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Book publishing professionals have been interested, to say the least, in the evolution of the music business over the last decade or so: its sudden conversion to a digital delivery system, the easy availability of music over the web, the free downloads that crushed traditional sales, the small labels put out of business and the … Read More »

Two seemingly disparate parts of your life can sometimes collide with a bang. I have worked in the independent publishing business forever. A decade into that career, my wife and I employed a nanny named Vivian Maier to help raise our kids. Years later, Vivian (sadly, only after her death) has burst into prominence as … Read More »

“Social media has one foot in the highly commercial world of advertising and the other foot in the realm of human communication—hopefully sincere human communication. This combination might not always be a comfortable one; but it is now possible to glimpse some social media strategies that may be especially well-suited to the needs of indie … Read More »

I have been arguing in this space that successful indie publishing is largely a question of understanding and working a niche or niches. If that is truly the case, all of us in the indie book business need to be looking hard at the question of how to use social media to promote our titles. … Read More »

Of course it is early to speculate about the effects of this merger, but if we think about it as the latest step in a process that has been moving forward for the last decade or so, it will not seem very surprising.
A place to start is with the lead sentence in last week’s article … Read More »

“They have special access to the information needed to make their books content-rich—years of personal involvement in a subject area, a close relation to a special-interest publication, a means of identifying individuals especially qualified to write books for a particular niche—some special advantage or edge.”
In the last post about what makes a good publishing … Read More »

I defined the attributes of a good publishing niche in part one of this post. In this second part I am going to explore the idea of the “pseudo-niche,” the publishing possibility that might look like a winner for an independent publisher but will probably not support good sales because it does not offer the … Read More »

In a previous post, I cited the second habit of successful independent publishers as: “They focus on a niche, but they are always looking for new, or better yet, related ones, because they know that the half-life of a particular niche may only be about 2.5 years or less.” To begin at the beginning though, … Read More »

Will good authors put up with rough editorial handling? They will, and with enthusiasm, if from the outset you involve them in the development of the marketing ideas that shape the book. The idea is to get them to focus not just on the publication of a book with their name on it, but on … Read More »