what publishers need to do to survive

The Future of Digital Distributionand eBook Marketing

Tim O’Reillywww.oreilly.com

Tools of Change for PublishingFebruary 24, 2010

Thursday, March 4, 2010

http://www.oreilly.com


Why There Will Always Be Publishers

Tim O’Reillywww.oreilly.com





What Publishers Need To Do To SurviveTim O’Reilly

www.oreilly.com





Create the coolest new enhanced ebooks? NOT.


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You’re betting that you’re going to be smarter, and faster, and more creative than all the young developers and entrepreneurs out there.


“The ugly stuff will always need to be done.”

-John Ingram


Your job as a publisher is to do things for authors that they can’t do for themselves:– Things that require special expertise– Things that require scale– Things that are expensive– Things that require marketplace leverage– Things that are boring and time-consuming


ProductionDistributionPricingChannel managementMarketingSales


Why?


“No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.”

Samuel Johnson, 23 March 1751 Rambler No. 106


“Obscurity is a bigger problem for authors than piracy.”

Tim O’Reilly, 11 December 2002 Piracy is Progressive Taxation


Does anyone see a problem with this?


Why does new media always display power laws?

Clay Shirky, Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality, February 8, 2003

http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html

Figure #1: 433 weblogs arranged in rank order by number of inbound links.

The data is drawn from N.Z Bear's 2002 work on the blogosphere ecosystem.

The current version of this project can now be found at http://www.myelin.co.nz/ecosystem/.


http://www.truthlaidbear.com/ecosystem.shtml

http://www.truthlaidbear.com/ecosystem.shtml

http://www.myelin.co.nz/ecosystem/

http://www.myelin.co.nz/ecosystem/

Publishing with the Huffington Post gives authors more visibility than they can get on their own.


It’s all in the math!


The mathematics of complex social organization

“Relationships between a band of 20 people involve only 190 two-person interactions (20 people times 19 divided by 2), but a band of 2000 would have 1,999,000 dyads.... In small societies with few pairs of members, the resulting necessary transfer of goods can be engaged directly between pairs of individuals or families, by reciprocal exchanges. But the same mathematics that makes direct pairwise conflict resolution difficult in large societies makes pairwise economic transfers also inefficient. Large societies can function economically only if they have a redistributive economy in addition to a reciprocal economy.”

Jared Diamond: From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracyin Guns, Germs and Steel, pp 286-287


Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to get more visibility and sales for authors than they can get on their own.


Distribution


O’Reilly eBook revenue sources


“the minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of

validated learning about customers with the least effort.”


http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2009/04/validated-learning-about-customers.html

http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2009/04/validated-learning-about-customers.html

The capability to create product in new formats, and sell it into emerging channels.


Marketing


Social Media Marketing


retweetradar


nivi and the @timoreilly bump


This is important!

In social networks, you gain and bestow status through those you associate with

A key function of a publishing brand is the bestowal of status by who and what you pay attention to

If you only pay attention to yourself, you aren’t as valuable to your community– You don’t learn as much from your readers– You don’t bind them to you by amplifying their voice


Analytics are the heart of SEO.


They are also at the heart of social media marketing.


ThePeopleBrowsrCycle

•HistoricalandOngoingSen9mentAnalysis

•CampaignstoBuildFollowers

•CampaignstoDirectMessage

•Repor9ngonROIfortradi9onalandSocialMedia

•CustomMonitoringDashboards

1


There will be ebook reader analytics tools as well.


Pay attention.


Analytics will help you find what products are workingwhat channels are working

what prices are workingwho is spreading the word about you

what your readers think


The secret of social media is that it's not about you, your product, or your story. It's about how you can add value to the communities that happen to include you. If you want to make a positive impact, forget about what you can get out of social media, and start thinking about what you can contribute. Not surprisingly, the more value you create for your community, the more value they will create for you.


Create more value than you capture.


what publishers need to do to survive

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