In this bi-weekly 1-hour WEBcast, the Roundtable offers insight into the greater book publishing ecosystem with actionable case studies from practitioners in publishing.

In this special presentation from the Roundtable, author and ebook consultant Carolyn McCray will follow up on her successful Optimizing Your Titles For Online Bookselling Part 1, and share her experience with online bookselling with a focus on the largest retailer for ebooks, Amazon. She’ll look at how publishers and authors can use pricing tactics, groups of titles, and the Amazon recommendation queues to promote both front and backlist titles.

Bonus: If you are a publisher or author with ebook titles on Amazon that you would like Carolyn to review and comment on during the WEBcast, post a comment below with a link.

ON THE AGENDA:

• Amazon’s Internal Recommendation Queues – Some Educated Guesses
• The Life Span of a Great Sale
• The See-Saw of Royalties versus Rankings
• “Price Pulsing”
• Rotating your “Pulse” for Maximum Sales
• “Sales Nodes” – The Functional Unit of Backlists
• Getting your “Node” On
• Putting it all together: Recommendation Queue Lifespans, Price Pulsing within a Sales Node

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Trade publishers, authors, marketers, and online merchandisers interested in the Amazon Kindle marketplace.

The Roundtable will be broadcast on October 20th at 1 PM EST / 10 AM PST.

Register For the Roundtable!

THE ROUNDTABLE

Carolyn McCray, Author and Ebook Consultant

THE MODERATOR

Matt Mullin, Community Relations Manager, Digital Book World

Join the Roundtable for provocative discussions every two weeks that set the tone for another exciting year in the publishing industry!

• Register to participate LIVE
• Subscribe to the audio podcast
• DBW Members can access the on-demand video archive of The Roundtable

AUDIO

The DBW Roundtable

In this 1-hour WEBcast, the Roundtable offers insight into the greater book publishing ecosystem with actionable case studies from practitioners in publishing.

As summer in publishing ends and houses look towards the Fall, a lot of coverage is paid to the latest titles and the newest models. But in a recent post, Roundtable regular Don Linn asserted that too much focus has been placed on devices and big retailers and not enough on the business developments reshaping distribution and digital + print integration. What are the developments that are really reshaping the way publishers do business? We’ll explore issues surrounding workflow, distribution, and ebooks from a perspective outside the retailer perspective.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

• Managers interested in workflow issues.
• Trade publishers interested in new distribution developments.
• Digital professionals exploring direct-to-consumer initiatives at publishers.

The Roundtable will be broadcast on September 29th at 1 PM EST / 10 AM PST.

Register For the Roundtable!

THE ROUNDTABLE

Don Linn, Founder, Linn and Co.
Brett Sandusky, Director of Product Innovation, Kaplan Publishing
Laura Dawson, Content Chief, Firebrand Technologies
Pablo Defendini, Interactive Producer, Open Road Integrated Media

THE MODERATOR

Matt Mullin, Community Relations Manager, Digital Book World

Join the Roundtable for provocative discussions every two weeks that set the tone for another exciting year in the publishing industry!

• Register to participate LIVE
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• DBW Members can access the on-demand video archive of The Roundtable

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LINKS

Meanwhile
Don Linn, Bait ‘n’ Beer

In short, the “boring and mundane” parts of our business continue quietly to work on transformative innovations while the chattering classes prattle on about the latest shiny thing. Supply chain management, demand planning and seamless global distribution are huge and fundamental building blocks toward publishing’s future.

Welcome back from your vacation. Get your hands dirty (or get some help from someone who will).

The DBW Roundtable

In this bi-weekly 1-hour WEBcast, the Roundtable offers insight into the greater book publishing ecosystem with actionable case studies from practitioners in publishing.

Following the enormously successful Roundtable Review of Ebook Design and Formatting with Peter Meyers and Anne Kostick, this edition of the Roundtable will look at ebooks once they’ve arrived in the retailing environment. While many publishers have long mastered the art of selling titles in bookstores, proper merchandising in places like the Kindle store require new skill sets and practices.

In this special exclusive presentation from the Roundtable, author and ebook consultant Carolyn McCray will share her experience with online bookselling with a focus on the largest retailer for ebooks, Amazon. She’ll look at publishers who are highlighting their books effectively in their consumer facing metadata: product descriptions, blurbs, and more.

Bonus: If you are a publisher or author with ebook titles on Amazon that you would like Carolyn to review and comment on during the WEBcast, post a comment below with a link.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:

• Best practices for optimizing your product descriptions, editorial reviews, and more.
• Getting your books into the right categories and bestseller lists for maximum exposure.
• How people make purchase decisions in an online environment.
• What to do to make sure that readers are discovering your titles internally and externally.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Trade publishers, authors, marketers, and online merchandisers interested in the Amazon Kindle marketplace.

The Roundtable will be broadcast on August 25th at 1 PM EST / 10 AM PST.

Register For the Roundtable!

THE ROUNDTABLE

Carolyn McCray, Author and Ebook Consultant

THE MODERATOR

Matt Mullin, Community Relations Manager, Digital Book World

Join the Roundtable for provocative discussions every two weeks that set the tone for another exciting year in the publishing industry!

• Register to participate LIVE
• Subscribe to the audio podcast
• DBW Members can access the on-demand video archive of The Roundtable

AUDIO

The DBW Roundtable

In this bi-weekly 1-hour WEBcast, the Roundtable offers insight into the greater book publishing ecosystem with actionable case studies from practitioners in publishing.

Join reading design mavens Peter Meyers & Anne Kostick on August 4th at 1 PM ET / 10 AM PT as they fussbudget their way through a bookshelf of titles. Their mission? Read as many ebooks as their eyes can bear—from different publishers, on different devices, and using different apps—in order to smoke out a top-10 list of common formatting and design mistakes.

From nitty gritty annoyances (botched smart quotes) to big picture no-no’s (TOC snafus), they’ll help authors, publishers, and ebook designers avoid the kinds of missteps that turn book lovers into ebook haters. And fear not: this session isn’t just an hour long complaint fest. For each gotcha, Anne and Peter discuss fairly easy to implement alternatives.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:

• Top 10 common formatting & design mistakes (and how to avoid them).
• What readers want to see in a quality designed ebook.
• How to fix persistent problems in your digital titles.
• Best practices for ebook design.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Ebook designers, authors, publishers, and anyone involved in digital publishing for today’s major platforms.

The Roundtable will be broadcast on August 4th at 1 PM EST / 10 AM PST.

Register For the Roundtable!

THE ROUNDTABLE

Peter Meyers, Author and Digital Book Producer
Anne Kostick, Partner, Foxpath IND

THE MODERATOR

Matt Mullin, Community Relations Manager, Digital Book World

Join the Roundtable for provocative discussions every two weeks that set the tone for another exciting year in the publishing industry!

• Register to participate LIVE
• Subscribe to the audio podcast
• DBW Members can access the on-demand video archive of The Roundtable

AUDIO

The DBW Roundtable

In this bi-weekly 1-hour WEBcast, the Roundtable offers insight into the greater book publishing ecosystem with actionable case studies from practitioners in publishing.

When a publisher creates a new digital product, they don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Bodies like BISG, NISO, the IDPF, and others endeavor to create agreed upon standards for identifiers, content, and coding languages that can give guidelines on product creation. However, the pace of implementation of new standards like HTML5 may seem painfully slow when compared to the rate of digital change.

In this special episode of the Roundtable, Laura Dawson, Content Chief at Firebrand Technologies, will engage in a conversation with Todd Carpenter, Managing Director of the National Information Standards Organization, on a number of issues surrounding standards.

Attendees will learn:

• The main standards book publishers need to know about.
• Why using standards is important for the shelf-life of your ebooks.
• How you can start integrating standards into your publisher’s workflow (even when the final specification might not be complete)

On the agenda for the Roundtable:

In this bi-weekly 1-hour WEBcast, the Roundtable offers insight into the greater book publishing ecosystem with actionable case studies from practitioners in publishing.

With ebooks selling more than all print copies combined in certain titles and genres, it’s clear that a title’s digital versions should receive the same attention and design as their print equivalents. But since Liza Daly’s 2009 presentation at Digital Book World, Getting Past “Good Enough” Ebooks, many problems remain in the ebook marketplace. In this edition of the Roundtable, we’ll dive deeply into the ebook landscape today and give positive examples on how to start producing better ebooks.

Among the topics the panel will explore:

• What’s Wrong With Ebook Design Today? We’ll present a partial list of mistakes,  miscalculations, and oversights that are appearing in professionally published ebooks today, and why they’re displeasing in the reader experience.
• Best Practices for Ebooks Design: Panelists will suggest some better ways to do your ebooks – and how. Should your publisher be hosting an all hands meeting of your digital and managing editorial teams to set up best practices? How often should you revisit?
• Skill Sets: Who do you need to hire or retrain in order to improve your processes? Should that person be coming from an editorial background (as was suggested in our Ebook Distribution for Small Publishers WEBcast with Publishers Weekly) or from a more technical production background? Is it a mixture of the two? What are some options for controlling costs? Who is doing good work in the field right now?
• “Mistakes Were Made”: How do you prioritize fixing previously digitized content that is not optimized for the expectations of today’s consumer? How do you make sure your titles look good on devices that have entered the market since original conversion, and then future proof your books?

This edition of the Roundtable will appeal especially to publishers involved with digital, managing editorial, production, and editorial. This is not intended to be a highly technical presentation on book making, but an introduction into the types of problems that exist in ebooks from even the largest houses and how to go about fixing them.

This edition of the Roundtable  was broadcast on June 30th at 1 PM EST / 10 AM PST. The next episode will air on July 14th at 1 PM EST / 10 AM PST.

Register For the Roundtable!

THE ROUNDTABLE

• India Amos, Digital Production ePub QA Associate, F+W Media
• Kate Rados, Group Marketing Director, F+W Media
• Don Linn, Former CEO, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
• Pablo Defendini, Interactive Producer, Open Road Integrated Media

THE MODERATOR

• Matt Mullin, Community Relations Manager, Digital Book World

Join the Roundtable for provocative discussions every two weeks that set the tone for another exciting year in the publishing industry!

• Register to participate LIVE
• Subscribe to the audio podcast
• DBW Members can access the on-demand video archive of The Roundtable

AUDIO

LINKS

Learn to be a Reader Again
Fran Toolan, Issues In Publishing

Understand the Consumer’s experience. As a company executive, you should OWN many different devices, a Kindle, a Nook, an iPad, a Kobo Reader, and any other device you can get your hands on. You should be BUYING books from different retailers (all around the world), downloading them to your device or devices and READING them. BUY books from your own website and from the websites of other publishers. This is a relatively small investment of money compared with the insights you will receive in doing so…

Ask lot’s of dumb questions internally. Understand your internal processes. Understand why certain groups work differently than others. Understand what kinds of stresses and strains producing ebooks puts on your staff. Understand how production quality breakdowns occur. Understand how rights are managed.

What Men (and Women) Talk About When They Talk About Publishing (Part 2)
Don Linn, Bait ‘n’ Beer

Quality of the work (And let’s stop calling it ‘content’, dammit; “content” comes from boiler rooms…books come from the heart.) We are, at bottom, a creative business. We are fighting for share of mind against hundreds of alternatives and if we do not put our best foot forward with regard to the titles we acquire, the care we give to the editorial process, and to the production quality of both our print and digital books, we won’t (and don’t deserve to) survive and prosper. When I see a poorly conceived, apparently unedited or copy-edited, badly designed book, that is produced (whether in hardcover, paperback or in a digital edition) in what is obviously the cheapest possible way, I fear for our future. Resources are limited, but if we can’t produce consistent quality, then let’s reduce quantities until we can. Nobody wants to buy a bad product.

The DBW Roundtable

In this bi-weekly 1-hour WEBcast, the Roundtable offers insight into the greater book publishing ecosystem with actionable case studies from practitioners in publishing.

For this special solo edition of the Roundtable Peter Meyers, author of Enhanced Ebooks Today and Tomorrow and the upcoming Breaking the Page: Transforming Books and the Reading Experience, will lead attendees through a fast-paced tour through a dozen or so books in the iPad section of the App Store.

Peter’s goal is to spark a discussion on “the Reader’s Experience”—that elusive, almost trance-like state we all enter when devouring a (typically) print book. Do these app books deliver the same kind of immersive feeling among readers as print books? If not, why not?

Peter will break the tour down into three big categories:

• Navigating the Book: page browsing methods, search, and discovery
• New Kinds of Content: gamefication, interactive graphics, and transformative multimedia
• Extras for and From Readers: typography, comments and commentary, and servicing reader queries

In each category, he will shine a spotlight on noteworthy apps: either they succeeded in pleasing the reader in an innovative way or they failed in a manner that felt instructive — doing something wrong that we could all learn from.

This special Roundtable episode will appeal to anyone involved in digital publishing interested in understanding the current landscape of enhanced ebooks and apps. This will not be a technical how-to WEBcast, but rather a survey of creative choices that amplify (or detract) a reader’s engagement with digital books.

The Roundtable was broadcast on June 2nd at 1 PM EST / 10 AM PST. The next Roundtable will be held on June 30th at 1 PM EST / 10 AM PST.

Register For the Roundtable!

THE ROUNDTABLE

• Peter Meyers, Author and Digital Book Producer

THE MODERATOR

• Matt Mullin, Community Relations Manager, Digital Book World

Join the Roundtable for provocative discussions every two weeks that set the tone for another exciting year in the publishing industry!

• Register to participate in the next Roundtable
• Subscribe to the audio podcast
• DBW Members can access the on-demand video archive of The Roundtable

ABOUT PETER MEYERS

Peter Meyers is an author and digital book producer. He writes about and helps companies create reader-friendly digital books. Author of Best iPad Apps (O’Reilly, 2010), Peter’s next book is Breaking the Page: Transforming Books and the Reading Experience (O’Reilly, 2011). Peter blogs at www.newkindofbook.com and can be found on Twitter @petermeyers.

AUDIO

The DBW Roundtable

In this bi-weekly 1-hour WEBcast, the Roundtable offers insight into the greater book publishing ecosystem with actionable case studies from practitioners in publishing.

The DBW Roundtable is a live, interactive webcast featuring some of the most outspoken industry professionals gathering to discuss and debate the hottest publishing issues of the moment.

In this bi-weekly 1-hour WEBcast, the Roundtable offers insight into the greater book publishing ecosystem with actionable case studies from practitioners in publishing.

In the past week, two major publishers have announced vertical communities dedicated to engaging with readers, especially those of genre fiction: Criminal Element, from Macmillan, and F+W Crime, from F+W Media and Tyrus Books. In addition, Penguin has announced its own community site dedicated to writers and readers of genre fiction, Book Country. It’s been approximately 2 years since the founding of Tor.com, one of the first publisher created community sites for fantasy/science fiction readers: What sort of results are publishers seeing from audience engagement in niches? In this episode of the Roundtable, we’ll answer questions like:

Why and how a publisher should create and foster a vertical community, within and without genre fiction?

What goes into the day to day maintenance sites like Tor.com or BookCountry? What sort of skill sets and staff are needed to truly support a community of readers?

What specific practices do publisher verticals need to enact to remain relevant and authentic?

How does a publisher serve an audience who might not always agree with its business decisions?

This edition of the Roundtable will especially appeal to business strategists, marketers, publicists, and editors at publishers large and small.

The Roundtable will be broadcast on May 5th at 1 PM EST / 10 AM PST.

Register For the Roundtable!

THE ROUNDTABLE

• Benjamin LeRoy, Publisher and Community Leader, F+W Crime
• Liz Edelstein, Senior Manager, CriminalElement.com and HeroesandHeartbreakers.com
• Pablo Defendini, Interactive Producer, Open Road Integrated Media
• Kate Rados, Group Marketing Director, F+W Media

THE MODERATOR

• Matt Mullin , Community Relations Manager, Digital Book World

Join the Roundtable for provocative discussions every two weeks that set the tone for another exciting year in the publishing industry!

• Register to participate LIVE
• Subscribe to the audio podcast
• DBW Members can access the on-demand video archive of The Roundtable

AUDIO

LINKS

Penguin Launches Book Country, An Online Community for Genre Fiction
Calvin Reid, Publishers Weekly

In a phone interview, Barton acknowledged that while Book Country is focused on developing writers, she expects to find new authors for Penguin through the site as well. But she also emphasized that Book Country will be “publisher agnostic” and encourages editors from Penguin as well as other publishers and literary agents to join the Book Country community. Agents or editors who wish to contact a writer about their work can notify Book Country staff who will then ask the writer if they want to be contacted. The private beta of Book Country has had about 500 members using it.

“Criminal Elements” is Live!
Scott D Parker

The site will feature pre-release excerpts, original short stories from various authors in the space, topical blog posts, and will eventually be offering downloads and podcasts. It’s a place for fans of the genre to come together in one exciting online space. At launch there will be excerpts, original fiction and articles by authors Joseph Finder, Steve Hamilton, Rosemary Harris, Charles Ardai, Luis Alberto Urrea and more. Much like its successful sister sites, science fiction community Tor.com and romance community HeroesandHeartbreakers.com, CriminalElement.com is “publisher neutral,” meaning that it will include author participation from all publishers and other content creators, and is not exclusive to Macmillan authors.

F+W Buys Tyrus Books, Launches Crime Vertical
Jim Milliot, Publishers Weekly

Through the new vertical, F+W Crime will publish a mix of e-books, hardcovers, trade paperbacks and print-on-demand titles. The first e-book only titles, which will have a mix of prices, will be released in June and F+W plans to release 200 in 2011. The list will be a mix of originals and, according to F+W communication director Stacie Berger, “rediscovered gems from the past inspired by some celebrity genre names.” While some e-books will appear under the Tyrus name, the celebrity genre titles will be released under Prologue Books, an initiative that LeRoy had been developing.

The DBW Roundtable is a live, interactive webcast featuring some of the most outspoken industry professionals gathering to discuss and debate the hottest publishing issues of the moment.

In this bi-weekly 1-hour WEBcast, the Roundtable offers insight into the greater book publishing ecosystem with actionable case studies from practitioners in publishing.

Publishers need to think more direct-to-consumer, but for many houses, that model entails a difficult transition. In this episode of the Roundtable, we’ll answer questions like:

Who are the publishers making strides in their relationships with readers and what are the best practices for fostering those connections? Each of our panelists will share real world examples and explain what makes those publishers stand out.

How can a direct-to-reader mindset reshape your publicity and marketing department?

What specific practices do every publicist and marketer need to know when dealing with bloggers and community advocates?

What can data about your customers do to change your acquisitions and product development cycle?

This edition of the Roundtable will especially appeal to business strategists, marketers, publicists, and editors at publishers large and small.

The Roundtable was broadcast at April 21st at 1 PM EST / 11 AM PST.

Register For the next Roundtable!

THE ROUNDTABLE

• Brett Sandusky, Director of Product Innovation, Kaplan
• Don Linn, Former CEO, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
• Sarah Wendell, Book Blogger & Author, Smart Bitches, Trashy Books
• Bridget Warren, Former Co-Owner, Vertigo Books

THE MODERATOR

• Matt Mullin, Community Relations Manager, Digital Book World

Join the Roundtable for provocative discussions every two weeks that set the tone for another exciting year in the publishing industry!

• Register to participate LIVE
• Subscribe to the audio podcast
• DBW Members can access the on-demand video archive of The Roundtable

AUDIO

LINKS

Marmite, Maturalism, and Mangification: What Publishers Can Learn from the World of Trends Research
Laura Hazard Owen, Publishing Trends

In a recent interview, Random House CEO Markus Dohle said he is “convinced that publishers have to become more reader oriented in a marketing and trend finding/setting way rather than in a direct to consumer selling way.” The tricky part: How can publishers be trendspotters?

London Book Fair 2011: The Great Debate: Will Publishers Be Relevant to the Future?
Andrew Albanese, Publishers Weekly

Readers, [London-based tech author and publisher James Bridle] says, think of publishers as the people who tell them they can’t lend e-books, and who insist on bad DRM and excessive pricing. He called “social reading” the next great wave and, rebutting Franklin, recognized that our best readers were also our best potential authors, praising nascent efforts like Richard Nash’s Red Lemonade imprint for its “community-based” approach. “If publishers today are not irrelevant, we will be soon,” he insisted, “unless we sieze back the high ground.”

Communities The Key, Publishers Told
Leigh Anne Williams, Publishers Weekly

Colin Robinson, who is copublisher at OR Books, which publishes only print-on-demand or platform-agnostic e-books, said his company works to hand-sell books online. “The Internet comprises hundreds of thousands and millions of communities based around specialty sites, listserves and blogs, and we needed to work closely with these communities if we were going to be able to sell our books and tailor our marketing messages and materials to specific interests and requirements,” he said.