DIGITAL MARKETING AND COPING WITH
By Mike Shatzkin on Jan 03, 2017
AMAZON ARE THE TWO BIG CHALLENGES FOR PUBLISHERS AS WE BEGIN 2017 MIKE SHATZKIN ON JAN 03, 2017
MIKE SHATZKIN, AUTHOR OF THE HIGHLY INFORMATIVE SHATZKIN FILES, WROTE A VERY INSIGHTFUL PIECE AT THE BEGINNING OF JANUARY, PRIOR TO ATTENDING THE DIGITAL BOOK WORLD CONFERENCE ON JANUARY 17-19, 2017. THE FOLLOWING ARE EXCERPTS FROM THE FULL ARTICLE. READ HIS ENTIRE ARTICLE BY CLICKING THE LINK.
I am getting ready to attend my first Digital Book World as a“ civilian”( having programmed and moderated the first seven), Thinking about DBW entails recognizing how different the book publishing world today is from what I expected three or six years ago. Be that as it may, the big challenges for the industry— how to change marketing to hit customers who are mostly learning what to buy online( which, as you’ ll see, is well covered) and how to cope with the steadily growing market share that is Amazon’ s— remain the ones I would have anticipated.
Although I do actually know other people who, like me, consume just about all their books on screens, we’ re a minority who are not really looked upon by those who have stuck with paper as the avant garde. Whatever market share ebooks achieve by evolution( and the data suggest that share has plateaued in the past couple of years), the expectations of revolution are at least temporarily over. I thought we’ d be clearly on a path by now to most people reading most narrative books digitally. We aren’ t, even though the one precondition I thought was necessary has been met: most people carry screens all the time that would work fine for ebooks. This clearly demonstrates that there is a limit to how much the appeal of convenience changes reader habits when the comfort level with a form is a competing consideration.
But a flattening ebook share has not prevented the market from consolidating in the way I thought was worth worrying about when I mistakenly saw a more accelerated ebook future. By anecdotal information gleaned from publishers, Amazon appears to be booking half or more of the print sales for many publishers and many books.( I told this fact to a former CEO who has been out of the business for 20 years last week. He said,“ you mean, if I sell 40,000 books, Amazon will sell 20,000?” I
MIKE SHATZKIN FOUNDER & CEO OF THE IDEA LOGICAL COMPANY
WRITERS’ TRICKS OF THE TRADE
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WINTER 2017