It’s hard to predict what’s going to happen next with publishing. (Remember when the Apple newsstand was going to revolutionize publishing?) I’m going to give it a shot anyway and make a few predictions. First, I’m going to start with some trends that we’re seeing now, and will, I think, continue to see … 1. …
Continue reading ‘The coming explosion of niche publishing’ »
This is the last of my 3-part series on what marketing needs to know about IT. Here are links to part 1 and part 2. Be Diplomatic There’s a huge cultural gap between marketing and IT, and the sort of things that work in a sales or marketing environment might not work in a techie …
Continue reading ‘What Marketing Needs to Know About IT, Part 3: Learn the Right Approach’ »
Here’s an interesting article to stretch your concept of the digital magazine. 5 Digital Magazine Trends to Keep an Eye On in 2015 Magazines have traditionally been issue based, because that was the only way to distribute them. But the web is a constantly moving target. So what does a magazine on the web look …
Continue reading ‘“It was in the issue with the tiger on the cover”’ »
In Part 1 I discussed how different the marketing and IT perspectives can be, and I gave a few suggestions on how to bridge the gap. The most important, in my opinion, is that a marketing department needs a “marketing technologist.” That is, somebody who understands marketing and technology, who can bridge the gap between …
Continue reading ‘What marketing should know about IT, part 2 of 3’ »
As more and more business moves to the web and other digital technologies, marketing and IT — which used to have very little to do with one another — are being thrown together on big projects. Sometimes this can get uncomfortable for both sides. In this first of a series of three articles, I will …
Continue reading ‘What marketing should know about IT, part 1 of 3’ »
I’ve been trying to catch up on the dispute between Amazon and the big six publishers on the question of ebook pricing. It’s a pretty interesting story. Years ago, Amazon wanted to set a ceiling on ebook prices at $9.99 because they thought this would encourage the young ebook market. Publishers didn’t like the downward …
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Between my blogs and my fiction and my actual work, I write a lot of words, so from time to time people ask me for advice about writing. I’m very qualified to speak on the subject as far as professional writing is concerned. I was an editor of several B2B publications for many years, and …
Should publishers be agnostic about print v. digital delivery? A lot of B2B publishers talk about trying to move their subscribers off of print. For some it’s almost an ideological thing, but typically they do this for a number of very practical reasons, including … To save the cost of printing and mailing. To avoid …
More and more people are reading emails on smartphones. For some senders a majority of the recipients open their emails on mobile devices. On the web, you can make a page “responsive” — which means that the server detects what kind of a device is asking for the page, and renders it accordingly. You can …
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Who wants to carry two devices — if you’re not paid to do it Last week I mentioned that tablet sales are flat, and most of the development work is moving to mobile. That seems to be true for consumer use of tablets, but tablets are finding a niche in some business applications. There’s an …
Continue reading ‘May 11, Tablets may move to business, start your freelance editing career’ »