All that work on the tablet app is looking pretty silly now The iPad was supposed to change everything. Especially magazines. But now people are seriously wondering if the short-lived era of the tablet is over. Three years ago, could you have imagined someone calling tablet development old news? We might be there. Tablet sales …
Continue reading ‘May 4, Congrats on your old-fashioned tablet app’ »
Get ready for silliness about the Apple watch The Apple Watch just came out, and that means Apple devotees will be oohing and aahing over them. Something else will happen, too, because it happens every time there’s a new tech product or popular social media site. Marketing experts will start telling us how the Apple …
In Will new app Rook be a useful pawn in the publishing game? Anna Baddeley says this. Experiencing something for nothing, or next to nothing, can be the start of a fruitful relationship between consumer and producer. Yes, it can. Sometimes. But in my experience, “free” is a dangerous thing that can easily misfire. “Free” …
Digital Disruption and the Death of Storytelling says that Professor Douglas Rushkoff studies … … people’s inability to connect with another person or an ideology … while they’re immersed in this era of multitasking and digital chaos. How many times in the past week have you seen someone stumbling around with their face in a …
Continue reading ‘April 13, Publishing to a digitally distracted world’ »
Help! My cover is awful I usually discuss professional publishing on this blog, but I’m also interested in book publishing (self-publishing), so from time to time I’ll talk about that side of the publishing world. I’ve published lots of books. You can see them on my Amazon page. Most of my books get pretty good …
Combine SubscriptMe with Evernote … As everybody in the subscription publishing industry knows, selling content on Apple and Amazon isn’t the greatest deal because those companies want to keep the customer information — and the customer. That undermines the publisher’s business model. (Note: this is a problem for subscription publishers. Selling books is another matter.) …
Is there at least one social media outlet that does not have a marketing angle? Every time some new social media thing catches on, some marketing genius is going to tell you how you can use it for your product or service. At a certain point it gets a little ridiculous. I just saw an …
What if everything fell apart? Every once in a while it’s a good idea to ask yourself how you would keep your company going if all your existing sources of revenue disappeared. So, for example, let’s say you publish a magazine and all of a sudden nobody buys magazines any more. What assets do you …
Continue reading ‘March 16, A few outside the box ideas to rev your creative juices’ »
Newsflash: College kids don’t like e-textbooks The “everything’s going digital” crowd must be very confused. After all, for years they’ve been telling us that all content is moving to digital. Yes, they’ll admit there are a few Luddites who still cling to print — because of some deranged emotional attachment, perhaps — but sooner or …
Continue reading ‘March 9, Why the cool kids misunderstood the actual kids’ »
Not even the media gets the media right Remember when the iPad first came out and some magazine publishers were rushing to get their product into the iTunes store? There were stories of disputes between the publishers and Apple, especially about the rules for approval of their apps. Many of those stories said the problem …