At a recent Book Expo in New York City, where publishers, authors, journalists, booksellers and others meet to network and to drum up interest in new titles (and books in general), one thing was obvious: this was the rare place in these United States where the political parties met without rancor. To anyone who’s followed […]
Write where you can. When you can. However you can. I admire folks who can continue to concentrate whatever the situation. In my many years as a journalist for a big newspaper I needed to be able to concentrate amid the noise of a newsroom (that noise is lessened now that most people arrange appoints […]
It’s the time of year when best-of or worst-of lists appear. Where’s yours? Yes, you should have one. If you’re building an audience through your online platform, then a list of what you yourself like can be a real audience-engagement tool. Your list doesn’t have to be made up of current books – not everyone […]
Traditional publishers are stepping into the digital universe on their own. It might not be enough to make a dent in sales of e-books on Amazon, but publishers are beginning to move beyond books printed on paper to ones stored in the cloud. Baby steps, as an article said. Penguin Books, according to a report […]
The publishing world is late to modern-day marketing. Perhaps the Miami Book Fair will begin to make up for that when live coverage of its events stream on PBS in a few weeks. Sure, some authors are individually quite media-savvy, and use social media well. Some such as John Green, create YouTube videos that are lively […]
Just Say “No!†to Authors without Healthy Marketing Platforms How could a book with such promise turn into such a dog of a letdown? The proposal looked great. The project felt worthy enough. And the subject matter seemed as if it would be interesting to an ocean full of readers. With all of that going […]
What are you reading this summer? Are you a book reader (physical) or an e-reader (virtual)? The material is same though the sensation might be different. But the wealth of material available to anyone, online or not, is staggering. In any event, did you know that Bill Gates recommends reading lists for the summer? I […]
Are you liable to be offended by reading something because you are very sensitive, because something traumatic in your past causes you to flinch at the very mention of a something even tangential that recalls such incident? Would you demand that your teacher remove a book from a course because it might cause someone to […]
Apparently the real money is in video games. “Grand Theft Auto V†racked up $800 million in sales in just one day . That makes even the colossal sales of Harry Potter books seem almost insignificant. Books are not videos, of course. And even grosses of blockbuster movies cannot really rival the sales of a […]
There’s branding and there’s over-branding. Alessandra Stanley in the New York Times writes about the proliferation of talk shows on television sign of celebrities who seek to “expand their marketing horizonsâ€. She goes on to talk about how some celebrities, including Kanye North, refer to themselves or others (such as Kim Kardashian) as brands. That’s […]
