Archive
“The iPod Moment for Books”: How Serious is the UK Publishing Industry?
Amid all the chat about Kindles, Iliads, SonyReaders and ebooks generally revivifying a “flat” books market, there is the latent hope/fear that Apple’s next iPhone (to be announced next Monday, keep up) will also have ebook capability.
Such a sexy, “converged” device would surely corral latent consumer desire to read books on a screen rather […]
Published: June 6, 2008. Read more →
Why Agents Need Good Websites
Do agents need (good) web sites? It depends who you ask. Some agents don’t have web sites at all - and, alarmingly, some agents I’ve spoken to continue to take a fairly dim view of the web as a whole, almost considering it beneath or outside their areas of responsibility.
None (that I know of, […]
Published: March 31, 2008. Read more →
The end of The Wire
I’ve just watched the last episode of season five of The Wire. If you don’t watch or know the show, my apologies - but for me, it’s almost (possibly even) as good as seasons 1-4 of The West Wing - those written primarily by Aaron Sorkin. In fact, all I want to do now is […]
Published: March 14, 2008. Read more →
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (200,000 times)
In 1999, I wrote a business plan for the company I was then working for, Canongate Books. The plan was for the Scottish Arts Council, and the idea I’d come up with was to make “pop promos for books” which would get a web and film festival showing, and drive traffic to the Canongate site […]
Published: February 14, 2008. Read more →
Free: PDF vs. MP3?
In among all the recent interest in free I wanted to pick up on something I mentioned in passing (I think during a question) at RRO a couple of weeks back.
We have an increasingly broad range of options these days for electronic reading devices - be it the basic (phone, computer), dedicated (Kindle, Sony Reader), […]
Published: February 13, 2008. Read more →
Free (conomics)
We’ve long, long, long-since argued that giving books away for free online is a great way to market them.
However, not all - in fact very few, possibly close to none - of our clients agrees, despite some great anecdotal evidence from the like of Corey Doctorow, Seth Godin and now, as fate would have […]
Published: February 11, 2008. Read more →
Radiohead Customer Service
I’ve always felt that customer service in e-commerce is vital - that you only get one chance to stuff up a relationship with a customer; that you’re competing with Amazon (who in my experience have crap customer service, but the perception is that they are the high water mark); and that you should do […]
Published: October 11, 2007. Read more →
Freeconomics: Radiohead vs. Publishers
As we all know, last week Radiohead did something interesting. I’d like to acknowledge that it was a very smart (and lucrative) thing for an established band to do - and to use it as an entry point into debate about the future of the book and its distribution online.
To recap, from our perspective […]
Published: October 9, 2007. Read more →
For One More Day - Live
Our new site for Mitch Albom’s new paperback, For One More Day, has just gone live. We think it’s quite special.
Published: September 7, 2007. Read more →
What Did Anna Wintour Call Her Blog?
We have a few clients who hate the word blog as much as Anna Wintour. Wintour - editor of American Vogue - got lots of press earlier this year when it was reported that she hates the word “blog” so much she asked her staff to come up with improvements. Thing is, I can’t find […]
Published: September 3, 2007. Read more →