I used to be quite dismissive of the usefulness of the 20Booksto50K conference. Pre-pandemic, 20Books was all about Amazon, Kindle, Kindle Select, and making money on page reads. Great money, for a few folks who learned to manipulate Amazon’s algorithms. Good money, for some who went exclusive to Amazon and manipulated the algorithms. Okay money, for many who did what they could when they were […]
Business Musings: The Split (The Year in Review 2)
2021 marks the year that most of us who jumped into what I’ve been calling the New World of Publishing have been at this for at least ten years. A few of us, very few really, have been doing it longer. But in 2011, the numbers for indie (self) publishers became real. New venues, like Barnes & Noble’s Nook, made indie publishing look like more […]
Business Musings: Untapped (Part One)
This year, I found the spring television upfronts oddly exciting. A lot is changing in the media landscape, so much that I have trouble keeping up. Plus, as you all know, my summer was filled with moving and a boatload of deadlines. But a phrase inspired by the upfronts kept going through my mind. As I mentioned in “Heads, Sand, and Traditional Publishing,” part of […]
Business Musings: International Growth (Jumping The Digital Divide Part 4)
Trying to wrap my brain around the possibilities for growth in the digital sphere hurts. Seriously. Because the markets are so big and the opportunities so vast that I’m not capable of grasping it all. For a long time, the digital divide wasn’t just generational. It was also location-based. When the Kindle came into being and reader after reader discovered ebooks, the early focus was […]
Business Musings: Reading and Ebooks (2020 in Review)
Believe it or not, there’s some great news in 2020. Reading became cool again. With all the other distractions shut down and people stuck inside, they picked up the books they had set aside because they were busy with other things. Most publishers and writers made it easy for readers in the early part of the pandemic, by offering a lot of free content to […]
Business Musings: Sales (Planning For 2019 Part 2)
The biggest issue for the latter half of 2018 was book sales. Indies and traditional publishers both complained that book sales were down, and that a crisis was imminent. Their ideas of crisis were different, but they come from a similar source, which is the current state of disruption in the publishing industry. I wrote about where we stand on the macro level in the […]
Business Musings: The Current State of Disruption (Planning for 2019 Part 1)
A Short Series Introduction For years now, I’ve done a year-end review, examining what happened and where the industry stands. I’ve been having a heck of a time starting this year’s series. At first, I thought it was because I had had such a difficult and disruptive year. But, with the help of my Patreon supporters as well as our annual Business Master Class […]
Business Musings: Bookstores (2017 in Review)
It is no longer possible for an independent bookseller in the United States to remain in business based on in-store book sales alone. Okay, maybe a handful are doing it in high traffic areas with low rents, but not many at all. The old way is no longer the new way, and unless the bookseller understands that, the bookstore goes out of business.
But readers do want their paper books. And readers love browsing bookshelves. Sometimes readers “window,” meaning they look at books on the shelves, then order them online. Readers recognize that they will discover books that are new to them in person more often than they’ll discover them while shopping online. So book people venture into any place with books.
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