Highlights from Digital Book World, part 2 (of 2)

The last three days flew by, with so much great information and insights.

Here are some highlights from Tuesday and Wednesday of the 2016 Digital Book World conference:

The final plenary session panel, Women at the Intersection of Publishing, Finance and Tech. (l to r): Joanna Stone Herman, Dominique Raccah, Katherine McCahill, Susan Ruszala and moderator Charlotte Abbott

One slide (of many) sharing some fascinating information about our industry from Data Guy.

Mike Shatskin (Conference Chair; Founder and CEO, The Idea Logical Company):

As shelf space for books shrinks, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google become more important.

Jon Taplin (Director, USC Annenberg Innovation Lab):

$50 billion has moved from content owners to platform owners.

Rand Fishkin (Founder, Moz):

If we know a small handful of the right customers (i.e., readers) we can know their influencers, their social media habits. Survey them. Clone them. Leverage attention by contributing to platforms where they already are.

and

Google drives seven to ten times more traffic than Facebook.

Mary Ann Naples (was Senior VP and Publisher at Rodale, about to start as Publisher at Disney):

Get excited about failure... Do experiments, test your hypotheses.

Data Guy (Data Analyst, Author Earnings):

There's an opportunity for publishers to give debut authors different (lower) pricing so they can find their audience.

Scott Galloway (Clinical Professor of Marketing, NYU Sterns):

Facebook is the most successful thing ever, with 2.3 billion people. They're "giving us the ability to love at scale."

Dominique Raccah (CEO and Publisher, Sourcebooks), on women at the intersection of publishing, tech and finance:

"The ebooks revolution was driven by women. Sorry, guys."

Andy Hunter (The Literary Hub), on content marketing:

 "It doesn't hurt to go very narrow." When you try to go broad, nobody feels like this is for them.

Ricci Wolman (Founder and CEO, Written Word Media), on email marketing:

"The more relevant you can make the content, the better it's going to do."