The BookSmarts Podcast, with Joshua Tallent

Tom Richardson has been the Bibliographic Manager for BookNet Canada since 2008 and currently serves on the BISG Metadata Committee. As BookNet Canada’s ONIX subject specialist, Tom joins the BookSmarts Podcast to discuss ONIX best practices in detail, as well as some of the issues seen with how sales rights and market data is being delivered from a Canadian perspective. BookNet Canada is a non-pr...

According to a report released by the American Library Association , Gen Z and Millennials are visiting public libraries at higher rates than previous generations, and also prefer print books over other formats. Dr. Kathi Inman Berens and Dr. Rachel Noorda from Portland State University authored this annual survey to capture how these younger generations read and discover books. They joined the Bo...

Miriam Warren is a Director at The Fisher Company , which provides international mergers and acquisition services for print and digital publishing media and technology sectors. Her eleven years in academic publishing give her a comprehensive knowledge of a publisher’s specific needs, from acquisition and peer review process through print and ebook production. Miriam also served as President of the...

Victoria Sutherland is the Founder and Publisher of Foreword Magazine, Inc., and Director of Children’s Books USA. She joins the BookSmarts Podcast to discuss how Foreword Magazine can help smaller, independent publishers with their marketing endeavors. The mission of Foreword Magazine, Inc. is to help booksellers and librarians discover great books from indie presses through an artistic magazine...

Klaus Krogh is the President, CEO, and co-founder of 2K/Denmark , a graphic design, typesetting, and type design company that earlier this year launched the Sustainable Typesetting brand of services. He joins the BookSmarts Podcast to discuss the importance of Sustainable Typesetting for publishers and the complicated process of creating bibles. Klaus also serves as the President of the Society of...

Mary Carlomagno is a publishing veteran with experience on all sides of the business including marketing positions at Barnes & Noble and Random House. She is a nationally recognized organizing expert and author whose books have appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Program, The Today Show, and CBS News. Currently, she is the Director of Sales and Business Development for Bowker bringing their wealth o...

Laura Brady is an inclusive publishing expert whose priority is always to put users first. She has more than 25 years of publishing experience creating and converting eBooks, training publishers on accessible workflows, and consulting for service organizations about how to publish inclusively while worrying about everyone’s reading experience. Currently, she serves on the board of the Accessible B...

Michele Cobb is the Executive Director of Audio Publishers Association and PubWest, publisher of AudioFile Magazine and MMB media, and a partner at Forte Business Consulting. Needless to say, she is a very busy woman and joins us at the BookSmarts Podcast to discuss what it’s like juggling so many hats at once. The Coronavirus pandemic threw a wrench in many areas of the publishing industry. Miche...

Thad McIlroy, an electronic publishing analyst and author who writes about publishing technology at his site, The Future of Publishing , joins me to talk about publishing startups.  Thad has been working for many years on a database that provides interesting details on these companies, and the list has now been published by Publishers Weekly. Thad describes how he got started with the li...

In this final episode of 2022, we are joined by David Marlin, President of MetaComet Systems. David has been working in the publishing industry for the last 24 years, and is an expert in royalty automation. We discuss his background and how he got into publishing, the recent move to paying author royalties through electronic payment services, and more. David shared how MetaComet has recently...

Ebook piracy is a constant struggle for some publishers, especially when their books are used in academic settings. In many cases, this can be due to the availability of the content, not an inability or lack of desire to pay for it. In this episode of the BookSmarts podcast, Joshua talks with Emma Watson, the Account Manager at Perlego, a UK-based book subscription service, about how subscription...

This episode features a conversation with Angela Bole, the current CEO of the Independent Book Publishers Association, about the role of independent publishing and the work of IBPA in that community. Angela's background is deeply rooted in publishing. She worked in a bookstore in college, then went on to complete the New York University graduate program in Book Publishing. After that she worked fo...

In this episode, Charles Watkinson, the Director of University of Michigan Press and the Associate University Librarian for Publishing at University of Michigan Library, joins us to discuss Open Access ebooks and their role in the publishing community. Open Access ebooks are essentially freely available ebooks, usually for scholarly monographs, that are released under a license that allo...

Kevin Franco is a Product Manager at Firebrand Technologies with a background in digital marketing, entrepreneurship, and direct-to-consumer ebook sales. He is leading the development of some new technologies at Firebrand, and has been doing a lot of thinking about book marketing strategies that can help increase book sales. We talked about the book marketing funnel from discovery through conversi...

In this episode we are joined by Pete Larson. Pete is the President and CEO of Bethany Press ( https://www.bethanypress.com/ ), a printer based in Bloomington, Minnesota. He has been in the printing side of the publishing business for over 25 years, and has some interesting thoughts to share with us about the current supply chain issues that we are experiencing as an industry. Pete looks back...

This episode features a recording of a panel discussion I led with Mary McAveney, Chief Marketing Officer at Open Road Integrated Media, at the BISG 2022 Annual Meeting. The discussion, titled "Future Proofing Your Workflow," aimed to cover some open questions about the process of becoming more prepared for the future of publishing, whatever that might look like: Where do we start? How do we...

Cory Verner is the CEO of ONE Audiobooks, a publisher of audiobooks and a turnkey audio services provider. Cory has been working in the audiobooks industry for over 20 years, and has seen the changes in technology, the changes in focus, and the growth in sales as the format has taken off in 6-7 years. Cory and I talk about some of the reasons for that growth, the demographics of listeners, and som...

In this episode we are joined by Mark Herschberg, publisher at Cognosco Media, author of  The Career Toolkit, Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You , and the developer of a new app that is attempting to promote a new take on reader interaction with book content. I was a bit skeptical of Mark's approach from the offset, having seen so many ebook apps and new ideas about digi...

This week's guest is George Slowik, Jr., the Chairman and Owner of PWxyz LLC, the parent company of Publishers Weekly, who joins us to discuss the magazine's history, the digital archive, and more. Publishers Weekly was launched in 1872 as a bibliographic source for all publishers to list forthcoming titles. Over its 150 year history, the magazine has continued to provide news and features ab...

In this episode I am joined by Thad McIlroy, an electronic publishing analyst and author based in San Francisco. Thad writes in-depth articles on publishing topics for his own website, The Future of Publishing, as well as for Publishers Weekly. We started off the conversation talking about the need to understand metadata from a strategic perspective, not just from a clerical or practical perspecti...

In the first episode of 2022, Todd Sattersten, Publisher at Bard Press, discusses his research on The Magic Number: the number of units a title has to sell in the first year in order to go on to be a greater success. This conversation was inspired by Todd's insightful blog post from April 2021 on this topic, which I highly recommend you read. Todd's research into self-help and business books...

In our last episode for 2021, we are joined by Scott Miller, Former CMO and EVP of Business Development at the FranklinCovey Company, and now their senior advisor on thought leadership and publishing strategy. In addition to running the publishing program at FranklinCovey, Scott is a best-selling author in his own right, as well as the host of the "On Leadership" podcast ( https://resources.f...

In this episode, Robin Whitten, editor & founder of AudioFile Magazine, joins us to discuss audiobook listener demographics and performance quality. Audiobook sales have grown significantly in a short amount of time. With that growth, we have also seen an increase in the number of available audiobooks and a revolution in audiobook production. Robin expounds on some of the major advances in the...

Fran Toolan, CEO of Firebrand Technologies, joins me to continue the conversation about cybersecurity in the publishing industry. Fran pulls back the covers a bit on this topic, revealing that Firebrand has had four security incidents in the last two years, including two ransomware attacks. And Firebrand is not alone; there have been a number of other breaches in the industry, too, so Fran is not...