Comments on: The Quartet Press Story

By: Starred Inspiration #5 | Cementum

Starred Inspiration #5 | Cementum — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:15:25 +0000

[...] The Quartet Press Story [...]

By: Zoe Winters

Zoe Winters — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 06:57:45 +0000

LOL Joel, actually it’s brilliant. I wish I’d thought of it.

By: Joel Friedlander

Joel Friedlander — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 05:04:00 +0000

Zoe,

The people at Bowker can afford all the crack they want. How do you like their business model? They sell numbers. No inventory problems, no cost of production, no royalties. Just numbers.

By: Zoe Winters

Zoe Winters — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 08:07:21 +0000

I just want to say, the people at Bowker are smoking crack if they think I’m using ISBN’s for my ebook formats. Ebooks are digital sales. they are automatically trackable. Sounds to me like a good plan to sell more ISBN numbers to people who want to look serious while losing their shirts.

By: marky48

marky48 — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 04:02:10 +0000

Well, if I had to pick which boat to climb into, and I do, then I’ll take Random House, thank you very much. Some things in business never change no matter how much or how many would be authors want them to. Quality rules!

By: Joel Friedlander

Joel Friedlander — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 17:30:35 +0000

Henry,

A sobering and informative piece on Quartet. Certainly the ground is shifting almost daily in publishing, epublishing and distribution. I think the turmoil also helps to point out what serious self-publishers (or independent publishers) have known for a long time. The right author, with a book produced at a professional level and editorially indistinguishable from other high-quality books in the market, regardless of who published them, still is an excellent and conservative business model for making money (eventually) at niche nonfiction.

But that is very far away from many of the ebook pushers and the “self-publishing factories” that are turning out the 1000 books a day we hear about so often.