Defining Failure in Publishing
15 Jul
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Leaders need to let go, to accept that we don’t know best. Our role is to create the environment in which a sense of urgency around experiments is engendered, to accept and allow failure, to encourage iterative improvement and speedy adaptation, to facilitate information flow throughout the organisation: to orchestrate a process of improvisation, a dance in which the aim is to fail better, cheaper and faster so that we can all work out what will succeed.- Rebecca Smart President and Managing Director of Osprey Publishing on: Publishers Need to Fail Better, Cheaper, Faster | Digital Book World
Yesterday’s DigibookWorld Round Table discussed Defining Failure. The gist of the chat focused on assessment and experimentation. With new and faster reporting technology will publishers, bookstores, and authors do more to fail, in order to succeed in this changing reading cultural landscape? Like tech companies who assess new product launches, will publishers began to assess why certain books introduced into the marketplace fail instead of just leaving the book out to die like a thirsty turtle in the middle of a dessert?
A few interesting questions were raised:
- Have bookstores become literary showrooms?
- Are there things bookstores can do more to fail?
- Bookstores are currently serving as show rooms, whether they want to or not. Are book buyers going into bookstores looking at books, then buying them online?
Some even better tweets
- @MatthewDiener: $500K advance for book that will be lucky to earn back vs. $500K for MarkLogic server and an end-to-end XML workflow #dbw
- @kratlee: literary fiction is the old spice of publishing – @glecharles
- @bakersmark: One thing we don’t do in this industry is postmortems to discover why a book failed and what we could have done better
- @deegospel: Why aren’t bookstores cultural centers anymore? Where are the cultural centers & do they accommodate readers?
- @MatthewDiener: "We are great at failing with books everyday." @donlinn Grt pt; an industry surviving on 10% success rate w/ print.
- @deegospel: that is the great question: did the Old Spice social media blitz push sales?
- RT @TomThompson: Remember the Old Spice guy took off with HUGE ad spend. Social media wouldn’t have worked without it
Now your thoughts…
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