Saved by sari and
What Can We Learn From Barnes & Noble's Surprising Turnaround?
When we look back over the past 100 years, traditional commerce (and the culture it indirectly endorsed) was primarily curated by a single person’s point-of-view. Even when commerce moved online, to places like Amazon or Farfetch, retailers still controlled the types of things consumers purchased. Online commerce didn’t innovate a new shopping expe... See more
Gaby Goldberg • Curators All the Way Down
Smaller publishers have always tended to specialize by subject, which is an inherent advantage in the age of internet marketing. Direct consumer relationships theoretically make it possible to expand beyond books to sell other things to the same audiences. But so far, that is largely a theory.
Mike Shatzkin • The Book Business: What Everyone Needs to Know®
Books matter. Making them is a combination of craft and insight. Publishing them is a generous act of faith. Adding to the corpus of shared knowledge is important. Books change the culture when people act on them, even if they don’t sell many copies. And sometimes the backlist surprises the accountants.
But the economics of new books have nothing to... See more
But the economics of new books have nothing to... See more
Books don’t sell
When I was in grad school, the unstated assumption in most of what we were taught was that the sole point of a business (or any institution, really) was to grow. To grow, grow, grow, to as large a scale as possible. To build an empire, take over the world. My classmates — tycoons in waiting — lapped it up. “Lifestyle businesses”? Nah! Those were fo... See more