News and opinion on the changing world of book publishing
April 2009
PT thanks New York–based marketing consultant Rich Kelley for his reporting. Social media and search had quite a mashup at this year’s Search Engine Strategies Conference. For three days, 5500 attendees alternated between panels on social media optimization strategies, talks on Google’s new AdWords interface, tuning websites for search, and much more. For its opening [...]
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Laura Hazard Owen | March 2009
“Twitter is really the stupidest thing in the world,” Chris Brogan, blogger and social media expert, said in his Blogging and Social Media panel at the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishers conference in February. But he didn’t mean it. At first blush, Twitter does seem like a dumb idea. It describes itself as “a [...]
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Laura Hazard Owen | February 2009
Yesterday, PT attended Chris Brogan’s “Blogging and Social Media” tutorial at Tools of Change for Publishing 2009. Brogan is a social media/community-building super blogger–check him out here. His panel wasn’t a lecture or traditional speech; rather, it was a conversation with the audience. He jumped from topic to topic; showed us his Facebook, Google Reader, [...]
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Laura Hazard Owen | December 2008
To be on the Web or not to be on the Web—sorry, technophobic authors, that’s no longer the question. Rather, what should be on your website and how can you draw traffic to it? There’s no universal key to success. But with help from a recent groundbreaking report and four web designers who specialize in [...]
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PT thanks New York-based marketing consultant Rich Kelley for this report. “Content is no longer something you hand down from on high on a sacred tablet,” advised John Byrne, editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek. Today it’s more like “a campfire that you use to gather people. What becomes important is what then happens among the people.” The [...]
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PT thanks New York–based marketing consultant Rich Kelley for his reporting. Can you get a good ROI in social media? That was one of many questions on the minds of hundreds of publishers and advertisers at the International Advertising Bureau’s Leadership Forum on User-Generated Content and Social Media in June. Speakers and panelists agreed on [...]
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November 2007
Aggregation is so 2006. The new web is all about distributed media, and widgets are the new web’s wunderkind. With widgets, users can easily remix, repost, and share chunked content, making them a popular (and rapidly growing) marketing tool. According to ComScore, more than 48% of all US internet users – over 87 million people [...]
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May 2007
Countless are the questions and few are the solutions publishers encounter when approaching “the digital problem” confronting the industry. But several publishers seem to be cracking the code, albeit from different ends of the spectrum. Travel publishers are capitalizing on its category’s unique potential to be nuggetized and monetized digitally, at times even rendering a [...]
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February 2007
Late last fall, Kenneth Brooks, VP Global Production and Manufacturing Service at Thomson Learning, decided to give his staff some homework. For a company whose target audience is under the age of 25, the majority of the staff’s tech knowledge was a little out of date. Everyone could throw around the term wiki (you know, [...]
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November 2006
Ann Coulter, contentious as she is, saw page views (and book sales) skyrocket when she launched her website www.anncoulter.com. “A website that’s an instant hit is like having 10 Oprahs at once,” Joni Evans, ex-William Morris agent and Coulter rep said. “It really is the future.” To better understand agents’ involvement in their authors’ e-lives, [...]
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