Publishers are Reshaping Themselves

Publishing professional Mike Shatzkin (@MikeShatzkin) writes on his blog about the news that Hyperion plans to sell off its “backlist” to focus its attention on new titles it will develop in conjunction with its corporate cousins at Disney and ABC. He says this follows Wiley’s selling a lot of the most bookstore-dependent parts of its list, including the sale of Frommer’s Guides to Google, in 2012.

Both Hyperion and Wiley are showing us what the publisher of the near future is going to look like. They will be more focused. They will be shedding overheads so they can expand or shrink their offerings more readily to respond to opportunities and circumstances. They will be less dependant on the trade bookstore and book review trade networks. And Hyperion’s decision says something more about the future that Wiley’s doesn’t: book publishing will increasingly be an activity operating in tandem with or in service of other objectives of the owning organization. (There is a parallel here in retailing, where Amazon and Google and Apple fit this description, and Kobo and Barnes & Noble do not.)

...the current state-of-the-art for merchandising and presentation of books online is not very helpful to backlist. Most retailers return a limited number of books (10 or 20) per screen to any query. Customers have limited patience for refreshing screens, so the number of titles an online purchaser “browses through” is far fewer than the number that would catch the same eyes in an equivalent amount of time in a store. This appears to be pushing sales more and more to newer books and books on bestseller lists.

This problem of concentration will probably just get worse as mobile devices become more ubiquitous and the shopping takes places on ever-smaller screens.

Read this in full.

Also see our previous blogpost, “Publishing Must Reinvent Itself.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

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Amazon's Customer Q&A Is Social Commerce Done Right

For MultichannelMerchant (@mcmerchant), George Eberstadt (@georgeeberstadt), founder of social commerce company TurnTo (@TurnTo), writes that “Amazon now offers true social Q&A on most of their product pages.” This is one more step Amazon is taking to try to capture the one retail element online shopping misses: in-store conversational engagement with product experts.

They have built a powerful engine for ensuring that questions reliably get answered by past buyers....

The key to making social Q&A work for eCommerce is speed, and Amazon has done all the right things to make their model fast:

* The question appears immediately on the page when you submit. In the age of Facebook, this is what people expect from a social experience. Not a message that says “We’ll alert you if we decide to accept your question. It may take hours or days...”

* The question is immediately emailed to a large selection of people who actually bought the product.

* The answers get sent immediately back to the asker. That provides fast reminders about the purchase the shopper was considering – while the shopper is still in the buying moment – and a smooth path back to the product detail page complete it. And the answers appear immediately on the site for future shoppers to use and for the asker to view.

* Askers can easily submit follow-up questions, or even just send thanks, back to the answerers. That, too, is email enabled, so that it’s easy to have rapid, back-and-forth dialog about products that one knows about the other needs to learn about.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN)

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How 'Big Data' is Changing Lives

Data is increasingly defining us - from the information we share on the Web, to that collected by the numerous companies with whom we interact. Intrigued by the sheer scales involved, photojournalist Rick Smolan wanted to see how data was transforming the world.

Here, as part of the BBC News - What If? series about the future, take a look at his global snapshots - compiled in his book The Human Face of Big Data (@FaceOfBigData).

See this slideshow in full.

Consider how publishing fits in to the Big Data picture.

Also see our previous blogposts “Learning in the Digital Age” and “Digital Nation,” and all our posts tagged “Youth” and “Future.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN)

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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

The People's E-Book Democratizes Ebook Publishing

The People’s E-Book (@peoples_e) is a new epublishing service being built by Greg Albers, the founder and publisher of Hol Art Books (@holartbooks) with funds from 920 investors through Kickstarter. It will be a DIY tool anyone can use for free.

The People's E-Book seeks to be a lab, an incubator, an e-book creation platform for artists, authors, and alternative presses who want to try new things, publish new books, and push into new territories. The People's E-Book will handle ebooks of all sizes and scope, but it will excel in areas that no one else has cared to consider — the very small, the quick and dirty, the simple and the experimental.

The People’s E-book is a super-simple online tool with an intuitive visual interface to allow anyone to make e-books quickly and for free. This is barebones ebook publishing. What the photocopier was to zines, we hope The People’s E-book will be to digital books.

Read this in full.

Also see our previous blogpost, "Guy Kawasaki's New Self-Publishing Instruction Book."

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN)

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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

What's Going On With Readers Today

The above presentation was presented by Goodreads (@goodreads) CEO Otis Chandler (@otown) at the 2013 Tools of Change (@toc) conference in New York. It details how readers discovered, acquired, and read two specific titles – Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, a hardcover book, and The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, which is available in paperback.

Also see our previous blogpost, “All About Goodreads.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN)

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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

Gesture-Control Gadget For Your Laptop to be Released

New technology scheduled to be released in May has possibilities to facilitate new ways of creating and displaying content.

The Leap Motion (@LeapMotion) controller plugs into almost any newer laptop and allows you to manipulate the screen via a series of hand and finger movements in the air. It's like having a touchscreen computer, but without actually touching the screen.

Watch the above video.

Read this in full.

How will this transforming device contribute to the content you’re publishing?

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN)

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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

Quality, Not Quantity, Should be Social Media Follower Objective

Top leaders from Google, Twitter, and Facebook spoke at the annual NRB Convention (@NRBToday & @NRB_Convention) (#NRB13) in Nashville March 4 and stressed the importance of communicators (authors, broadcasters, presenters, and others) to concentrate on engaging with their audience through social media platforms and not to focus so much on numbers only.

Claire Diaz-Ortiz, Twitter's social innovation leader, said that while her company was doing some analytics, just 3 years ago "we started to see that Bible verses were doing really well."

"Someone would tweet out Bible verses and 500 people would immediately re-tweet it," Diaz-Ortiz said. "People of faith were really engaged with these Bible verses. Religious content on Twitter is incredibly engaged. You can look at a pastor such as Andy Stanley and see that he will tweet something out and get more reaction and more engagement than famous celebrities like Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber with 50 times as many followers."

Facebook's manager for policy, Katie Harbath, said, "The Internet and how people use it is constantly changing and so what worked six months ago may have changed."

Although some people add as many Facebook friends as they can accumulate, she believes the value of the site is not found in a numbers game.

"The number of fans you have on your page is important, absolutely, but in reality it's how many of those people are engaged with you. A fan is worthless if they are not seeing your content and not engaging," she said.

Read this in full.

Also see our previous blogposts, “Infographic: The Importance of a Fan Base” and "Know Your Brand Advocates."

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN)

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

Take Advantage of Google for Author Discoverability

Google Authorship is a service to help you increase the chances of raising your blog’s or website’s ranking in a Google search. By creating and maintaining a Google+ account, an author’s name is tied to all blog posts, articles, and products published under their name. When an author is “searched,” Google will list all the posts, articles, and titles associated with that author. An author photo will also appear that links back to the Google+ account.

Search Engine Land (@sengineland) says, “If a user returns to the search results (after reading an author-tagged search result) for a certain period of time, Google will add three additional links to similar articles from the same author below the originally clicked link.”

Read this in full.

On SEOmoz (@SEOmoz), Jeff Sauer says, “The sooner that you connect Google+ authorship to a new domain, the sooner you will be indexed.”

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN)

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

Papercasting: Literary Trailers for the iPhone Generation

Alexander Mayor, digital producer at Papercasting (@papercasting), explains his new book service in this article for The Literary Platform (@TheLitPlatform). He says ‘papercasting’ aims to create new hybrid media trailers for books that people can consume on their smartphones, tablets, laptops, or desktops.

For a new generation of readers, music fans, and film lovers, the initial experience of these cultural works is increasingly not a retail space or publishing house but a piece of personal technology – the shop is in your pocket or inside your laptop. Our time is increasingly spent in the company of devices, not books and records. Thus the competition for the reader’s attention is intensified; the opportunity cost of one form of media choice weighs heavily on all the other present options.

The idea at the heart of papercasting is simple: bring to life the premise of books in as imaginative and entertaining way possible and you establish the value of the book and close the sale. Create something for writers and readers to share. Recreate a little of the magic of an in-store event but for a potentially far bigger audience. Make the trailer available from the back of the book jacket. Make it come alive in the shop by harnessing the DIY-media advantages of the digital era – the fact that with the right skills we can now create our own compelling, high-quality media at low-cost and high speed.

Here’s an example of papercasting:

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to produce audio and video book trailers that strategically promote your content and brand.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN)

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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

Debunking the Myths of the First 100 Days

The Boston Consulting Group’s (@BCG) bcg.perspective (@BCGPerspectives) includes an article exploring the challenges faced by people newly named to the CEO position, but it also applies to anyone in a new leadership role.

A particular danger for new CEOs is basing their 100-day plan on a set of general “best practices” without taking sufficient account of the “contextual fact base” — the specifics of the new job, the culture of the company, today’s complex and dynamic business environment, and their own leadership style.

The article identifies 5 common misconceptions that may sound appealing to new leaders, but “they risk destabilizing any CEO launch.”

Myth 1: New CEOs should direct their attention outward

Myth 2: New CEOs should prove their mettle

Myth 3: New CEOs should establish a team

Myth 4: New CEOs should immediately set tough standards

Myth 5: A new CEO should be the smartest person in the room

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN)

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.