“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 …

    Fran Korten of YES! Magazine, a prime mover in the project, with demonstrators at New York’s Zuccotti Park. The First Book on Occupy Wall Street: Four Weeks from Idea to Publication; Two More to Thousands of Sales by Steven Piersanti How is it possible to publish a book in only four weeks from …

  One of the huge benefits of niche publishing is that you can pretest to see if a book will sell (and roughly how many copies) before it exists. I backed into niche publishing about 15 years ago, and now most of my 40 published books are niche based. One field, dentistry, earned us about …

  When the phone rings in the IBPA offices, it’s often a call from a member who’s perplexed about whether to use DRM on e-books. When the board of a book-business trade association convenes, some of its members insist that DRM is essential and others insist that it does far more harm than good. Contributors …

PUBLISHED DECEMBER 2011 by Mark Bide, Executive Director, EDItEUR — Adjusting business strategies in the light of the “switch to digital” necessitates familiarity with the complex landscape of standards. As noted in Part 1 of this series describing that landscape …

PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 2011 by Mark Bide, Executive Director, EDItEUR — With varying degrees of success, publishers of all types, alongside the music and movie industries, TV, and games—all the different sectors of what are often called the “copyright industries”—are adjusting …

PUBLISHED MAY 2011 by Roy M. Carlisle, Acquisitions Director, Independent Institute — As I was walking from the parking lot into the nondescript building in San Jose, I wondered what it would be like to talk with Richard Tam, the founder of iUniverse.com. He was certainly friendly enough on the phone when he called to …

For a small business, reputation damage may be a bigger risk than natural disaster or even terrorism. After all, a careful backup plan can avert most problems an earthquake or fire might cause, but damage to a reputation is long-lasting and often permanent, and every customer interaction has the potential to create it. Fortunately, there …

Right after John Wiley & Sons acquired the book division of Bloomberg, Joan O’Neil, VP and executive publisher at Wiley, sent a letter that began: Dear , . . . It is my pleasure to welcome you to our Wiley community of authors. . . . We are pleased to inform you that we will …

Allworth Press, the company I founded more than 20 years ago, publishes many books for graphic designers and creative professionals in related fields. Recently I’ve received a number of emails from upset and worried authors who have found their books available free on the Internet. Pirated titles include Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm for Connecting …