DIGITAL MARKETING AND COPING WITH
By Mike Shatzkin on Jan 03 , 2017
AMAZON ARE THE TWO BIG CHALLENGES FOR PUBLISHERS AS WE BEGIN 2017 MIKE SHATZKIN ON JAN 03 , 2017
MIKE SHATZKIN , AUTHOR OF THE HIGHLY INFORMATIVE SHATZKIN FILES , WROTE A VERY INSIGHTFUL PIECE AT THE BEGINNING OF JANUARY , PRIOR TO ATTENDING THE DIGITAL BOOK WORLD CONFERENCE ON JANUARY 17-19 , 2017 . THE FOLLOWING ARE EXCERPTS FROM THE FULL ARTICLE . READ HIS ENTIRE ARTICLE BY CLICKING THE LINK .
I am getting ready to attend my first Digital Book World as a “ civilian ” ( having programmed and moderated the first seven ), Thinking about DBW entails recognizing how different the book publishing world today is from what I expected three or six years ago . Be that as it may , the big challenges for the industry — how to change marketing to hit customers who are mostly learning what to buy online ( which , as you ’ ll see , is well covered ) and how to cope with the steadily growing market share that is Amazon ’ s — remain the ones I would have anticipated .
Although I do actually know other people who , like me , consume just about all their books on screens , we ’ re a minority who are not really looked upon by those who have stuck with paper as the avant garde . Whatever market share ebooks achieve by evolution ( and the data suggest that share has plateaued in the past couple of years ), the expectations of revolution are at least temporarily over . I thought we ’ d be clearly on a path by now to most people reading most narrative books digitally . We aren ’ t , even though the one precondition I thought was necessary has been met : most people carry screens all the time that would work fine for ebooks . This clearly demonstrates that there is a limit to how much the appeal of convenience changes reader habits when the comfort level with a form is a competing consideration .
But a flattening ebook share has not prevented the market from consolidating in the way I thought was worth worrying about when I mistakenly saw a more accelerated ebook future . By anecdotal information gleaned from publishers , Amazon appears to be booking half or more of the print sales for many publishers and many books .( I told this fact to a former CEO who has been out of the business for 20 years last week . He said , “ you mean , if I sell 40,000 books , Amazon will sell 20,000 ?” I
MIKE SHATZKIN FOUNDER & CEO OF THE IDEA LOGICAL COMPANY
WRITERS ’ TRICKS OF THE TRADE
PAGE 5
WINTER 2017