“Shift!” Shatzkin tells publishers

I’m a little behind in posting this, and many of the readers of this blog who already follow conversations on publishing futures will be familiar with it. But if you haven’t already, you really must, MUST read the text of Mike Shatzkin’s address at BookExpo America: “Stay Ahead of the Shift: What Publishers Can Do to Flourish in a Community-Centric Web World“. Here’s just a snippet:

So if the community development requires scale, and the content development doesn’t require scale, and you’re a big company with a lot of money, where are you going to make your investments? Where are you going to look for your advantage? You’re not going to look for it in owning content. What we’ve come to is a point, where where we create value today is not going to create value tomorrow. You win today because you own valuable content and have the ability to put it on a shelf, but tomorrow what you need to own is the attention and the bandwidth of human beings. {Read the full text here}

The reason I remembered today that I wanted to link to this speech was that today Smashwords, the innovative e-Book publisher/retailer, announced their new Satellite strategy. Instead of having to find your way to the Smashwords main site to find their titles, you can discover content more specific to your needs via one of dozens of individual sites that group content into a channel, such as ebooks-for-kids.com or free-erotica-ebooks.com or Kindle-Ebook-Downloads.com.

This is all kinds of clever. First, it recognises that customers are looking for the content they care about, not the content the publisher cares about. It groups titles into channels to improve discoverability. Somone searching for ebooks for kids is more likely to land on ebooks-for-kids.com than Smashwords.com and when they do, they’ll find all kinds of content that meets their needs. It also proliferates the number of times titles and authors appear on the web, likely improving search rankings & results.

Smashwords’ Satellites strategy recognises and address many of the issues Shatzkin discusses in his speech. They are thinking and acting vertical. Great to see.