PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 2015 by Mike Shatzkin, Founder & CEO, The Idea Logical Company The core principles and workflows for marketing books not only require change in the digital age; they may require more radical change than many people thought. The time-honored process was to somehow communicate knowledge of what was inside a book to book …

PUBLISHED JUNE 2015 by Mike Shatzkin, Founder & CEO, The Idea Logical Company When I was invited to join a discussion entitled “Amazon: Friend or Foe” in connection with this year’s London Book Fair, I thought first about three ways Amazon has profoundly changed our industry. Although just about every publisher has headaches dealing with …

Back in pre-Internet times, books, music, and video generally had their own retail networks. But when media became largely digital in the first decade of the 21st century, the digital companies that decided to establish consumer retail operations tried to erase the distinction that had divided reading (books) from listening (music) from watching (movies and …

The industry got the news that Amazon was probably reassessing its own publishing program when it was announced that Laurence Kirshbaum was stepping down as the head of Amazon Publishing and being replaced by a 14-year veteran of the Seattle company, Daphne Durham. Whatever Durham’s strengths and connections are, they don’t include the familiarity with …

Mike Shatzkin, founder and CEO of The Idea Logical Company, has been an industry consultant for more than three decades. His blog, The Shatzkin Files (idealog.com/blog), is the source of this article and offers links to speeches and posts that document the evolution in his thinking in this area. In the July 2013 Independent, I looked …

Mike Shatzkin, founder and CEO of The Idea Logical Company, has been an industry consultant for more than three decades. His blog, The Shatzkin Files (idealog.com/blog), is the source of this article and offers links to speeches and posts that document the evolution in his thinking in this area. Four overarching realities are determining the …

“I’m usually the one wearing the target on my chest.” The speaker was an Amazon executive. The setting was a meeting of publishers and booksellers confronting troublesome issues. The time was some years ago. But it’s easy to imagine the same scene playing out today as people throughout the book business express anger at Amazon …

In “Why You Can’t Actually Sell an E-book” (May), Mike Shatzkin argues that e-books are really licenses rather than physical objects, and should therefore be treated like the other license-like elements typically found in a publisher/author agreement—serial rights, book clubs, paperbacks (I assume Shatzkin means mass market paperbacks), and so forth. He certainly is right …