The Shatzkin Files » Marketing

There are, at this moment, still five US commercial book publishers of mega-size. Penguin Random House is the biggest; HarperCollins is 2nd; and Hachette, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster round ou...

https://www.idealog.com/blog/doubts-about-the-department-of-justices-objection-to-the-prh-acquisition-of-ss/

Having been out of the day-to-day of book publishing for a few years now, and — like most people — cut off from most routine commercial conversations in the nearly two years of the pandemic, ...

https://www.idealog.com/blog/every-publishing-strategy-should-start-with-amazon-and-ingram/

The global infrastructure for the book business that is not Amazon is owned and operated by the Ingram Content Group. In fact, a lot of the global infrastructure of the book business that is iden...

https://www.idealog.com/blog/the-family-business-is-ingram-the-global-infrastructure-for-the-book-industry/

There’s quite a bit of publishing about publishing going on in the next few weeks. British academic John B. Thompson has written a solid scholarly history of book publishing in the past quarter...

https://www.idealog.com/blog/amazon-has-done-so-many-smart-things-that-some-of-the-best-ones-get-forgotten/

A team of independent publishing consultants with broad and deep experience in the industry have produced an excellent report on the effects of the past year’s pandemic on the book publishing b...

https://www.idealog.com/blog/thoughts-about-what-covid-and-2020-mean-for-book-publishing/

My brilliant friend Joe Esposito has written a piece to explain why Penguin Random House would want to acquire Simon & Schuster.  I have also been thinking about why PRH, or any of the other thr...

https://www.idealog.com/blog/the-end-of-the-general-trade-publishing-concept/

Just before the world changed, about five months ago on February 18th, we wrote in this space about two initiatives that made sense for all publishers to employ to raise revenues and profits. One...

https://www.idealog.com/blog/both-the-supply-chain-and-book-marketing-are-forever-changed-by-coronavirus/

One thing the pandemic has done is to make everybody more aware of “supply chains”: the path by which a thing gets made and delivered to its ultimate user. Many of us heard many times that a ...

https://www.idealog.com/blog/the-supply-chain-for-book-publishing-is-being-changed-by-coronavirus-too/

Years that end in zeroes summon a natural tendency to look backwards and forwards. So as we enter this century’s decade of The 20s, we’ll do just that. The ideas in this piece analyze what is...

https://www.idealog.com/blog/2020-zero-year-thoughts-about-the-changes-in-book-publishing/

A prior post described the new structure of the book publishing ecosystem. In the past three decades, we have migrated away from a world where a publisher needed to own a substantial infrastructu...

https://www.idealog.com/blog/7-ways-book-publishing-will-change-over-the-next-few-years/