Books are still the “DNA of our civilisation” according to Penguin Random House UK’s chair.
Reporting on a speech Gail Rebuck delivered to the London Book Fair’s Quantum conference earlier this week, Publishers Weekly said Rebuck talked about the changes she has witnessed in her publishing career over the last two decades.
The publisher’s job was made easier nowadays, Rebuck said, because digital research and sophisticated insight tools allowed marketers to segment audiences and target them appropriately. However, there had also been a decline in authors’ revenue and that only one in 20 writers could live on their writing income along, with half of all self-published authors earning less than $500 a year.
The challenges for publishers included squeezed margins across the whole supply chain, a lack of diversity in e-book distribution and competition from other media for readers’ time.
Technology, she added had made it possible for a tiny minority of authors to “hit a global jackpot of unprecedented, Himalayan proportions” while making it much tougher for many authors to be seen or heard in among the “vast sea of information” in which we live.
In an earlier speech at the conference, author Philip Pullman had also reiterated the importance of books and that the new ways of doing things did not entirely replace the old.
Read the full article on Publisher’s Weekly.
Reporting on a speech Gail Rebuck delivered to the London Book Fair’s Quantum conference earlier this week, Publishers Weekly said Rebuck talked about the changes she has witnessed in her publishing career over the last two decades.
The publisher’s job was made easier nowadays, Rebuck said, because digital research and sophisticated insight tools allowed marketers to segment audiences and target them appropriately. However, there had also been a decline in authors’ revenue and that only one in 20 writers could live on their writing income along, with half of all self-published authors earning less than $500 a year.
The challenges for publishers included squeezed margins across the whole supply chain, a lack of diversity in e-book distribution and competition from other media for readers’ time.
Technology, she added had made it possible for a tiny minority of authors to “hit a global jackpot of unprecedented, Himalayan proportions” while making it much tougher for many authors to be seen or heard in among the “vast sea of information” in which we live.
In an earlier speech at the conference, author Philip Pullman had also reiterated the importance of books and that the new ways of doing things did not entirely replace the old.
Read the full article on Publisher’s Weekly.
