Monday News: B&N is being investigated by the SEC, marketing v. publishing, the digital publishing market, intellectual property jobs, and the growth of Harlequin India

JanetPublishing NewsBarnes & Noble / digital publishing / Harlequin / India / intellectual property / Mills & Boon / Nook10 Comments

Were Nook’s Books Cooked? Barnes & Noble’s Accounting Investigated By SEC – Forbes – In the immortal words of Astro and Scooby Doo: Ruh Roh. It seem the SEC is a mite concerned about two issues:

(1) the Company’s restatement of earnings announced on July 29, 2013, and (2) a separate matter related to a former non-executive employee’s allegation that the Company improperly allocated certain Information Technology expenses between its NOOK and Retail segments for purposes of segment reporting.

Barnes & Noble reports that it is cooperating with the SEC’s investigation; however, BN stock fell almost 8% after the bookseller’s quarterly report detailing the investigation was released. Forbes

Customer choices – Brian O’Leary has a very short, but very provocative piece on the way in which marketing platforms like Hubspot are innovating very quickly in their interest in and ability to individualize marketing streams to consumers, meaning that publishers may no longer fill that media void. There are a lot of implications here that O’Leary doesn’t detail, but that you can extrapolate from his article, especially his parting points:

“The lines between editorial and marketing content are already blurred, as marketers work to answer questions and solve problems for both current and prospective customers. If publishing incumbents can’t establish a customer-facing legitimacy, marketers may become their new and even primary distribution channel.” Magellan Media

Mike Shatzkin Says That There’s no Market for Anything Other Than Narrative eBooks – I’m Not Sure I Agree – Publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin has a lot of opinions about a lot of publishing issues, and here’s another one, with interesting commentary from Nate Hoffelder. As Hoffelder points out, just five years ago, the traditional publishing industry was convinced that ebooks weren’t going anywhere, and look at things now. In fact, had the traditional publishing marketplace taken digital books more seriously back then, they may not have lost ground in the failed agency pricing model or federal collusion allegations. So let’s hear it for more independently produced digital cookbooks and textbooks!

“To say that there’s no market today for digital products like cookbooks, textbooks, and the like would be like saying in 1978 that there was no market for PCs in the home or school simply because there were only a handful of truly successful models, none of which came from one of the major computer manufacturers (Wikipedia).” The Digital Reader

Jobs Involving Intellectual Property Make Up 6% of US GDP: IIPA – At first glance, 6% may not seem like a lot, but this study by the International Intellectual Property Alliance found that “copyright industries” contribute more than a trillion dollars in UC economic value per year, inclusive of industries that support newspapers, books, television, music, and radio. Numbers in these fields continue to grow, adding more credence than ever to the assertion that we are living in an information economy.

“The report found that these industries included about 5.4 million jobs for US workers or about 5 percent of all private sector jobs. These jobs paid on average 33 percent more than other jobs, according to the study.” Galley Cat

Harlequin India bets big: Indian writers give Mills & Boon brand a fresh lease of life – This is a really interesting article on Harlequin India, led by Amrita Chowdhury, a former Silicon Valley semiconductor engineer and Hachette-published author, who is focused on growing, diversifying, and modernizing Indian-authors Harlequin/Mills and Boon Romances. Some of these books sell 100,000 copies a year, reflecting a strong demand for Indian-written Romances within the M&B framework. Harlequin established itself in India in 2008, and cultivates some authors through its annual “Passions – Aspiring Author Auditions” writing contest, noting that many authors do not have a writing background. In many ways, they reflect the readership Harlequin India is building:

“‘These are often professionally successful women who represent the new India. Even though a large part of our readership still comes from older women in the 35-40 years age bracket, we are wooing a younger demographic such as college girls and young professional women who are probably single and at a marriageable age,’ adds Chowdhury.

That the stereotypes about the Mills & Boon men being chauvinistic and dominating are changing also helps in wider acceptability. “The Indian titles, which now sell far more than the global ones in this market, offer a great degree of cultural and gender sensitivity. The women characters are not just secretaries or school teachers like those of yesteryears, they are doctors, bankers and engineers; and the men even if they are rich and handsome are also sensitive and make adjustments. The themes of second marriage and arranged marriage have also been explored in recent Indian M&B titles,” explains Chowdhury.” Economic Times

Janet

isn't sure if she's an average Romance reader, or even an average reader, but a reader she is, enjoying everything from literary fiction to philosophy to history to poetry. Historical Romance was her first love within the genre, but she's fickle and easily seduced by the promise of a good read. She approaches every book with the same hope: that she will be filled from the inside out with something awesome that she didnʼt know, didnʼt think about, or didnʼt feel until that moment. And she's always looking for the next mind-blowing read, so feel free to share any suggestions!

→ Janet