We’ll be running a workshop in Auckland next month on how to use social media, especially Facebook, to market books and ebooks. Love it or hate it, social media – with Facebook and Twitter to the fore – are taking over more and more of the discussion around books. Books are a traditional word-of-mouth sale [...]

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I was in Brisbane last week talking to Queensland librarians about ebook lending in public libraries and why HarperCollins wasn’t really the bad guy in this conversation. One view seemed to have a lot of support, both among the audience and my fellow panellists. It was that publishers, especially the big multiunationals, were doomed. I [...]

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The post below was written for the June 2011 issue of the Australian Booksellers Association magazine News on Bookselling. It was written shortly after the rejection by Judge Chin of the Google Books Settlement so it’s somewhat old news. But it did remind me that we haven’t yet heard anything from the parties about what [...]

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Many companies treat their website and Facebook page as if they were completely separate, like having two independent websites. In a sense they are but there are plenty of ways to integrate Facebook activity into your own website, and vice versa. It makes sense to do this now that Facebook is so big — 670 [...]

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The Association of American Publishers released its US book sales figures for February 2011 and it looks like 2011 will be the year the trade book business has to finally confront serious declines in its core print business. Up until now, print sales have largely held up while ebook sales boomed, giving the industry the [...]

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