Andy Unedited
Exploring Books, Life, and Writing
In business, psychology, science and politics, successful metaphors should be as common as one-liners at a comedy convention, as numerous as drunks at a tailgate party, as bountiful as bribes in Chicago politics. In advertising, GEICO, the insurance company, has successfully grabbed attention with its use of metaphor (or it’s close cousin, the analogy) in …
Sometimes the positively best way to promote a book is by being negative. Why?
A friend, David Horton, once said, “Some get paid to be critics. Everyone else does it for free.” We, like any organization or business, get our share of criticisms and complaints. How do we deal with it? Here are my guidelines.
Someone recently asked me a helpful diagnostic question for those in leadership, a question that helps you get at the big picture. “What causes you to lose sleep at night?” Certainly for me the Great Recession and the sea changes it may be bringing in book publishing have been right at the top of the …
Is the rise of reselling books on the internet destroying publishing? Book lover David Steitfeld thinks it might be. The explosion of people selling used, nearly new and rare books online means readers can save money if they are willing to wait a while for a new book to make its way to these re-sellers. …
What do publishers really have to offer authors? Can’t someone self-publish easily through Lulu or XLibris? Can’t they sell their books on Amazon.com? Retail stores are in decline, so who needs publishers to get their books on the shelves? Clay Shirky asked these sorts of questions in Publishers Weekly a couple of months ago. He …
When anybody talks about the future of publishing, the impact of the digital world is always front and center. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. It is having and will have a massive impact. Tom Woll acknowledges as much in the conclusion to his book Publishing for Profit, as well. But what is really …
Publishers like to complain about returns, but few seem to do anything about them. How do I know? Return rates keep climbing, costing the publishing industry over $7 billion a year. Why do books come back to publishers from stores, distributors and wholesalers? The reasons are many. Tom Woll offers a dozen in Publishing for …
One of the most convenient “real time” views of how a book is doing is to check out Amazon’s sales rank. It’s simple (the lower the number, the better the sales), it’s convenient (just a click away), and it’s empirical (gotta love those numbers). Alas, as Aaron Hierholzer says, “the Amazon sales rank is a …
Maybe you thought this was old news, but Brandweek reports on a survey by Direct Partners that found “e-mail is now the most popular form of direct response marketing. . . . E-mail is used primarily by 35% of companies compared to 25% which use traditional direct mail and 21% who use package, statement stuffers …