Tough times for publishing?

The official letter has now gone out that Ron Watters is discontinuing support of his popular AnyBook royalty software system.  In this letter, he states that he has experienced an economic downturn for the past few years from which they have not been able to recover.  Graciously, he proffers DashBook as a good alternative to AnyBook, and notes that AnyBook data can be imported by DashBook to help with the transition.

A few years ago, Publishers Assistant aka pubAssist discontinued selling their royalty system, although they will provide support for an ongoing fee.  They said that the world has changed, and offering a $1495 software solution is no longer accepted.

How has DashBook been doing?  During this time, we've been growing, perhaps to the detriment of our competitors.  We have no desire to put other products or companies out of business, but we have a strong desire and push to create the best royalty accounting system available, and at an affordable cost.  At only $495, DashBook bests the others in price in addition to the extra benefits to the publisher of its advanced features and functionality.

Our DashBook version 4.5 is the best software available for companies not willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a royalty solution.  In fact, in many facets, DashBook is better than some of those as well, and we're not finished with our ongoing improvements.

Sales of DashBook have been growing, as have the businesses of many of our publishing clients.  The publishing world has been going through massive changes, but nimble companies can make the best of a situation.  For instance, E-book sales are skyrocketing!

This means that many more publishers now have to deal with multiple formats of their titles.  To make this even easier, we will soon introduce DashBook version 5 that builds upon the success of version 4.

We're here, and we're growing stronger to help you even better!

Help other publishers

Publishing is not a zero-sum game.  If a customer were to only purchase one product (book, song, etc.) in their lifetime, then yes, that customer would no longer be available for any other publisher or vendor.  But it doesn't work that way, of course.

We all know that consumers consume, and some of them do it quite often and in mass quantities.  However, what they consume and how they consume it is fickle.  There was a time when consuming media meant a newspaper or a book.  Times have shifted toward multi-media information from the internet, electronically printed books, audio books, movies, etc.  So help generate a feeding frenzy for what you have now.

What this means is that as a publisher of a particular media type or genre, it behooves you to embrace your competitors!  If everyone but you abandons a field, you are alone, so you surely do not want your customers leaving your area of interest.

Seek out your competitors and start communicating.  Perhaps you could team up to develop a convention or even a #tweetchat.  When you brainstorm with your competitors new comrades, you will come up with many ways to target this common market that can be mutually beneficial.

Don't think that you have to "go it alone," as that is not the best way of doing it.

I'd love to hear your experiences of working with other publishers.