Joshua Mack & Co.

Communications and technology for media and nonprofits

publishing

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Author Sites and Services

bookcovers_new

What can we say? We like books and we love working with authors to help them get their voices and projects out in front of potential readers. Each project is a bit different. Some authors blog and tweet others don’t, some have one book, others multiple titles. Some books have inspired community based projects. We addressed all of these situations. We know what happens to traffic when an author appears on a morning show and what happens the week after. We can help you build an online presence that works for your habits, that is easy for YOU to update, and we can help you build an audience. Our work ranges from single page sites for authors who have one book to multi-page sites for authors with multiple titles and articles. Our sites for authors range from fifteen hundred to five thousand dollars.

Authors we’ve worked with:

Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney – author of the NYT bestseller The Nest
Ron Suskind – Pulitzer Prize Winning author of A Hope in the Unseen and recently Life Animated
Nina Kushner – Historian & author of Erotic Exchanges; The world of Elite Prostitution in Eighteenth Century Paris
Alice Feiring – Wine writer & author of For The Love of Wine and the Feiring Line newsletter
Triss Stein – Mystery writer & author of Brooklyn Bones
F.L. Fowler – NYT Bestselling author of 50 Shades of Chicken
David Wessel – Head of the Brookings Institute and former WSJ columnist
Melissa Clark – NYT writer and cookbook author
Tony Hiss

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A Must Read For Smaller Publishers From The Founder of Skift

What is the smaller publisher to do in this world of giant page view generators like Buzzfeed and The Daily Mail? What is their business as Medium and others are trying to be the place where one should publish?

Rafat Ali, the founder of Skift a wonderful site for travel industry news, has written a must read about his experience trying to raise money, regaining  focus, and just doing what they need to do to succeed titled, “How We Got off the Addiction to Venture Capital and Created Our Own way to profits.” How they stopped chasing scale, focused on building direct channels to their readers versus trying to be a distributed media platform, focused on doing things today that brought revenue today”, worked on their company culture, and strengthened their utility for, and connection to, their readers.

“Lastly, we embraced the idea of being boutique, in the truest sense of that word, and have been loud and proud about it. One of the fallacies of mainstream media coverage of smaller media businesses is that these are just lifestyle passion businesses. Passion about the subject, enough to spend many years of our lives in it, sure. What business engenders loyalties if it doesn’t have passion behind it?”

The post is inspiring and a great blueprint for smaller publishers who want to work in and own a niche. The kind of publishers that I like to work with and believe the web is supposed to enable.

 

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Where are the hyperlocal media predictions for 2016

After my stints at LocalVox (which worked with local merchants to distribute their marketing information) and then at Blankslate (which was effectively the publisher of several of the largest local blogs in the country) I consider myself well out of local media. I still follow the  space still by subscribing to Street Fight. Like every news and pundit site they offered their list of things to look for in 2016. I was struck by the fact that none of their prognostications dealt with it, focusing instead on retailers, startup services, and beacons.

It was also interesting to me because I had just read an article on Nieman Journalism Lab about adding local news to people’s walls on FB. This in turn led me to think about outside.in where I had worked to develop a local blogger network and a toolkit that mapped stores to their locations. Outside.in may have been a bit ahead of its time as aggregating local stories and then placing them into FB and Snapchat would probably be a good service given how hard media is in general now an how difficult hyperlocal media is on top of that. It wouldn’t solve the problems that the creators of the stories face but it could get them in front of an audience where good things might happen. Foursquare might end up doing something similar with ads.

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Yummly opens up its recipe API to food app developers — Tech News and Analysis

Initially customers most likely will use the Yummly API to provide more generic recipe content and search in their sites and apps. One of Yummly’s early API testers, search engine DuckDuckGo, uses the API to answer specific recipe queries, basically extending Yummly’s search portal onto its own site.

But developers will eventually be able to tap into Yummly’s technology to make their recipe and cooking services smarter. For instance recipe aggregation apps such as Evernote, Paprika and BigOven store recipes scrapped from all over the web, most of them drawn from the same sites Yummly categorizes. Those companies could use Yummly’s API to organize their customers personal recipe boxes into much more useful categories.

Yummly opens up its recipe API to food app developers — Tech News and Analysis.

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The snowpack of social platforms

From the comments section of Matt Haughey’s post about the demise of Google Reader, the tech behind it, and current alternatives.

“I believe that Google Reader is the snowpack of social platforms. That the hard core information consumers you identify are likely the curators, contributors and distributors of content. Removing that from the ecosystem could wind up causing a drought of content.

Mind you, those curators and information junkies (me included) will find other services to perform these tasks. So my guess is that the impact will be limited. Yet, I think it’s Google that loses here by giving up such an important part of that ecosystem. Which is why I don’t think it should be looked at as a profit center”(just as G+ isn’t.)

 

A Whole Lotta Nothing: Thoughts surrounding Google Reader’s demise.

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Local TV News Is Following Print’s Path, Study Says – NYTimes.com

The report also highlighted the results of a new Pew survey that asked Americans whether they had heard much about the financial challenges that the news industry faces, like the steep decline in newspaper advertising revenue.

Sixty percent of the respondents said they had heard little or nothing, indicating that “awareness of the industry’s financial struggles is limited,” the report said. But some have sensed the results: 31 percent of respondents said they “have stopped turning to a news outlet because it no longer provided them with the news they were accustomed to getting.”

The report’s authors did find, as in prior years, a robust public appetite for news. Digital news sources are now used daily by 50 percent of Americans, according to Pew’s survey, making the Internet nearly as important a source as television. Mobile phones and tablets were mostly responsible for the surge in digital news consumption.

 

Local TV News Is Following Print’s Path, Study Says – NYTimes.com.