paid her an advance, and as the time approached when the book itself would be published, she was stunned when her publisher originally suggested marketing through “newsgroups”, and then through a LinkedIn fan page. When she took a meeting with them to discuss the issue, she...