Brands Create Media Outlets Online, Bypassing Magazines

NYTimes:

In the not-so-distant past, a luxury brand like Richemont, the Swiss company that owns Piaget, Dunhill and Montblanc, would have killed for even the slightest attention from Jeremy Langmead, the editor of British Esquire.

Now, he works for them, building a menswear e-commerce site.

Luxury brands have always advertised in the likes of Vogue, Esquire and Architectural Digest and tried to impress their editors enough to get mentioned in the editorial pages, as well. But now companies like Richemont are reaching out directly to consumers — and cutting out the middlemen.

Last year, Richemont acquired control of Net-A-Porter, the 10-year-old online luxury fashion retailer founded by the British magazine editor Natalie Massenet. When it first began, people in the industry sniffed at Net-A-Porter, suggesting it was just a tatty e-commerce site masquerading as digital fashion magazine.

They’re not sniffing anymore. Net-A-Porter sold for over half a billion dollars, making it one of the most expensive purchases of a consumer publisher — if that’s what it is — in many years. ...

Random House to Release "Ebook Insider" Sampler in Time for Christmas

The Digital Reader:

Random House are planning ahead for all the e-reader that people are going to be giving for Christmas. They’ve released an ebook sampler with a selection of all their latest titles. It’s called The Ebook Insider, and you can find it here.

For some reason it’s an 5″x8″ PDF. I wonder why they didn’t just make it a website? It’s already unusable on most e-readers; it needs a 9″ screen. Oh, they’re blinkered by the iPad, aren’t they? (I had to write the screen size before I realized it, actually.)

I’m beginning to get the feeling that the RH marketing department came up with this without consulting the ebook geeks. ...

Brit Pubs: Digital Promos to Dominate Xmas Books Campaigns

theBookseller.com:

... Pan Macmillan marketing manager Rebecca Ikin said this autumn would demonstrate a "step change" in the link-up between traditional and online marketing. "There are new platforms for the e-book in a way that didn’t exist before, so our digital publishing team, our marketing team and our digital marketing team are working in an integrated way," she said. "We are not now having the two-week or four-week advertising campaigns, we are having three-month campaigns and they are much more complex." ...

HarperCollins promises "whizzy digital plans" yet to be revealed for Russell Brand’s My Booky Wook Two. Brand will also be reunited with fellow "Sachsgate" culprit Jonathan Ross for a Hackney Empire event (30th September).

Penguin will use a "suite of video assets" in a pre-awareness campaign for Michael McIntyre’s autobiography Live and Laughing (14th October), with the author doing a 20-date signing tour.

Nigella Lawson’s Christmas title Kitchen (Chatto) will be part of an unspecificed "new digital initiative" being launched by CCV in the autumn, according to publicist Mark Hutchinson of Colman Getty.

There will be an app for The ­Armstrong and Miller Book by ­comedians Alexander Armstrong and Ben Miller (Little, Brown, 7th October), ...

NY Times Bestselling Author Seth Godin to No Longer Publish Books According to "1907" Model

mediabistro.com: GalleyCat: "New York Times bestselling author and marketing guru, Seth Godin vows to never publish traditionally again. After over 12 books with a legacy publisher, Godin says he's had enough. ... "I've decided not to publish any more books in the traditional way. 12 for 12 and I'm done. I like the people, but I can't abide the long wait, the filters, the big push at launch, the nudging to get people to go to a store they don't usually visit to buy something they don't usually buy, to get them to pay for an idea in a form that's hard to spread ... I really don't think the process is worth the effort that it now takes to make it work. I can reach 10 or 50 times as many people electronically. No, it's not 'better', but it's different. So while I'm not sure what format my writing will take, I'm not planning on it being the 1907 version of hardcover publishing any longer."

French Publisher Tries New eBook Marketing Model

theBookseller.com: "Le Belial Editions, a French sci-fi specialist, is to launch an e-book platform on 1st September. The four-year-old independent will sell all its books at between nine and 11 euros, about half the price of the print versions, according to c.e.o. Olivier Girard, and will offer buyers the possibility of paying more out of solidarity with the author or publisher."

Amazon's Prime Sucker?

Virginia Heffernan - Amazon's Prime Suspect - NYTimes.com: "I’m a member of Amazon Prime, and I can’t help congratulating myself. Though I should know better, I persist in believing that Amazon Prime, a program that for an annual fee gets me 'free' two-day shipping on purchases from Amazon, is something I’ve been tapped for — like Skull and Bones. Sure, I know that Amazon flogs Amazon Prime on every Web street corner, and if you shop even once at the nation’s largest online retailer you practically have to fight not to join up, which is to say, to pay the 79 bucks that make you a member. But on most days I’m so delighted by the warm welcome the site gives me ... So it wasn’t easy to suppress despair the other night when someone casually mentioned that there might be something . . . a little . . . chumpy about Amazon Prime. He wasn’t even talking about the auto-renewal, though it’s true Amazon doesn’t exactly grab you by the lapels to warn you that your card has been charged again, or about Amazon’s new program to draw students in by waiving the Prime membership fee for the first year. He hinted at something more sinister. ..."

Indie Lit Experiment: Sometimes That Happens With Chicken

Indie author and publisher Wanda Shapiro is giving her novel Sometimes That Happens with Chicken away as a downloadable PDF, and selling the self-published paperback, ala indie musicians and also such writers as Cory Doctorow, using a model of the type I blogged about here. Check out Wanda's book and her concept.

Simon & Schuster's Jonathan Karp Leverages eBook Technology & Backlist Prose to Address the Topic of Generals and the Presidents Who Fire Them

Sequence: President Obama fires McChrystal. Then pundits compare the event to Truman firing MacCarthur. Next Jonathan Karp, newly ensconced at Simon & Schuster, smells an opportunity to leverage the efficiencies of eBook publication, catering to the immediate, but likely brief, public interest in this topic. Karp grabs relevant prose from a sleepy S&S backlist title, David McCullough's bio of Truman, and revs it into a short but immediately relevant eBook. We'll be seeing more of this type of thing.