somersault

Book publishing can be a guessing game. Publishers are presented daily with hundreds of manuscripts from enthusiastic authors who believe theirs will be the most sought-after book of the century. Acquisition editors and publishers have to decide which manuscript has bestselling potential from the many that don’t.

We’d like to hear from you. What do you consider to be the best criteria for a book to reach the bestseller stratosphere? Write your ideas as a comment below and let us know. We plan to compile them into a list for a future post (along with our own ideas). Let the comments begin!

USA TODAY (@USATODAY) reports that, while “mega-chain” bookstores have crowded out independent bookstores over the last decade, it now seems that the indies are discovering a business model that might work in this digital age we’re in.

As measured by numbers, bookstores are in inevitable decline, says Michael Cader, founder of Publishers Lunch, a digital newsletter. At the same time, he says, some "modestly sized, locally connected independent stores have found a successful formula" for surviving in today's market.

[A]bout 200 independent bookstores [are] in a digital partnership with Google eBooks, launched in December. The unprecedented partnership allows customers of independent bookstores to buy ebooks via a link on the stores' websites to the Google eBook-store (which also sells ebooks directly).

And Oren Teicher, head of the American Booksellers Association, says in an age when millions of books can be found online, the “curator skills” of local booksellers “to match a book with an individual reader is more important than ever.”

Read this in full.

USA TODAY (@USATODAY) reports on one author, Amanda Hocking, who became frustrated in trying to find a traditional publisher to accept her young-adult paranormal novels. So last year she published them herself in the ebook format.

By May she was selling hundreds; by June, thousands. She sold 164,000 books in 2010. Most were low-priced (99 cents to $2.99) digital downloads.

More astounding: This January she sold more than 450,000 copies of her 9 titles. More than 99% were ebooks.

In fact, her Trylle Trilogy will debut in the top 50 of USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list on Thursday! Truly book publishing and distribution is changing. How can Somersault help you navigate these waters?

Read this article in full.

Newsweek (@Newsweek) polled a few literary leaders on their thoughts about where the future of reading is headed, given that the format of books is “evolving at warp speed” thanks to daily digital advances in publishing. Here’s a quote from James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress:

The new immigrants don’t shoot the old inhabitants when they come in. One technology tends to supplement rather than supplant. How you read is not as important as: will you read? And will you read something that's a book — the sustained train of thought of one person speaking to another? Search techniques are embedded in ebooks that invite people to dabble rather than follow a full train of thought. This is part of a general cultural problem.

Read other quotes here.

Here’s insight into buying behavior. According to a new study reported in TIME (@TIME), people whose surnames start with letters late in the alphabet may be the fastest to buy. What could possibly explain this weird phenomenon, which the study authors dubbed "the last-name effect"? The research didn't provide a definitive reason, but the authors offer an intriguing theory.

Since America's obsession with alphabetical order often forces the Zs to the back of the line in childhood, they suffer. They were always the last to get lunch in the cafeteria — sorry, Young, the other kids bought all the chocolate milk again — and had to beg for the teacher's attention from the back of the classroom. So later in life, when the Zs — and even onetime Zs who became As through marriage — see an item they really like for sale or are offered a deal, they jump on it, afraid that supplies won't last. The chocolate milk is finally in front of them. So they grab it.

What implications would this have for your brand?

Read this article in full.

Interested in a free website that collects in one location the links and RSS article and news feeds from more than 300 media sources written for publishing, editing, and marketing professionals, and provides multiple services for monitoring a brand’s online word-of-mouth? Created by international publishing strategy and services agency Somersault Group™ (http://somersaultgroup.com) especially for publishing executives and content creators, the SomersaultNOW dashboard (http://netvibes.com/somersault) is intended to be used as an Internet start-up page, browser homepage, bookmarked favorite, or mobile portal.

You can use the dashboard as is, or customize it for your personal needs by registering a free account with Netvibes.

==> If you find this free online dashboard useful, please tell others about it on your blog, in your tweets, on your Facebook updates, by email, etc. Please include the hashtag #SomersaultNOW in your tweets. Here's a suggested tweet you may want to use: Check out the new #SomersaultNOW free Web dashboard created for #publishing & #marketing professionals http://bit.ly/fLYNYe .<==

The site contains news feeds and links divided into 9 tabbed categories: Publishing, Editing, Innovation, Leadership, Branding, Marketing/PR, Social Media/Word-of-Mouth, Research, and Religion News. Two additional tabbed sections consist of resources to assist users who want to monitor their brands’ current online and social media buzz, and selected links to publishing and marketing content designed to be read on mobile devices using Wi-Fi connections.

Among the daily RSS feeds on the SomersaultNOW dashboard are those from such media as Publishers Weekly, The New York Times bestseller lists, Shelf Awareness, American Booksellers Association, CBA bestseller lists, ECPA, The Association of American Publishers, Digital Book World, mediabistro.com, and Seth Godin’s blog. Direct links are included to websites like BookWire.com, Chicago Manual of Style Online, and Common Errors in English Usage. The dashboard even has the daily edition of the Dilbert comic strip, and words-of-the-day from Oxford English Dictionary, Dictionary.com, and Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

The dashboard’s “Monitor Your Brand” tab offers the ability to conduct real-time Twitter searches as well as back-tweet and hashtag searches, Addict-o-matic and BoardTracker searches, image and video searches, and services including MonitorThis, Social Media Fire Hose, Google Alerts, and TweetBeep.

“We created the SomersaultNOW dashboard to help users leverage the swiftly shifting landscape of today’s publishing world by staying informed about it,” says Jonathan Petersen, Somersault’s social media evangelist. “Our dashboard assembles quickly accessible collective knowledge in one convenient place.”

Somersault Group™ (Somersault™) is a partner-managed LLC with offices in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan. The company’s purpose is to enable publishers, agents, ministry organizations, and Christian authors to quickly leverage rapid changes in communication technology, emphasize excellence in branding and marketing communication for an author’s business development, and extend the highest editorial standards to achieve the goal of helping people experience God’s kingdom. Somersault’s mission statement: to change lives by connecting inspirational content creators with readers using exceptional creativity, right-now technology, and old-fashioned personal care. For more information, visit somersaultgroup.com.

On The Nervous Breakdown (@TNBtweets), J.E. Fishman (@JEFISHMAN) scans the bookstore trade and hazards to forecast its fate in this world of digital publishing:

1. Superstores will shrink in number.

2. Non-book merchandise will consume half the bookstore.

3. More independents will die.

4. Google eBooks will not save independents.

5. Independents will succeed by going into the experience business.

6. Booksellers will charge admission and split the fee with visiting authors.

7. Booksellers will go forth, projecting their expertise into the community.

8. Publishers will open “bookstores” again.

Read this article in full.

On The Nervous Breakdown (@TNBtweets), J.E. Fishman (@JEFISHMAN) dedicates this list of publisher blunders to his friend Seth Godin:

1. Knowing their suppliers (authors) better than their customers (readers).

2. Failing to do market research.

3. Thinking big advances produce “heat.”

4. Assuming readers think like them.

5. Worrying more about stealing than about selling.

6. Trying to cut their way to profitability.

7. Failing to teach business principles to English majors.

8. Publishing too few books.

9. Refusing to collude.

10. Forgetting what business they’re in.

Read the article in full.

News Corp. debuted The Daily (@daily) today, a "digital newspaper" designed specifically for the 14.8 million iPads sold since last April and the millions more expected yet to sell. Joined by Apple executive Eddy Cue, the company's Internet division chief, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch unveiled the publication to which his company has committed around 100 staffers and an investment of $30 million.

"No paper. No multi-million dollar presses. No trucks," Murdoch said. "We're passing on these savings to the reader, which is why we can offer The Daily for just 14 cents a day." It represents an opportunity to "make the business of editing and news gathering viable again," he said.

Read this CNN Money article in full.

For a critical review, read “The Daily - stunning but too slow.”

For an alternate review, see “Why The Daily’s Detractors Are Missing The Point.” 

More than 1,200 publishing professionals gathered at Digital Book World 2011 (@DigiBookWorld) in NYC last week for 3 days of forecasting the future of publishing. A quick roundup of news coverage, tweets, PowerPoint slides, and reactions to Digital Book World 2011 (#dbw11) is located on the DBW website. For example, from the Los Angeles Times

In 2010, ebook sales rose by around 400% and pulled in almost $1 billion in sales. Madeline McIntosh, Random House’s president of sales, operations and digital, said her company is working on the belief that by 2015, half the books readers buy will be ebooks.

And from Eric Hellman

“Fear no ebooks” was the message of the conference, and it was a welcome message to many of the participants that I talked to. “I’m just trying to learn about ebooks” and “we’re trying to decide what to do” were phrases I heard more than once.

Read this in full.