Before you make that face, let me stress that I am 1,000% supportive of anything he wants to do. Just as I’m totally supportive of him getting a degree in Archeology at the spry age of 68. However, I’ll kill him if he calls me Junior. I honestly thought that he would treat this project [...]
So Barnes & Noble has put itself on the block. If I were a rich man, I’d buy B&N, get rid of all the mass market shelf space, replace it with an Espresso Book Machine, start strong-arming publishers to print and bind really, really nice hardcovers at lower print runs and stock the hell out [...]
I Am Ozzy is the autobiography of one of the craziest rock stars of all time, Ozzy Osbourne. While I was a fan of MTV’s The Osbournes back in the day, I wasn’t ever really a diehard fan of his music. Save for an occasional ‘Crazy Train’ karaoke indulgence. When the book came out, I [...]
Those of you who attended yesterday’s Publishing Point meetup, “In Conversation with John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan,” got to see a side of Sargent that wasn’t carefully scripted in a Publishers Lunch letter or blog post. Rather he continued his tradition of being accessible and personable with the publishing community and I, for one, appreciated [...]
Wow, cool. Macmillan started a blog! (Incredibly well-designed, too. Wonder who did that…) First of all, I think I speak for a lot of people by saying, good on you, John Sargent. This is absolutely a move in the right direction, and I can’t think of an executive better suited that Sargent for speaking plainly [...]
I came of age, career-wise, in the late 90′s, as an art director at J. Walter Thompson, a multinational advertising agency. The 1990′s were an interesting time to be in an art department. The desktop publishing revolution was changing the way art directors and designers went about their work: x-acto knives, paste-ups, and letraset lettering [...]
Wow. So that happened. I don’t have a lot to add to the Team Macmillan or Team Amazon sides, but I do think this is a good time for us all to touch base about a little thing called corporate communications. Publishers: In times of crisis, the social media tools you have invested time into [...]
After reading Ami’s article about essential digital positions in Publishing, I thought about how most people in our digi-nerd positions, especially in publishing, come from another neck of the business woods like marketing or production. Why is that? How did we get there? For me, I’ve been asked more than a few times ‘well, how [...]
In this era of layoffs and pay freezes across the industry, it might seem silly to talk about new positions that publishing houses should be looking to fill. I can hear you all groaning from here: with what time, exactly, should we be interviewing these people, and which pile of doubloons should we cash in [...]
Two announcements to kick off 2010. First, check out the new blog. I’m launching The New Sleekness with other smart, bookish types to fill a hole in publishing punditry: voices from the boots-on-the-ground folks actually working directly in that sweet spot of publishing and technology. I hope you’ll add us to your RSS Reader. And [...]