It might just take a publishing industry outsider to solve the current marketing challenges facing publishers. We spoke with Angela Tribelli, the new HarperCollins chief marketing officer who comes from outside the industry, about marketing analytics, the recent sales reorganization at HarperCollins, and why publishers need to think more like direct marketers.
“We need a diverse e-book market and not just a best-seller e-book market,” said Hachette’s new chief marketing and sales officer Evan Schnittman to Digital Book World at Book Expo America in New York in early June. Part of cultivating that diverse e-book market is helping bookstores get involved in the e-book marketplace.
E-book subscription services have gained traction in the past few months as several publishers have adopted the alternative access model. Safari Books Online, which allows users to stream e-books for a subscription fee (think Netflix for e-books), has been using the model for ten years. But the sudden and recent rise of e-book subscription models isn’t so much a vindication for the company as a welcome party.
A decade ago, it would have been unthinkable for an author to self-publish their own work and distribute it to half a dozen of the leading bookstores. Today, tens of thousands of people are doing it. How things have changed. One of the people responsible for this revolution in publishing is Mark Coker, the founder and CEO of Smashwords.
Google is taking a bite out of Apple among consumers who read e-books. Two out of five e-book readers who choose a tablet as their primary reading device use an iPad; at the end of 2011, two-thirds of those e-book readers were using an iPad, according to a new study from the Book Industry Study Group
Sourcebooks has been growing at a healthy clip in the past few years and has gotten a reputation as a cutting-edge publisher. We spoke with Sourcebooks CEO Dominique Raccah about using data in book publishing, Sourcebooks’s approach to e-book pricing and why it’s important to sell books directly to readers.
