by Allyson Longueira | Feb 4, 2013 | blog, Uncategorized
There has been a lot of crying in my life lately. My daughter has been pretty unhappy, too.
You see, she’s two-and-a-half, and apparently that milestone marks a peak in what the experts call “separation anxiety.”
I call it Working Mommy Guilt, but potato, potahto.
After spending lots of quality time with grandparents and us over the holidays, we started off the New Year with a change in daycare. We expected a relatively smooth transition. After all, our daughter is one of the happiest, easiest-going and most outgoing little people I’ve ever met. But this change threw her.
She now clings to my leg when I drop her off, cries huge tears and says, “Mommy, you don’t need to go to work!” Ouch. And I thought Catholic guilt was bad…
I feel terrible for her, and I feel just plain terrible, but I understand—intellectually, anyway—that adapting to change is something she needs to learn. Heck, we adults don’t do it very well half the time. Maybe more.
So, I hide my dread every morning as we go off to daycare. And I’m eagerly awaiting the day, hopefully not too far off, when she has adapted. But while I wait, I recognize this feeling. That fear of change is part of the human condition. Most of us experience it from time to time. Some are paralyzed by it.
Including writers. And publishers.
Which brings me around to the warp speed at which our industry is changing, and the adaptability we all need to keep up.
Some writers, you see, are still clinging to the legs of their agents, their publishers, their, well, whatever they were used to before the industry started its rapid course adjustment. Those writers make decisions based on the way things were, not on the way things are. And that’s a dangerous way to conduct business.
Some publishers, too, have had a hard time turning the ship to respond to the shift in currents. They cling to their business models, hoping their sheer mass will carry them through. It won’t.
The only way to survive is to adapt. That’s what we do here at WMG. I won’t lie and say it’s always easy. But it’s necessary. Even fun, to tell you the truth. And it’s one reason why our fourth-quarter sales increased while the industry trended downward.
We’ll be talking a lot more about our innovative projects in the coming weeks. In the meantime, experiment with a little change yourself. Try a book in a genre you’ve not read before, for example. You’d be amazed what opening yourself up to a little change will do for your adaptability.
Allyson Longueira is publisher of WMG Publishing. She is an award-winning writer, editor and designer.
by Allyson Longueira | Jan 28, 2013 | blog, Uncategorized
This week, I’m going to talk to you a little bit about the back end of the publishing business. The technical side of sales channels.
Now, the concept of sales channels is pretty straightforward. You publish a book. Someone sells books. You get said book to seller. Right hand meets left hand, and sales ensue.
But in today’s technical world, it’s not that simple. Getting your ebook to the ebook retailer is not necessarily a straight path. In some cases, you must go through a third-party retailer because some platforms don’t allow for direct sales. In other cases, you have a choice to make as to whether you go direct or through the third-party.
The advantage of a third-party retailer, like Smashwords (who, to be fair, also sells direct), is you only have to upload your file once. They convert the file to various eReader platforms, and distribute them accordingly.
But what you gain in convenience, you lose in control of your product.
Going direct means you can more easily correct problems with the files because you have a direct relationship (interface is probably a more accurate description) with the retail platform. You don’t have to wait for the aforementioned third party to send off the changes and hope for the best. You can see fairly quickly if the problem is resolved.
To that end, we’re going direct as much as possible here at WMG, and we’re in the process of moving our books to those platforms as they become available. We were already on Amazon and Barnes & Noble direct, and we’re adding Kobo and Apple now. We’ll add new platforms as they become available and we deem it feasible.
Faster turn around and better products. That’s what direct sales means to our ebook customers. And that helps us fulfill our mission as The Home of Great Fiction.
Allyson Longueira is publisher of WMG Publishing. She is an award-winning writer, editor and designer.
by Allyson Longueira | Jan 21, 2013 | blog, Uncategorized
We’ve been talking a lot about marketing here at WMG lately because of several projects we have in the works (more about those in the weeks to come). And it got me thinking about how fast the concept of marketing is changing in this new publishing era.
Used to be, a book was marketed for a finite amount of time. The publisher bought it, put whatever amount of money it decided to invest toward promotion, and got it into the hands of booksellers (I’m simplifying here for expediency). All told, the book got maybe a few months of buzz. Then, it was on to the next one, and eventually, perhaps, that book goes out of print.
Think of it like a movie release. The movie is hyped for a while through ads and coming attractions. Then, it hits the box office and, if people like it, it gets more buzz by selling a lot of tickets. Then, if it’s really good (or maybe just critically acclaimed), it gets put up for some awards and gets more buzz. It gets one final push when it’s released on DVD or On Demand.
But movies don’t go out of print. They hang around. They develop cult followings. They (more…)
by Allyson Longueira | Jun 27, 2012 | Uncategorized
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