ePublishing Week in Brief – September 2nd to 6th, 2013
ePublishing Week in Brief – September 2nd to 6th, 2013
Future Publishing Lays Off 55 Employees in the UK
The CEO of Future Publishing Mark Wood has announced that they have laid off 55 employees in the UK as it continues to restructure from a print based business to a digital publisher. Also positions are are not filled right now will remain unfilled.
“As we announced in July, we are restructuring Future in the UK to adapt it more effectively to the company’s rapid transition to a primarily digital business model,” said Wood in a statement to GamesIndustry International. “Future is now seen as a leading player in the digital media revolution and approaching 60% of our advertising now comes from digital markets. As Future becomes an increasingly digital business, we need to reduce costs and staff levels devoted to print products and downsize back office and support activities.”
“As a result, we are carrying out a redundancy programme which will affect selected, but limited areas of the company,” Wood continued. “This programme will involve 55 redundancies and the removal of an additional number of vacant posts.”
http://www.vgchartz.com/article/251278/future-publishing-lays-off-55-employees-in-the-uk/
Businesses in Gloucestershire warned over publishing scams
It follows reports that a company has been touting for business locally while claiming to be affiliated with the county’s fire and rescue and trading standards services.
Offering advertising space in a publication called The Chronicle, the company has cold called businesses allegedly claiming that it is an “exciting new partnership” with Gloucestershire Fire and Rescue Service and Gloucestershire Trading Standards.
Businesses are told that the publication will be distributed to every household and public building in the county, including GP surgeries and schools.
However, neither trading standards nor fire and rescue has had any dealings with the company or the publication.
http://www.southwestbusiness.co.uk/news/05092013092141-businesses-in-gloucestershire-warned-over-publishing-scams/
Visual Publisher Graphicly Raises $1.3M And Gets A New CEO As Co-Founder Steps Down To Focus On Product
The visual publishing house Graphicly, which makes it easy to distribute graphically rich content across a variety of platforms, has raised $1.3 million from previous investors led by Mercury Fund and Dundee VC. The company has also set aside around $300k for outside investors due to there being “so much interest.”
In addition to the new round of funding, Graphicly has a new CEO in David Fox. Former CEO and co-founder Micah Baldwin is moving back to a product role for reasons that he explains in a post today.
This is the second round of bridge funding that Graphicly has raised this year. It raised $1 million in January in order to make its way to a Series B and profitability by the end of 2013. This round means that the company has now raised around $7.3 million in total. I asked Baldwin why the second funding round and he said that they expected the growth in subscribed publishers to be “more linear.” Now they’re raising more money to sustain that growth and pull the string on other efforts like an embeddable YouTube-like widget that displays book trailers, provides a conduit for publishers to reach out to readers regardless of platform and allow them to share that info. About 10 percent of its publishers are using it and it’s seeing more than 1 million page views a month all with little attention given it in a year, and the company appears to have big plans for it.
Baldwin seems especially bullish about the widget, which he says shows a “distinct desire for publishers to connect directly to consumers.”
“Over the past three years or so, I have been CEO of Graphicly,” says Baldwin. “Until a few months ago when I walked into our Board meeting and informed the board that it was time for me to step down. It was time for me to remove the ‘CEO’ part of ‘player-CEO.’”
Baldwin says that it was the right thing to do for the company and for himself. “I was our biggest roadblock. The lack of production and delivery wasn’t because our engineering team wasn’t focused properly or our sales guys weren’t selling, but because I became an ‘arbitrary decision maker and product roadblock.’ So I stepped down. But not out. I just stepped from the sideline onto the field.”
http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/04/visual-publisher-graphicly-raises-1-3m-and-gets-a-new-ceo-as-co-founder-steps-down-to-focus-on-product/
E-Books Fail to Compensate for Medical Publishers’ Print Losses, According to Latest Report by Simba Information
Medical and health care e-books titles are hot — unfortunately for publishers, the double-digit growth rate for e-books has not countered print book losses and other challenges to their traditional business model. Global sales in the medical publishing market fell 2.4% to $10.1 billion in 2012, according to the most recent report from media and publishing intelligence firm Simba Information.
Medical and health care e-books titles are hot — unfortunately for publishers, the double-digit growth rate for e-books has not countered print book losses and other challenges to their traditional business model. Global sales in the medical publishing market fell 2.4% to $10.1 billion in 2012, according to the most recent report from media and publishing intelligence firm Simba Information.
The report, “Global Medical Publishing 2013-2014”, found that the worldwide recession had a broad impact on the revenue streams of medical publishers. Academic institutions faced budget pressure, which made subscription renewals difficult. Corporate customers and advertisers also cut back their spending in light of the recession’s impact. Globally, the market has been flat since 2010. Books and pharmaceutical journal advertising are on the decline. Thomson Reuters and McGraw Hill, once market leaders, have sold their medical publishing businesses.
The patterns have been clear for several years, but accelerated in 2012, particularly the decline in book sales. Simba estimates that medical book sales fell 2.5% to $2.96 billion in 2012.
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/9/prweb11087742.htm
Finnish Journalists Launch Prestigious Book Publishing Venture With Just $600
Long Play is certainly not the first European e-book single publisher to emerge. ThinReads, which tracks developments in the world of e-book singles with reviews and best-seller lists, wrote about the Danish publisher Zetland in the spring.
Long Play’s focus is strictly long-form journalism, with an added emphasis on investigative work. Vehkoo’s roots are in mainstream journalism. She was working as the literary editor at Aamulehti, Finland’s second largest newspaper before studying for two years at England’s Oxford University on a fellowship. Her purpose: to rethink the future of journalism. But she did more than think about the future of journalism; she wrote a book about it.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/howard-polskin/finnish-journalists-launc_b_3861608.html
A Profitable Six Months for Most Publishers
Despite some print softness, earnings were solid in the first half of 2013
There were other factors besides the increase in e-book sales that helped boost profits. At the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt trade group, print sales increased faster than digital, due mainly to HMH’s purchase of John Wiley’s cookbook line. Cookbooks are one category where e-book sales are relatively small, compared to fiction genres such as romance and sci-fi. Digital books represented 16% of HMH’s first-half sales in 2013, down from 18% in 2012, but profits at the house more than doubled.
Print book sales also rose at Penguin in the six-month period, up 13.4%, while digital sales increased 28.6%. Penguin’s overall results were helped by favorable currency changes. At Penguin Group USA, digital sales made up 33% of revenue in the first six months of the year, up from 31% in 2012, while for the entire Penguin Group, digital accounted for 21% of worldwide revenue in the first half of 2013, compared to 19% in the same period last year.
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/financial-reporting/article/58960-a-profitable-six-months.html
Kerry Wilkinson: ‘It’s not true that self-publishers can only be successful if they sell for under a pound’
Six books into a self-published crime series, Kerry Wilkinson has signed a 14-book deal. Will he ever go it alone again? ‘Definitely’
How did you come to self-publish?
When I turned thirty, I’d been doing the same job for a while. I wanted to try doing something different with my life, and made a list of things I thought I could do if I put a bit of effort in. “Professional sportsman” was unfortunately a long-disappeared aim, due to my increasingly dodgy back and, more likely, an utter lack of ability. It’s also hard to make a living from sitting on your sofa playing The Elder Scrolls. I had been working as a journalist for almost ten years and figured I would try to write a book. It sounds a bit simplistic but I just went for it, working every day around my job until I was finished. I looked at the traditional publishing routes – three chapters, stamped addressed envelope and a tiny piece of your soul to an agent, wait six weeks for the rejection and go again – but figured life was too short. I saw the “self-publish with us” button on Amazon and never looked back.
What sort of books do you write?
My crime series with DS Jessica Daniel set against the backdrop of a rainy Manchester is now five books long, with the sixth coming out in October. The rights were bought by Pan Macmillan and I am working with them on a total of 14 novels, which seems a bit surreal considering where I was two years ago.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/sep/03/self-publishing-kerry-wilkinson