- Creepy Straw Man
- Hennaed Hands
- Reception
- Spider and Skull
- Skelton in Tails with Dog
- Wicked Witch of the West
- Punk Skelton Dinner
The 1/365 images are originally posted to my Instagram.
Archive for the ‘publishing’ Category
1/366 2016 Week 43
November 17th, 2016 by Babette
In The Cloud
July 27th, 2012 by Babette
Aoraki (Mt. Cook), New Zealand
With big thanks to @askburnie I attended the Publisher’s Launch conference “Book Publishing in the Cloud” yesterday. It was an interesting day and I thought I would share the highlights of what I thought were the major talking points. And thank you to @MikeShatzkin and Michael Cader for putting the program together.
Let’s start with some basic definitions:
- Cloud – Web 3.0
- SaaS – Software as a Service
- Legacy System – Current Mainframe Systems
- Enterprise Systems – Nuts and Bolts systems that support the entire business’ functions such as email
Examples of Cloud Systems that are being utilized by publishers are ones that manage data asset management, metadata, marketing, publicity, sales tracking, rights, royalties and HR.
First Steps
- Strategy. What exactly is the problem you are trying to solve? What is critical vs what is bells and whistles? What are the sparkly unicorns?
- Buy In. What are the concerns of the C suite? What are the concerns of the day to day users? How are you going to manage those concerns and fears. How are you going to sell the positives of this change and how are you going to manage the challenges. What are the specific workflow changes involved. How are you going to educate, train and support users.
- How will the new system integrate with the old systems.
- What do you need from a provider before you sign on? Privacy. Track Record. Flexibility.
- How is your data being backed up. Yes, the cloud needs to be backed up.
Upsides to the cloud:
- Speed. Panelists all reported projects/reports that used to take days now takes hours or minutes freeing peoples time to focus on the meatier parts of their jobs rather than the tedious aspects.
- Accessibility. All uses can access easily, and testing is easier.
- Acceleration. Changes in producing ebooks are fast and furious, we don’t have the luxury of time to design our own systems.
- Spend. Cloud solutions are lower in cost to set up and start up
(See what I did there.)
Downsides
- Integration with legacy systems is not always smooth and can lead to frustration.
- Customization can often be harder than expected, but working with your vendor can lead to a workable, if inelegant, solution.
- Tension with IT or other departments.
- Raw data may be harder to access than it was in previous system.
Two more points I found interesting:
- Transition to SaaS is NOT synonymous with down-scaling human resources. However, when looking for new hires new skill sets will rise in importance.
- With the explosion of digital in our lives the general user population in an organization is a LOT smarter than they used to be leading to very different IT support needs. (Gone are the days when a training session starts with, “the blue button to the left will turn on your laptop…” yes, that is a real life example.)
Also, when a vendor asks you what your pain point is and you reply, “finding a great new job,” you get very varied reactions.
BEA 2012
June 8th, 2012 by Babette
The first time I went to BEA (then ABA) I remember two things clearly: feeling overwhelmed by the crowds and the publisher who reproduced the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in their booth. (I think it was Random House.)
This year I still felt overwhelmed but what struck me the most was how connected I felt to the publishing industry. As much as I like social media, and I believe in the power of the networks I’ve created, nothing beats “In Real Life.” I’m completely exhausted today but I loved being unable to walk more than 5 feet without stopping to chat with someone. That first year I really only knew my colleagues at BDD and it was great to see so many of them again this year along with so many people I’ve worked with or consider colleagues vis-à-vis Twitter.
The conversations I had were mostly upbeat. I love talking to people who have hopped to new roles which they are loving, or are super excited about an upcoming book, or new digital opportunities. The floor was jam packed both Tuesday and Wednesday. But on Thursday it was quiet even with the “General Public” wandering around in their bright green badges. I couldn’t help but imagine the public thinking that we were indeed a dying industry based solely upon the quiet aisles.
In addition to walking the floor, which reminds me I’m really looking forward to reading “Age of Miracles” and “The Twelve.” I went to a few educational sessions where I fed my brain with more nuggets on social, marketing, video, metadata. I couldn’t help but notice some new booths in “The Digital Zone” and some others which didn’t come back… we are indeed an industry in transition. I also was pleased to notice the physical integration of some digital partners into heart of the show area. I’m sure this is a financial decision on the cost of a booth but I’d like to think this is also a mind shift. I was very sorry to have missed the Stephen Cobert breakfast but I loved watching Patty Smith interview Neil Young!
And last but not least, I’ve worn many hats and I always find it fascinating to hear how former colleagues introduce me to new people. I’ve gotten <insert adjective> operational, sales, marketing </insert adjective>, but my new all time favorite was “she gets shit done.” Thank you Kim.
Book Camp Feb 2012
February 16th, 2012 by Babette
I’m a few days late for the BookCamp2 wrap up but better late than never, right?
First off kudos to Ami and Chris for a great day!
And for those of you who don’t know Bookcamp is an “un-conferencece” which means its meant to be structured discussions on topics put forth by attendees. We start with a blank grid and slowly people come forward to add their sessions. 
Overall, what I find most interesting is some of these takeaways completely fly in the face of what I have read, seen presented or thought to be true. And perhaps that’s the greatest value of an informal conference. I’m going to recap the takeaways from the sessions I attended (also with so many good options it was hard to choose which discussions to attend.)
1. “Who Will Keep The Flame” led by Emily Williams. 
The discussion revolved around the question, if digital is about scale is that at odds with personal engagement?” How do we as publishers/marketers/salespeople keep the love of reading alive? Needless to say we had some passionate and engaged discussion, it’s no secret we didn’t enter the publishing industry for the high salaries. And unsurprisingly we also talked about discoverability (drink).
- Librarians will keep the flame
- Social platforms can provide trusted recommendations
- Booksellers/traditional hand-selling
2. The experience of reading print books vs. the experience of reading eBooks – along with a game of Scrabble – led by Nick Ruffilo 
Why don’t the folks in this session like eBooks:
- Tech issues, don’t own a reader
- Simply prefer physical books
- Want to be able to lend books (I take that to mean they want to borrow books.)
Side bar, the demographic of this “I do NOT read eBook group” includes folks who are creating them for a living. WAIT, WHAT?!
What do the folks in this session like best about eBooks, enhancements:
- Hyperlinks
- “Read to me” for kids books
- Bundled in reading group guides without adding heft
- Multi media integration
3. Hand-selling in a Digital Age led by Stephanie Anderson. There are many touch points before a purchase, how can we direct people into buying locally? 
Scaling Hand-selling
- “Live chat” feature on an indie bookstore’s website to help you choose your next book (LOVE this idea, and I really wish I could have caught the name of the brilliant person who came up with the idea to give them credit)
- A subscription model for a monthly, quarterly book
On a more local level:
- “Show and Tell” night in the bookstore where the staff could talk about their favorites – a live action staff picks if you will
- Hand-selling by Bloggers, can we reduce friction to get readers to buy from Indies instead of the Giant
4. New business models led by Guy Gonzalez. Can we crowd source the ideal publishing start up? 
- Spotifiy for books
And the conversation shifted to the Book of the Month Clubs, which had a limited selection of titles.
- Smaller lists
Publishing only the books you can support with marketing. Shelf space is declining so there is an argument for less titles, and while digital shelf space is infinite focus is still limiting
Then we dived into a discussion about data and the importance of gathering and analyzing marketing data
- Find a need that is not being met and meet it (credit to Rebecca Maines)
Oddly, the whole session ended with an inexplicable apocalyptic view on the energy crises
All in all it was a great day spent talking with friends and colleagues. And then as these things go it was time for drinks:
Resume Word Cloud
October 11th, 2011 by Babette
I’ve been thinking about ways to make my resume stand out in a crowd, and I started thinking about infographics… and I’m still thinking about how to create a relevant infographic for my resume. But as I tinker with that I thought I share my word cloud starting point, which I created using Wordle (Admittedly this is very 2010.)
Book2 Camp
February 20th, 2011 by Babette
Last Sunday was the Book Camp 2 and just like the first Book Camp I think I left smarter.
We got t-shirts
Also, I got to hang out with Margret Atwood!
Book Camp is an unconference, the schedule is created and set by the attendees at the start.
Ami Greko explaining how it works
Also, knitting is welcome.
The schedule for the day
Laura's pretty yarn
The first session I went to was led by Nick Ruffilo and was called “Brainstorming to come up with a Viable Trade Model”
Nick Ruffilo
Nick began with a lot of numbers on the whiteboard about sales, titles published and income. This sparked some rather heated discussion. “Was this data correct?” “Is it being interpreted correctly?” “Be careful about what you extrapolated from it because you’re veering into speculation.” Nick was trying to get the group to brainstorm via the “Harvard Business Review model” and I believe it was Guy who quipped that “some believe that’s what ruined publishing in the first place.”
What makes a published work part of the industry or an outlier? For instance, would a work consisting of the results of Brett xoxing his butt be an outlier? In case that the discussion wasn’t lively enough things got rowdy again with the idea that sales and quality can be used interchangeably.
Imagining we were starting with a blank slate, how would we begin to develop a revenue model? The Music Merchandising Model (sigh) the idea of a Sporting Franchsise (in publishing this is the Gawker model) or something entirely new. It was a good idea for a session and props to Nick for having a ready answers.
For my second session I chose Guy Gonzalez’s Community Engagement & Development.
Guy Gonzalez
The major points here can not be said enough times:
- Community leads to commerce, commerce does not give you community.
- Customers control the conversation.
- Engaging with readers directly requires community, you do not have to build a new platform, find your readers.
- Email is still a valuable tool, in fact its so valuable you need to make sure you’re not abusing it, use it wisely.
- Also valuable is connecting with an individual user. If a company @s back to a user it can be powerful – ancedata, I do get a kick out of a quick connection when it feels authentic.
- The voracious readers and the casual readers have different levels of “brand recognition” with publishers.
Thanks to Bethanne Patrick (aka @thebookmaven) I learned that the CIA has a Director of Social Media – they love Twitter for real time monitoring and hashtags although apparently the use of hastags has dramatically decreased as twitter grew.
Brett Sandusky and I hosted a session on the process involved in creating digital products via an Agile Workflow.
It's official now
This is more of Brett’s world than mine but I talked about how the small task group helps me stay on schedule, gives participants a stronger feeling of ownership and it can lead to fresh marketing ideas. It should be said I do not like being the presenter, at all, so this was good for me.
Next session I went to was hosted by Mary Ann Naples and was about Monetizing a Direct Audience.
Mary Ann Naples
She talked about the Open Sky model but honestly what I learned most in this session was that Margret Atwood should always be in attendance at any conference dealing with the future of publishing. She was very engaged, entertaining and smart.
Margret Atwood
Margret likened the idea of commerce destination where an author was curating the content to the Book of the Month club, where overwhelming choice is limited. Margret Atwood told a story about seeking out hackers to take them to lunch to find out how they tick: love solving puzzles, find it relaxing, likened to knitting! And of course, the cheese sandwich was invoked, as in who will pay for her cheese sandwich if the work is pirated. We also discussed how the internet could just poof vanish… so hold on to your hard copies. Of course, a lead lined safe may safeguard your discs.
I never made into the last session I had planned on as I got into a conversation….
Wine
then as it should be, there was wine.
My DBW Highlight Reel
February 10th, 2011 by Babette
I suspect I’m the last person to post a DBW wrap up seeing as how it wrapped up just over 3 weeks ago.
The workshop day was a great addition to this year’s schedule. Once I was done blinding the presenters with my flash I settled into (@DanBlank) Dan Blank’s Content Strategy for the first session and Email Marketing for the second session. I was thrilled to see both workshops focused on data. The fundamental rules for email marketing can be extrapolated into a great theme for this conference: know your audience, have their permission to approach them, test your strategies, analyze the results and then proceed with the next steps. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The evenings entertainment included cocktails, a fabulous 7x20x21, the Innovation Awards and (@R_Nash) Richard Nash in an orange leisure suit hosting “Name That Audio Book.”
Conference Day One started off with both funky sunglasses (no, not these, these) and a fabulous left hook about libraries thrown at Brian Napack (Macmillian) by (@SmartBitches) Sarah Wendel, “why aren’t your eBooks available in libraries?” I retweeted @Stacy_Boyd’s sentiment, “I’ve always seen libraries as the gateway drug to book buying” because I couldn’t agree more. Unless you can show me data proving otherwise I don’t think having eBooks available for lending will be tantamount to cannibalizing your sales.
I’m not a developer but I really enjoyed (@Liza) Liza Daly’s smart talk on cost effective development of enhanced content. I was disappointed but not surprised by how the Google presentation was a live action commercial. Then (@sarahw) Sarah Weinman moderated what an interesting discussion with financial analysts on the future of brick and mortar bookstores.
I edited the morning’s batch of photos while sitting in The Sales Department in Transition and found it somewhat depressing that the fundamental conversation about the printed catalog hasn’t really changed much since I sat in corporate meetings about it 2 years ago. Having said that, I liked hearing Jaci Updike talk about how sales and marketing are even more closely aligned in the digital realm with field sales reps marketing books at the local level. And how reps who have a social media presence are good for the bottom line. An example raised was the fabulous Books on the Nightstand which is run by @AnnKingman and (@MKindness) Michael Kindness, both Random House reps.
@DonLinn moderated a panel on New Revenue Streams -I made it inside just in time to hear (@manaples) Mary Ann Naples talk about the Open Sky Platform, which in a nutshell gives an author a virtual storefront in which they can sell books and the verticals related to their expertise creating a vibrant space for themselves.
Day two was all about data. And I mean Data with a capital D, turned up to 11.
It started with the Executive Study, then the DBW/VERSO Book Buying Behavior study and finally the BISG/Bowker Consumer Attitudes focusing on the eBook behavior of Multi Function Device users. Here’s what i took away:
I caught some of the Consumer Sales Data session and I was especially fascinated by Kobo’s (@mtamblyn) Michael Tamblyn’s “ghetto business intelligence” presentation.
Not only is Kobo paying attention to the stats to see what marketing is working in real time (all the time) but they have released a personal dashboard to show you what/where/when/how you’re reading. The amount of data being collected by the eRetailers is staggering and ranges from how many books a consumer is actively reading simultaneously, the time of purchases, what readers abandon (including precisely where in the book they did so) and segmentation by platform device.
I sat in on the Enhanced Metadata session. In a nutshell, metadata is the data required in a B-to-B relationship. Enhanced Metadata is consumer facing. And importantly, it can be consumer generated. Enhanced metadata is incredibly valuable to marketing. The more enhanced metadata you have the greater the positive impact on your SEO. Here’s what you need to think about: extended author bios, author influences, videos, reviews both formal and user generated.
Tags. Allow readers/fans to tag, it is likely they think differently than you do and will make searching easier for like minded fans. There was also a robust discussion about Bisac Regional codes and how you can use them to work for you in search/social marketing.
So the takeaway is that enhanced metadata will greatly enhance the discoverabiility of your titles in both search and social.
In the Publisher Developing Verticals panel the mantra was “give them something before you sell them something” and the ideas talked about were making money around the content but necessarily on the content.
Russ Grandinetti from Amazon gave a surprisingly data filled presentation. My biggest takeaway was “the amount of time between ending a frontlist book and buying a backlist book by the same author has never been shorter.”
The final session, @MikeShatzin’s Where Are We Now and Where Will We Be in 12 months, left me thinking that Madeline McIntosh provided the perfect ending to my data filled day, my tweets on what she said were as follows:
As always, catching up with my industry colleagues was immeasurably valuable. And meeting/seeing twitter friends in real life is fantastic.
If you’re interested in seeing my pictures from Digital Book World you can find the original set on Flickr. and a somewhat better edited set here.
Face to Face
December 24th, 2010 by Babette
Waay back on Dec 14th I attended another brilliant Publishing Point Meetup, with guest speaker Scott Heiferman (@heif) who founded Meetup. Since then A LOT of AWESOME has happened in my world so this short post is long overdue.
My biggest takeaway from the talk was that when you get people together, in real life, amazing things happen. The “alchemy” of everyone’s ideas building on one another creates a bigger and better idea. We’re all so focused these days on “community building” and what the magic pill might be to pull it off that we tend to forget people have been building communities organically since people began.
Scott Heiferman founded Meetup shortly after 9/11, the idea inspired by realizing it wasn’t until the aftermath that he was getting to know his neighbors for the first time. Since it’s beginning there have been 7 million Meetups with 70 million rsvps. There are Meetups created around every conceivable idea. I love the way he defined community as “conversation” and simply as people saying “LET’s.” He talked about envisioning a future where Amazon would have MeetUp buttons for every book. Discuss!
I’ve described a lot of events this past year as cool because it was like “my twitter stream came to life.” I’ll confess at the first it felt a bit like gawking at my own personal red carpet but once you move past that there is so much to learn and be inspired by when we have face to face conversations.
Book Sales Reps Rock
November 8th, 2010 by Babette
I’ve reread a great article a few times over the past week and last week when I first saw it I retweeted links to it. Dominique Raccah expressed succinctly why I believe Publishers will have important roles in the future.
Publishing is undoubtedly going through a major transition with clear concerns from disintermediation to rights associated with both simple and enhanced eBooks. And pricing. And production. And, And, And.
The processes are changing but the heart of what a publisher does remains the same. If I were an author (and let’s face it, that’s a stretch to imagine, I’m not even a good blogger) I would want my book to be “birthed” by a Publisher. I would want all of the groups highlighted above to be involved in getting my book out into the marketplace.
I would describe myself as a generalist with knowledge in many of those blue groups listed above but my professional experience was behind the scenes in sales – think of an internal customer service group to distribute sales & marketing materials and create tools to allow sales reps do what they do best – sell books. In all of the positive talk of self publishers who can DISTRIBUTE your book into all imaginable channels to my knowledge there is no one at those companies who SELL your book into those channels.
Sales reps and booksellers make up the traditional Word of Mouth marketing and publicity channels. And a lot of these smart people I know are now also very active in the social networking sites that are becoming the new Word of Mouth channels. I’m fairly certain that I would never have picked up a lot of the books that constitute some of my favorites if not for the enthusiasm of the sales reps. And because I was in the business and because I’ve not steered them wrong before my friends asked me for recommendations on what to read. My answers often began with the sales reps were crazy about X, so I read it and loved it and I think you will too.