Is a digital edition even worth the trouble any more? A major magazine advertiser has allegedly decided that it will no longer count digital editions towards rate base. (Rate base is the guaranteed minimum number of copies of a magazine the publisher promises to deliver.) See Major Ad Buyer Tells Magazines It Won’t Buy Tablet …
Attract more readers If the book market is a zero sum game, then any advance in ebooks means a decline in print books. The different formats are competing for larger slices of a static pie. (Although there is a small group of people who buy the same title in print and as an ebook.) If, …
How print refuses to die Print Books Outsold Ebooks In First Half Of 2014 According to Nielsen’s survey, ebooks constituted only 23 percent of unit sales for the first six months of the year, while hardcovers made up 25 percent and paperback 42 percent of sales. In other words, not only did overall print book …
We need to stop talking about “digital” The imprecise language people use about the “digital transformation” of publishing is getting frustrating. I just read an article that says “Hearst got a late start in digital.” Gee, thank you very much. That tells me almost nothing. Saying that a publishing company has increased its investment (or …
There are lots of ways you can improve a landing page to get better sales results, and wise marketers do lots of testing to find out what pages work best. But have you wondered … If you manipulate someone into buying a subscription have you done yourself a favor? There are all sorts of ways …
Rather than sporadic posts, I’m going to write one weekly column on my thoughts on issues in publishing. I’m not going to limit myself to B2B or even professional publishing. Some of the material will be about transformations in the industry. Some will be about writing. Some will be about self-publishing. I’ll discuss magazines, newsletters, …
There were some interesting discussions at BIMS about optimizing email for mobile, including a great session by my friends from Real Magnet. This is an important thing to watch because more and more people are reading (or at least triaging) their email on mobile devices. My biggest concern is the next step — getting the …
You probably have it in your pocket. I had a lot of interesting conversations at BIMS about monetizing mobile traffic. The concern is that as traffic moves from a desktop, where there are several ads per page view, to tablet and mobile, where there are fewer ads per page view, it’s harder to keep the …
Continue reading ‘The dangerous technology that’s going to kill your ad-supported website’ »
A colleague went to a meeting of publishers — mostly magazine publishers — and reported that many of them are finally realizing that this “the iPad will save the magazine” stuff should be filed right there next to “the Segway will transform city life.” Digital, yes — in a very fragmented, confusing way. iPad magazines, …
Continue reading ‘The end of this iPad nonsense, finally?’ »
Apple never even tried to understand magazine publishing, and magazine publishers were stupid to play along. Now Publishers want out of Apple’s Newsstand jail. It was a bad deal from the start, but publishers were willing to jump in because of all the breathless promises about the “digital revolution” — that still hasn’t done much …
Continue reading ‘The Apple newsstand was an abortion from day one’ »