At the FutureBook Conference on 14th November, Crystal Mahey-Morgan says she intends to to what The Bookseller editor Philip Jones asked for in his Turn up the volume post. Jones, in that reflection on a Frankfurt Book Fair that seemed too quiet to some of us, wrote about #FutureBook14, as we’re hashtagging it, this way:… Read More
A Chuffed Market's Children's Conference: #PorterMeets Charlotte Eyre
If you walked into publishing right now and stopped one of us to ask, “What’s the healthiest, happiest part of the business to get into?” — the answer you well might get is “children’s books!” The exclamation point would be there, yes. They’re a generally exuberant lot these days, the children’s books folks. And why not? Thanks to Charlotte Eyre’s… Read More
Applauding gaps in 'retail stonewalling'
What might have been an hour or so of complaint and commiseration became — in the tweeting hands of The FutureBook community — something more hopeful and more nuanced than some would have predicted. Our topic, ‘Retail stonewalling’ and Amazon sightings in bookstores, took its phrase from Amazon Publishing author Tim Ferriss. And its starting point was The… Read More
Subscriptions: What If All The Fitness Club Members Actually Come To The Gym?
If I had a dollar for every time I had seen a pitch for a subscription-based ebook platform, I would by now have launched my own. And right about now, you could be forgiven for feeling that The Bookseller’s Philip Jones is the only guy who hasn’t launched a digital book subscription. In his lead editorial for… Read More