FutureParadox
Author Alasdair White
Posted in 
Author Alasdair White
This is a slightly edited version of part of my input to a discussion on a publishing forum.
People seem to either love or hate the big publishers and either support or are contemptuous of the self-publishing fraternity. Publishing is a business and there are simply two different business models here.
The big (traditional) publishers are operating with a very well established but inflexible business model that relies heavily of bringing out as many books as possible so that they obtain volume-based market share. Their competitive advantage is their professionalism, their financial clout, and their access to the book-retailing sector combined with their extensive market intelligence. Their competitive disadvantages are their incredibly slow product development cycle (the time it takes to bring a new book to market) and their very poor product acquisition strategies (how they actually find new authors/books that will give them market share or the greatest publicity).
The small publishers (and that is what self-publishers are) have a more flexible business model that Read the rest of this entry »
Author Alasdair White
Email is a wonderful thing – or is supposed to be. The trouble is that it is addictive and time consuming – many managers spend more than 25% of their working day dealing with their email in-box and feel outside their comfort zone when deprived of email connectivity. But when one considers that the estimate by the Radicati Group, a company supplying research in this area, is that 76%+ of the 267,000,000,000 email messages sent each day are spam, it is easy to understand that email has lost its competitive advantage as a communication process. Perhaps we should re-think our communications strategies!
Although the research suggests that corporate email suffers slightly less badly that private email – 66% of corporate emails are considered spam as against 82% of private emails – it still means that Read the rest of this entry »