September 11th, 2017
Designed to help publishers market their books online, OptiQly is a brand new software-as-a-service (SAAS) platform for book publishers. Initially just for Amazon*, OptiQly (pronounced optically) assesses a book’s “Brand Authority” and “Product Authority” to derive a “OQ Score” comparing that against a pre-determined optimal measure. To reach a top OQ score it recommends a series of steps to improve “Authority”.
August 1st, 2016
This post examines the latest quarterly financial reports from the big 5 book publishers and tries to draw some conclusions from the data. The big 5 are, of course, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. These companies are often seen as emblematic of the state of traditional trade book publishing in the…
February 9th, 2016
The other day I was in my local branch of the Vancouver Public Library. It’s a small branch within a community center. They do a good job of serving our neighborhood, of course with a full assortment of reading spaces, working spaces for students, a play space for the kiddies, a handful of computers and a small…
January 27th, 2016
“Reading comprehension,” Wikipedia tells us “is the ability to read text, process it and understand its meaning” (emphasis mine). I remember in Grade 5 at St. Anselm’s School when Mrs. Webber introduced our class to SRA cards, a ground-breaking reading comprehension game that help teach kids that reading wasn’t just mouthing the words and stringing the…
January 18th, 2016
It’s a great and timely idea: “Five-Minute Manifestos” for the future of the book business. Philip Jones, editor of the UK’s The Bookseller started the project as a lead-up to last December’s FutureBook Conference in London. But publication has continued since the conference. Jones first outlined the goals of the series in Those Magnificent Manifestos. Porter Anderson is serving as the…