Author and marketing guru Seth Godin is asked for advice by Harper Studio on their blog: “The huge opportunity for book publishers is to get unstuck. You’re not in the printing business. The life and death of trees is not your concern. You’re in the business of leveraging the big ideas authors have. There are a hundred ways to do that, yet book publishers obsess about just one or two of them. Here’s the news flash: that’s not what authors care about. Authors don’t care about units sold. They care about ideas spread. If you can help them do that, […]
A Bush Memoir? Best to Wait
The consensus of publishers interviewed by the AP’s Hillel Italie is the President Bush should not be in any hurry to look for a book deal after leaving office. Knopf’s Paul Bogaards says, “Given how the public feels about him right now, I think patience would probably be something that I would encourage.” Jon Karp at Twelve points out that, even if there is a hardy domestic market for a Bush book, foreign publishers will not rush to buy rights the way they did for Bill Clinton’s memoir. “I don’t think Bush can get the kind of money Clinton did […]
Miami Book Fair's 25th Anniversary
The 25th Miami Book Fair International begins on November 9 and organizers “expect some of the world’s most acclaimed writers to attend, including Salman Rushdie, Nathan Englander and Joyce Carol Oates, as well as some locally based talent.” Co-founder and bookseller Mitchell Kaplan tells the AP, “I think there is still room for lots of growth. I think Miami will continue to grow and diversify as a literary community.”AP
Barnsley Looks Ahead
Harper UK ceo Victoria Barnsley gave a speech called Media’s Last Diehard? at the London School of Economics last night. Improbably, though it has taken 10 years for online sales of physical books to comprise 12 percent of sales at HarperCollins, she speculated that “within say 10 years more than half our sales will come from digital downloads.” She acknowledged that territorial rights will be “pretty hard to police” if ebooks become that prevalent and “also said it would be difficult to establish a profitable pricing model when most consumers are used to free digital content.”Bookseller
Google Settlement: Expanding Public Access?
Since the announcement of the Google settlement, the Internet has abounded with fantasy suggestions for changes in the agreement. On his personal blog, executive director for the Digital Library Federation Peter Brantley offers a level-headed proposal on expanding access to the public in areas with “underprivileged populations.” Simply put: “I propose that public terminals be accessible on a tiered basis. If a certain percentage of a public library’s served population falls beneath the poverty level or a similar metric, the number of public access terminals is commensurately increased. At public libraries, internet access is a priority; so is access to […]
Stalking Steve
The NY Observer seems to think Doubleday group publisher Steve Rubin should just retire already, what with the “devastation” of Jon Krakauer’s cancelled manuscript, disappointing sales for Andrew Davidson’s The Gargoyle, and having the world’s most successful adult novelist not yet ready to give a delivery date for his new book. And they’re miffed that Rubin is canny enough not to play the game with them: “So far, Mr. Rubin has remained silent on the matter. When approached by Pub Crawl for a profile last week, the onetime publishing reporter declined repeatedly to be interviewed and took impressive measures to […]