News and opinion on the changing world of book publishing
Laura Hazard Owen | October 2009
In 2007, we wrote about a new book publicity trend: ARC giveaway programs, in which publishers provide early copies of books to citizen reviewers through book sites or their own sites. Two years later, these programs have grown quite a bit. Details on a few: BookBrowse.com First Impressions Publisher’s fee: $750/promotion; members pay $30/year. Titles [...]
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Laura Hazard Owen | May 2009
Last fall, BookExpo America formed its first-ever Conference Advisory Board and decided to increase the show’s focus on content and programming. “In the past, we had too many sessions that were all over the map and that were trying to be all things to all people,” says Courtney Muller, Group Vice President of BEA. In [...]
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September 2006
PEOPLE The Book Industry Study Group has a new Executive Director in the person of Michael Healy, Editorial Director of Nielsen Book Services. He will be the keynote speaker at BISG’s September 8 annual meeting and may be reached at michael@bisg.org. BISG’s previous Director, Jeff Abraham, left at the beginning of the year to become [...]
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June 2006
Last year, Bookreporter.com‘s Carol Fitzgerald had the novel insight that if there isn’t an audience for a book, perhaps it shouldn’t be published. The publishing palooza has subsided a bit (Bowker recently reported that total titles were down to 172,000 last year – an 18,000 title drop from 2004), and Chris Anderson mania has everyone [...]
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October 2005
WOM’s The Word As Podcasts, Blogging, Buzz & Viral Go Mainstream Although the book publishing industry as a whole has yet to go viral in the way of blockbusters or burgers (Have you “crashed” the Wedding Crashers trailer or Had It Your Way with Burger King‘s Subservient Chicken?), many in the industry say they’re not [...]
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February 2004
Industry pundits and publicists have noted and mourned the declining space given to book reviews in newspapers and magazines over the last decade. But now that declining space has wiped out what was once an inevitable accoutrement to the book’s author and title — the publisher’s name. While the NYTBR, Time, and The New Yorker [...]
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December 2003
PEOPLE November brought some big moves in the industry, with Bill Barry going to DK as President, after a hiatus of two years (he had been at Hungry Minds when it was sold to Wiley) and Jim Jordan, Director of the Johns Hopkins University Press moving to Columbia University Press as President and Director (as [...]
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April 2002
In the War Over Market Share, Focus Groups Are a Secret Weapon If you wandered into the loo of London’s Grosvenor House Hotel last month, as did plenty of attendees at the British Book Awards, you’d have found one of the more literal-minded brand campaign “roll-outs” in recent years: stickers slapped on rolls of toilet [...]
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September 2000
“A book, e-book, any book!” is the inclusive theme for this month’s New York Is Book Country, and in the spirit of platform promiscuity, e-reading appurtenances will be out in force. For the first time, according to NYIBC president Linda Exman, the fair will feature a New Technology Pavilion to give an expected 250,000 attendees [...]
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May 2000
“You can’t get yourself on Oprah,” says Carol Fitzgerald of the Book Report Network, “but you can get yourself on the web.” And that’s the business plan in a nutshell of three new ventures — AuthorsOnTheWeb.com, PreviewPort.com, and YourNextBook.com — aiming to bring authors and audiences together on a browser near you. Without further ado, [...]
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