Just watched a 6-minute interview with Jane Friedman, former CEO of Harper Collins. She’s now CEO of Open Road Media, a publishing company she co-founded to so she can play exclusively in the digital space.<\/p>\n
Key things in her remarks that caught my attention:<\/p>\n
She describes advances and inventory <\/strong>as the two things that caused her most stress when she was in traditional publishing. Little wonder: an advance is a gamble and inventory is a huge cost-burden.<\/p>\n She describes her new digital venture as entrepreneurial.<\/strong> From her lips, that’s code for “I believe there’s a lot of money to be made.” One source: author’s backlist titles. “Backlist was always something that completely interested me.”<\/p>\n She places a huge emphasis on her new company’s ability to market its authors.<\/strong> I find this interesting because as we know from reading writers like Dean Wesley Smith and J.A. Konrath, that writers no longer need “publishers” for . . . you know, “publishing.” So what’s left for “publishers” to do? That would be marketing.<\/p>\n She envisions ebooks as multimedia.<\/strong> “We are bookending the text with video.” “Enhanced biographies” embedded at the end of some ebooks include text, video, photos etc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Just watched a 6-minute interview with Jane Friedman, former CEO of Harper Collins. She’s now CEO of Open Road Media, a publishing company she co-founded to so she can play exclusively in the digital space. Key things in her remarks … Continue reading