Writers Tricks of the Trade Issue 3 Volume 9 | Page 32

NEWS
7 WAYS BOOK PUBLISHING WILL
CHANGE OVER THE NEXT FEW YEARS
M IKE S HATZKIN
F OUNDER AND CEO OF I DEA L OGICAL COMPANY
T HIS BLOG POST BY M IKE S HATZKIN WAS DATED O CTOBER 8, 2019. S INCE IT REFLECTS THE STATE OF OUR
INDUSTRY , IT IS REPRINTED HERE WITH PERMISSION .
A prior post described the new structure of the book publishing ecosystem. In the past three
decades, we have migrated away from a world where a publisher needed to own a substantial
infrastructure to deliver printed books to thousands of retail locations. And “back then” and for
most of the time since, most book readers both found the books they wanted and purchased
them in those stores.
B
oth the market and the nature of the
infrastructure have changed. Now
more than half the book sales and an
even greater amount of the “discovery”
takes place online and a lot of the discovery
and a lion’s share of the purchases happen
at a single account: Amazon. You don’t need
a big organization to cover a single account
F ALL 2019
nor a big infrastructure to service it. The
other half of the sales in the US, and sales
around the world, are now facilitated by
another single account, Ingram Content
Group.
Ingram provides every component of
the fixed-cost infrastructure that any book
publisher requires and, in fact, provides all
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W RITERS ’ T RICKS OF THE T RADE