There are natural advantages to being a small, independent publisher when it comes to social media marketing. But, big or small, there’s a social media marketing strategy for you. Just keep it appropriate to your type of organization, make sure you engage your audience, and go for a personal voice – whether that is you and/or your authors.
Read MoreThere is a lack of skills in the publishing industry to deal with new emergent paradigms. But it’s not just skills and structure that are lacking, but culture and attitude. In a period of accelerating change we need vastly more efficient methods of developing new concepts. In this post I want to share some thoughts about some of the changes that would be required for publishers to become more agile, generalist and collaborative in an age where we are all becoming publishers, authors, creators and consumers and as such all have a voice and opinion as well as the ability to implement our own ideas.
Read MorePublishers get real about digital as they are told: “This industry doesn’t owe you a living”.
I was lecturing at Birkbek yesterday, on digital publishing, social media marketing – and men in their pants in Basingstoke. For this was the key takeaway message for me at this year’s London Book Fair Digital Conference, which I attended and live-tweeted last weekend: if publishers don’t produce digital content, such as apps, there are plenty of men in their basements in Basingstoke in their pants who will.
In case you hadn’t realised before the announcement of the Apple iPad in January, this is the decade of the eReader. The publishing industry is going through a similar transition to that of the music industry in the last decade.
In these days when you can publish direct for ereaders like the Kindle, Cool-er and soon the iPad – or just blog a story – what’s to stop anyone stealing and copying your work illegally?
If the music industry is anything to go by, it is not the J K Rowlings, Stephanie Meyers or Dan Browns who will suffer if peer2peer file sharing becomes rampant in books, it is the already beleaguered midlist authors, whose work already struggle to find a place in a market dominated by multi-million pound global hitters and celebrities.
Read MoreTom Evans is an author, author mentor, writer’s unblocker and e-publishing wizard. Follow his memes and musings on Twitter @thebookwright
Read MoreWith the introduction of ereaders last year and the imminent announcement from Apple about the much rumoured Tablet – or
Read MoreFor those of us not at the Frankfurt Book Fair this week, it’s been easier than ever to keep up
Read MoreEveryone’s talking about Kindle 2. To those outside the industry this must sound as opaque and mysterious a revolution as
Read MoreA quick heads-up for anyone who’s not yet seen Sara Lloyd’s excellent piece for US-based library journal, Library Trends, called
Read MoreThe Amazon Kindle has finally launched in the US (we need to wait a bit longer here in the UK),
Read MoreInteresting article in today’s Independent about eBooks – including plenty of quotes from Jeff ‘Print is Dead‘ Gomez: In just
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