toccon-bug.gifTim O”Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly media. Challenge is not to build the coolest and most enhanced ebooks. The publisher will never be a winner in a technology race. Innovations do come from publishers, but that’s not the heart of what publishers do. Publishers’ job is to do for authors those things that authors can’t do for themselves. Be creative, but remember what you really do. Which is often the boring stuff. If not good at those things then someone will take your place.

It’s not easy to be found in this new world. Big haystack. All of the top blogs today are publishers and publishing with one of these will get writer more visibility that they can get on their own. Even iPhone apps are having a haystack problem. Given this there will always be a role in society for aggregators, and this should be a core competency for a publisher. Getting authors known and distributed. Publishers must be excellent distributors. Publishers must have the capability to create products in new formats and sell it into new channels. Publishers extremely weak in SEO.

Social media marketing: you gain and bestow status based on those you associate with. More important to build your status rather than trying to push product. Use social media to build the status of your authors rather than just to push product. Just like with Google, a new breed of social media analytics are coming on board and should be used in designing your social network. There will be ebook analytics as well. An ebook knows it is being read and this will lead to a lot of interesting tools.

Should be doing a lot of pricing experiments to find what works. One nice thing about the agency pricing model is that it allows the publishers to experiment with pricing rather than distributors.

Social media is not about trying to sell something but is about trying to add value to community who cares about what you card about. The more you create value for your community the more value will redound back to you.

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