Yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. This has me thinking about backlist. We spend a lot of time talking about the future and worrying about the frontlist, but what can set a publisher apart from the rest is a profitable backlist and arguably what can set a bookseller apart from the rest is thoughtful curating of backlist titles.
Increase Sales and Lower Costs with Better Metadata
More and more digital platforms are sourcing their content from ONIX files, which makes it easy for publishers to take part without increasing their workload. The catch, though, is that the information needs to be in the ONIX files to be shared, and currently most publishers are not including enough information in the files they’re creating.
Midlist: I Will Survive!
Chelsea wrote about James McGrath Morris’s piece in HuffPo last Tuesday and made some really enlightening observations (“Every title is ‘face-out’ online’—Chelsea, you’re blowing my mind!).
It’s true that metadata, a.k.a. the ONIX files that publishers craft so carefully and thoroughly, can actually make midlist authors more visible online. This not only impacts ebooks, but regular books too.
Midlist Authors Might Actually Be More Visible Online: A Rebuttal to HuffPo
Super Saturday a Little More Suped Up
On Saturday I attended the CBA Super Saturday conference for indie booksellers. I sat in on a discussion that sparked a recurring dream of mine: Finding Hidden Money. Bronwyn Addico and Mandy Brouse (the winner of this year’s inaugural Chase Paymentech Young Bookseller of the Year), from Words Worth Books gave this talk and they were mostly talking about running events and the way that events should be run. First of all the similarities to the idea of providing local news in a hyperlocal model came to mind.
Post-BookCamp Brain Explosion
This past weekend, the second-ever BookCamp Toronto brought together publishing types of all sorts for a day of discussion, discovery, and drinking (the latter starting as early as 10:30 am, in Michael Tamblyn’s now-legendary Kobo Q&A/ summer wine tasting). The BookCamp “unconference” model is an intriguing contrast to the usual progression of talks/presentations/limited discussion time.
Facebook's Open Graph Has Huge Potential for Books
Facebook announced it’s Open Graph earlier this week, opening up to the rest of the web and making the user experience more social in the process. But what does this mean for books?
One Book, One Twitter: Voting Starts Monday!
“What if everyone on Twitter read the same book at the same time and we formed one massive, international book club?”—Jeff Howe in One Book, One Twitter … aka #1b1t
That’s the concept behind One Book, One Twitter (#1b1t ), and I think it’s pretty awesome.
One Book, One Twitter is the brainchild of Jeff Howe (@crowdsourcing ), and here’s how it works
Social Media Cheat Sheet
Bookselling Innovation That Will Save the Industry
EBooks, eReaders and eBooksellers are all the rage in publishing reporting. Amazon announces that Christmas Day 2009 was the first Christmas where eBooks outsold their print counterparts. Kobo announces a new global strategy.
