Oct

Publishers Adapt to the Digital Market

Hachette Book Group announced an entire restructuring of its sales staff yesterday in order to designate an entire division of the organization to digital books, while aligning the print sales division to work closely with the digital division in order to meet retailers’ and consumers’ needs. Under this restructuring, one-third of its sales and marketing staff are part of the digital focus.

“We are changing our current structure to enable HBG to meet the needs and challenges of our ever-shifting world, where digital has made a deep and lasting impression on the way HBG sells and the customers we sell to, the platforms we advertise on, and the manner and type of content we publish,” wrote Chief Marketing and Sales Officer Evan Schnittman in the announcement.

Not only did the reorganization not result in any layoffs, HBG anticipates that more staff are to be added to the group in the near future. A number of promotions also took place as part of the shuffling.

One task that the new digital sales and marketing team will tackle immediately is the renegotiation of retail contracts with companies like Amazon, Apple, Sony, and Barnes and Noble. Under the terms of the Hachette’s settlement of the Department of Justice lawsuit, the existing contracts which allowed for the agency pricing model had to be scrapped and rewritten, a job which simply takes a lot of time and effort from parties for both the publisher and the retailers.

Mercy Pilkington (1079 Posts)

Mercy Pilkington is a young-adult author and a teacher in a correctional facility. She does not have a single textbook in her classroom. With the top-of-the-line technology at her disposal and the low reading ability of many of her students, there’s no need for standard paper texts. Instead she relies on e-readers, iPads, desktop PCs, Polycom video conferencing equipment for virtual field trips, live streaming for science demonstrations, and text-to-speech read-aloud software to teach English and science. Within the next ten years, public school classrooms across the country are going to look a lot more like Mercy’s classroom because the educational possibilities with these kinds of technologies are limitless. Have a question? Send an email to mercypilkington@yahoo.com