New York Times

Google explicitly announced that it intends to directly compete with Amazon. This may not be unexpected, but Google’s marketing intent is now more explicit. This means that publishers will now have a choice. The competition between Amazon and Google could effect your future marketing in terms of new opportunities for your titles, pricing strategy, distribution, and promotional communication channels.

MediaPost

Excellent article provides insights on how to market to consumers during a recession. The result is a consumer typology that yields insight into the purchasing dynamics of different consumer types and opportunities for marketing to them. Insights here have potential applications for publishers, new product development, and marketing.

Trend Watching

“Foreverism” is an emerging intellectual point of view and trend gaining cache and force within marketing and consumer culture. The essential idea is simply that consumers and businesses are embracing the notion that conversations, lifestyles, and products are “never done.” The ideas here could impact the way publishers view marketing, product branding, product development, and consumer engagement.

Springwise

Authonomy.com by HarperCollins is a good example of a customer-centric, organic, market approach to new surfacing new book ideas. This online community allows authors to post manuscripts that visitors can then review. A HarperCollins editorial board looks at the top five books each month. If you don’t have a program like this, this mini-case study might inspire your editorial team.

Publishing Trends

As part of your SEO and outbound digital marketing strategy, it’s important for publishing marketers to understand how to profitably use Twitter. This is a concise and helpful article on traps to avoid and best practices to develop when using Twitter as a tactic to help improve your web presence, corporate branding, and sales.

Adweek

A recent Linked-in poll conducted for AdweekMedia asked, “What is the most effective tone for advertising during a recession?” The top response (52%) was a tone of “value.” The next popular was “empathetic realism.” See how the other responses ranked in this article. What is the tone of your advertising for selling your publishing company to other businesses or products to distributors these days?

Pew Research Center

Last week interrogation techniques and same-sex marriage led the discourse on social media and blog sites. Christian publishing already includes many titles on same-sex marriage. But experts suggest the subject of interrogation will be high in our nation’s political discourse through summer. This opens new opportunities to create products for consumers who want to understand this issue from a biblical viewpoint. Relevance: acquisition editors, pub boards, or new product developers.

Publishing Trends

A story on a recent study on the influence of book cover jacket copy on consumer purchasing conducted by the Codex Group. Among other things, the findings confirm the importance of publishers placing their strongest copy writing talent on the task. There is a very useful generational analysis included here as well. Relevance: marketing, acquisition editors, and pub boards.

Wall Street Journal

Interesting insights on the significance and impact of the e-book format and the way we might read and write in the future from Steve Johnson. Insights from here could be usefully applied to new product development. Relevance: acquisition editors, product developers, and pub boards.

Association for Consumer Research

This is an abstract of a longer, formal article on extending brands in the presence or absence of a category competitor. Great fundamentals for book and author branding. Relevance: marketing, acquisition editors, and pub boards.