DBW 2010

DBW–the ongoing community that grew out of the Digital Book World conference–is running a series of Webcasts designed to teach interested parties how to format eBooks. This dovetails nicely with our “Making of An eBook” series.

The Webcast series–the first installment was free–features Joshua Tallent, founder and CEO of eBook Architects, a firm that specializes in eBook formatting. He’s also the author of this book, Kindle Formatting: The Complete Guide (a book with which this blogger may shortly become obsessed).

Next in the series is a set of intensive A-Z sessions in how to format, distribute, and convert an eBook for use on various devices; the Webcasts will take place on Wednesday, March 3 at 1pm, Wednesday April 14 at 1, and Wednesday May 12 at 1. Tuition of $50 per session or $125 for the whole series, and there’s a discount for DBW members.

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

Digital Book World, the community that grew out of the DBW 2010 conference, has just launched a membership platform, meaning you can join the club. DBW describes the kinds of folks it’s looking for as “readers of all kinds who are passionate about the book, in all its forms, and are working within the industry to help change it for the better.”

Membership in DBW includes unlimited access to all kinds of exclusive Web content as well as discounts on conferences and classes. Membership normally costs $99/ year but is being discounted to $79 through the end of February.

DBW is certainly fulfilling its promise of creating a robust community based on the digital changes in the book industry, featuring compelling programs like a series of Webcasts that we’ll have more on later.

According to Kelly Gallagher of RR Bowker, indeed it is. His talk this morning at Digital Book World focused on surveying the income bracket of people who actually read eBooks. Even though eBooks are a bit cheaper than print books, the price of eReaders and awareness of the new technology seems to be restricting usership to only those with a bit of money to burn.

Here’s more from our sibling blog GalleyCat:

Most dramatically, he reported that 37 percent of eBook readers earned over $65,000 a year, 38 percent earned between $35,000 and $75,000, and 25 percent earned $35,000 or below. That presents a considerable challenge for publishers–how to reach an economic bracket effectively priced out of the digital book market.

Associate editor Iris Blasi broke that figure down on Twitter: “100% of entry level publishing types live in the beige circle @BISG’s pie chart defines as “low income”(<$35K)."

And here’s a bit of Gallagher’s talk: “Today all bets are off [about] knowing where that customer is. Today’s consumer they don’t care that we are here at this conference… that’s a reality that’s facing us in the publishing industry. All they care about that they’re going to get their product when they want it and how they want it. They don’t care what our problems are.”

At the Digital Book World Conference this morning, Sourcebooks founder Dominique Raccah gave an unlikely talk on poetry. More specifically, she spoke in detail about her companies new initiative, Poetryspeaks.com, an online extension of the publisher’s popular spoken word poetry anthologies. Turns out, she actually sees ways of making money off of poetry!

If you click over to the site (or look at the above screen shot with a magnifying glass), you’ll see it has a similar design to the books (provided you’ve seen the books), and a number of interesting features, including pages where poems participating poets live and can be read and heard. There’s also a kind of virtual open mic, through which anyone can record a poem. The site’s been live for 90 days, and this talk was a kind of check-in on how the site is doing a bit after launch.

Raccah said her team identified six revenue streams for the site, including downloadable audio and future plans for audio bundles of favorite poems curated by famous poets. Raccah tracked book sales for participating poets from various publishers. She looked at book sales for the six weeks before joining, and six weeks after via Bookscan. “These poets had a 55% increase in Bookscan sales after joining the site.” She said this represents preliminary evidence that users are engaging with the site. Given the small sales poetry is used to, 55% is huge for poetry, even though it might not represent that many books.

Future plans include poet trading cards (ugh) and online poetry slams.

At the Digital Book World conference in New York this morning, author and Razorfish exec Shiv Singh gave the morning’s first big talk of the day. Much of what he said will be review for folks in the publishing industry who’ve been rethinking their business for the last couple of years, but he nonetheless made some very interesting points.

Underscoring his whole talk was the notion that publishing–or any business–is now “all about relationships,” including not just online social networks but also all other forums, virtual or in person, through which the business can come to know its customers. He emphasized that there is no longer business to business media: publishers must now connect directly with customers, just as customers are now connecting directly with authors. He said it’s not just about having a social network presence, but having a strategy for using that presence.

He offered tips on branding and how to become a consumer brand, urging publishers to identify and reach out to social influencers–the “cool kids” from high school.

He had a fresh notion of the idea of looking for authors with platforms. “Authors who already have audiences…are going to be a lot more expensive,” said Singh, and publishers will have to find these people just before they break out otherwise they won’t be able to afford them.

Most interesting is his plan for how he’ll develop his next book: he’s going to ask his fans from his fan page what he should write his next book about, what publisher he should use. “That’s the change that we see,” said Singh.

The Digital Book World conference in New York starts tomorrow and goes through Wednesday. Co-sponsorted by F+W Media and Publishers Lunch, the conference features a ton of panels and talks about the changing digital book business.

Editors from eBookNewser and GalleyCat will be in attendance and hope to see you there, if you’re going. Here’s the complete schedule as a PDF. We’re particularly looking forward to the introduction by the ever-provocative Mike Shatzkin and eBook Tipping Point panel on Wednesday.

Publishing can really use these kinds of conferences now, if only to stoke a sense of healthy competition and to see who has been doing their homework. Of course, this conference will be going on during the Apple tablet announcement, so a certain amount of attention on Wednesday may be focused elsewhere. Follow the conference on Twitter using the hashtag #DBW.

[Full disclosure: DBW has advertised on this blog, though that ain't why we're covering it. Harumph.]