Lou Rosenfeld

Over the next year, Lou Rosenfeld aims to publish 10 books and set up a media platform for publishing other high quality content.

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Filed under: Brooklyn, NY | Defining New Markets | Lou Rosenfeld | Publishing | Rosenfeld Media | Twelve Month Goals | Web 2.0

In this two and a half minute podcast (download iPod compatible, 13MB), Lou Rosenfeld, CEO of Rosenfeld Media, describes himself as an "infrastructuralist". Over the next year, he hopes to use his newly developed publishing infrastructure to produce 10 books focused on User Experience (UX). More importantly, he is trying to create a platform where smart people can properly package their content and monetize it without having to worry about the details. In this regard, he intends to move beyond books to multimedia web-delivered content.

Lou describes how he is using social networking to build Rosenfeld Media's brand image. While much of the information that might be contained in a book can be freely found on the Internet, readers will pay for high editorial standards and packaging in a form they understand.

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Filed under: Brooklyn, NY | Defining New Markets | Lou Rosenfeld | Publishing | Rosenfeld Media | Web 2.0

In this jam-packed 13 minute segment (download iPod compatible, 67MB), Lou Rosenfeld discusses two seemingly contradictory features of Rosenfeld Media: its open, social networking marketing model and its revenue model based on proprietary book sales. The two ideas seem contradictory because much of the work developing the books relies on open communication on the network. However, when it comes time to purchase the book, Lou might appear to be effectively asking people to pay for what was so freely communicated.

Lou answers this dilemma with the value of packaging, an idea he brought up in the very first segment of this interview that we published. Rosenfeld Media is using the network to establish an authoritative brand and providing the books in a format where people will find the information most useful. In essence, people are paying for presentation and editorial insight, not the reams of information that are freely available on the Internet.

Some additional highlights from this conversation:

• Lou uses a home-brewed analytic system to figure out how people are networked together based on how they pass discount codes along.
• Much like Linda Girard, he views networking on the Internet as just an extension of networking in the physical world. Google's algorithms for determining relevance are in fact based on analytic techniques long used to discern the structure of social networks.
• Packt Publishing may be attempting to use a strategy similar to Lou's but in the open source software arena.
• Lou would be interested in going to a subscription model like that used by Lynda.com, but feels he needs to build up inventory first.

Lou Rosenfeld discusses how he uses social media such as weblogs to create a presence for his books before they are even published and then uses promotional surveys to develop influence maps of the niches he is selling to.

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Filed under: Brooklyn, NY | Defining New Markets | Lou Rosenfeld | Publishing | Rosenfeld Media | Web 2.0 | Web Communications

In this 10 minute segment (download iPod compatible, 53MB), Lou Rosenfeld describes the vision of the book he has for Rosenfeld Media. Books are convenient information packets focused on a topic that people can read anywhere. Where Lou differs from traditional publishers is in his approach to marketing. It consists almost entirely of networking, be it traditional or on the Internet. Here are some highlights of his Internet approaches:

• Within a short time of signing an author, Lou creates a blog for the book.
• These blogs gain very high search engine visibility for their topics, well before the book is published.
• Lou also does push marketing through social media where invites people to invite their friends to surveys they have completed. In this way, he is actually able to develop a network map of influence in his target markets.

In our next segment with Lou, we will continue to focus on how he is using social media.

This segment is the first in a discussion with Lou Rosenfeld on what it takes to build a money making micropublishing business that eschews costly traditional distribution channels. Lou, who helped found the field of information architecture, is using social media combined with traditional word of mouth to build direct sales. The jury's still out on Lou's plan, but he has sufficiently controlled costs to the point that he does not have to sell too many books to break even.

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Filed under: Brooklyn, NY | Defining New Markets | Lou Rosenfeld | Publishing | Rosenfeld Media | Web 2.0

In this 12 minute podcast (download iPod compatible, 60MB), Lou Rosenfeld and I discuss how he first learned about the Internet and the helped found the field of Information Architecture (IA) before turning to his latest venture, Rosenfeld Media. Rosenfeld Media is a publishing house focused on the user experience (UX), a field that encompasses IA as one of its elements. Lou believes Rosenfeld Media can break even if it can sell as little as 1000 copies of each title. Here's his strategy:

• Rosenfeld Media will not distribute through major book retailers which require a margin of 55% to 70% of the cover price just to carry a title and can return books for full refunds at any time.
• He will not even use Amazon as it still requires 55% of the cover price as margin.
• Instead, he will sell as an independent seller in the Amazon network, paying them only a margin of 18% on each sale, and he will ship through a company for a lesser total cost.
• Although, he will do some test publications with on-demand printer lulu.com, their cost of $30 to $40 per book is substantially higher than the $6 per book he will pay for a run of 3000 with a traditional printer.

In later segments, Lou will reveal how he intends to use the Internet to magnify his marketing efforts and how he has focused his career on creating infrastructure for others to participate. This conversation can be thought of as complementing the series we have just started with Linda Girard and are in the process of completing with Peter Morville.

update: Corrected the stated relationship between IA and UX per a clarification from Lou Rosenfeld. Also added a link to the series by Linda Girard.