“Authors must become brands” is now common wisdom in book publishing. But should authors be in business beyond their books?
The growing trend towards “author-preneurship” reveals a range of opportunities and skills for authors to both gain from and contribute to the business world. Authors are founding startups, producing films, running lecture agencies, consulting with Fortune 500 companies, and entirely-author led services for the industry itself. This underscores not only the desire for an author point of view in business but the benefits of authors taking an entrepreneurial approach to one’s literary career.
In this podcast episode, we explore issues related to “author-preneurship”, including time management, legal issues, working with collaborators and self-identity within and outside of your entrepreneurial endeavors.
Kevin Smokler, Chief Evangelist and Community Director of BookTour moderates this panel. Smokler is joined by Betsy Amster, President of Betsy Amster Literary Enterprises; Mark Sarvas, litblogger and author of Harry Revised; Kim Rickets, founder of Kim Rickets Book Events; and Ron Hogan, founder of Beatrice.
Publishers looking to build web communities are increasingly faced with a choice: build, or buy? To make the right decision, prospective buyers need to consider the time, resources and benefits of acquiring targeted web communities.
Who is who, and who is doing what in the Chinese publishing market. How and where to find reliable and detailed market information – in English? What can a partnership do that a straight right sale can’t? And why do Chinese want to localize certain books?
LinkedIn has grown to become the professional equivalent of MySpace. Listen to How to Succeed in Publishing Using LinkedIn and find out why LinkedIn has become the number one business networking tool on the Internet. 
Book Buzz…Created by Librarians….FOR librarians!
The electrifying national bestseller The Grapes of Wrath was burned and banned in 1939 in Kern County, California—the Joads’ newfound home. “If that book is banned today,” asked the local librarian, “what book will be banned tomorrow?” 
According to BISG, libraries will spend over $1.8 billion on books in 2008. Buying for a library is quite different from buying for retail. No sales reps call on librarians and they do not return books, so they have to select carefully. 
Next-gen readers are visually assaulted by all forms of media and for the publishing industry to keep up with this pace it requires delivering information that is all things at once: entertaining, informative, credible and visually appealing. 
The 2008 BEA Editors Buzz panel was re-vamped to deliver the pre-show buzz right before the show-floor opened. This year’s event featured six top editors, each filling us in on their top book picks for this year.
Drawing from both customer research and years of personal retail experience Wayne Hastings, Sr. Vice President and Group Publisher at Thomas Nelson, leads this session – Creating Maximum Customer Experience Through Felt Need Merchandising. 
As consumers grow increasingly used to consuming an enormous amount of information from countless websites and blogs, for free, what’s the business model for traditional publishers? And how do we compete in a world where people are willing spend their time writing for Wikipedia, a website or blog, for nothing? 
Some exciting solutions that would change the way publishers do business are being offered by third-party vendors. How do they find it selling new ways of doing things in a media industry that has changed less than any other in the past decade? In this podcast episode – Teaching Some Old Publishing Dogs Some New Digital Tricks: Lessons from Third-Party Vendors Who Would Change Our Business – representatives of digital content third-party vendors lay out their vision of what publishers can gain in the future with their help and also tell us how hard (or easy) it is to get publishers to see the vision, or at least to try the proposition. 
Moving forward, the ability to create content that is enjoyed and shared by consumers will define success in publishing. New mobile devices and technologies, such as Apple’s iPhone, Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s eBook Reader, are just a few of the devices that are changing how people consume and share book content. 
The Caravan Project is an innovative non-profit partnership of publishers, distributors and booksellers which has produced scores of books in multiple platforms: e-books, downloadable audio, print-on-demand and large print. 
