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 …
If it works, do it again I’m not a golfer, but I heard an old guy talking about the advice he used to get from a friend who was a golf pro. He’d see the pro in the locker room, and the pro would ask, “Is it working?” The old guy would say, “It’s working,” …
Continue reading ‘Feb. 23, To expand your business, play to your strengths’ »
Can self-published authors really do all this? If you want to know why book publishers will continue to survive in the era of the Kindle, self-publishing and ebooks, just read this article: 55 Digital Branding Tips for Authors. It’s a lot for an author to take on. And if that’s not enough to make the …
Continue reading ‘Feb. 16, Why publishing companies will survive’ »
Ramen noodles in two days! It’s very interesting that Amazon — the unquestioned leader in the e-commerce and digital publishing space — isn’t trying to force college textbooks onto Kindles. Instead, they are taking a shot at the college bookstore market, but they have the sense to know what that means — which is textbooks …