COMMUNITY NEWS

NetGalley At the Library Today NetGalley officially launched a new member benefit program for librarians, in conjunction with the American Library Association (ALA).   ALA members can now add their ALA member number to their NetGalley profile. When librarians request a title, you'll see the ALA logo appear next to their name on the New Requests page, so you can approve requests more quickly.    We're also launching "NetGalley at the Library"--our new online, email and social media program where we'll highlight specific titles and promotions just for librarians. You can pre-book spots in these newsletters for your titles just like the other "NetGalley Roundups," using this form. You can even include the title widget, to grant auto-approval just to librarians.   Over 7,000 librarians are already members of NetGalley. We recently conducted a survey of librarians to better understand how they read digitally, and how they use digital galleys. We'll be publishing the results in early February, after the ALA Midwinter show. (Want to meet NetGalley at the show? Email Kristina Radke to set up an appointment.)

Firebrand in Publishers Weekly

Kicking off a series of articles on the digital landscape, Publishers Weekly interviews Firebrand President Doug Lessing:

"We work with publishers at an early stage to integrate digital strategy into their print programs...not after the fact."

Read the entire article here.

November News from Firebrand

New in NetGalley

Features: We're pleased to introduce several new features added to NetGalley in our latest release, including support for select foreign currencies in the Edition Information, new ways to view Auto-Approved Members, and changes to the New Requests and Request History pages.

Markets: NetGalley recently announced a move into the UK market, led by publisher Faber & Faber. NetGalley's President, Susan Ruszala, will be speaking at the upcoming FutureBook conference in London on December 5th.

Publishers: Our publisher community continues to grow-recent additions include Llewellyn, New Harbinger, Library of America, and drop-in titles from industry veteran MJ Rose and bestselling author Brenda Novak.

Professional Readers: We recently launched a new page highlighting review sites and organizations who accept digital galleys via NetGalley. In just a few weeks, we've added more than 50 sites and publications to the list. Take a look here. Tell your publicists to check this list and make sure they know to send these outlets a NetGalley widget. A NetGalley widget is a pre-approved link to access a secure galley on NetGalley, and is the primary tool publicists are using to give their key contacts an early look at the newest titles.

If you'd like to know more about NetGalley, email us!

The ECPA membership newsletter recently published an article by our client, Dr. Warren P. Baker, of AMG. We were pleasantly surprised to read what he had to say about Firebrand:

Through Eloquence we can keep all our metadata in one place; we make it accurate there, and Firebrand sends it out to hundreds of trading partners. We no longer have to spend hours working in Excel to provide our metadata to various partners via their own specialized spreadsheets. And if there is a discrepancy between our data and what a trading partner has on the web, we simply notify Firebrand and Firebrand takes care of connecting with that partner to get it corrected. Now that we have an organized database, we keep finding more and more uses for it.

Earlier this year we decided it was time for a new website and web store. We didn't want to do a one-time conversion of data and then have to keep updating both the store and our database separately. So I thought, why not use our ONIX feed from Firebrand to do this? If the trading partners use it for their stores, why shouldn't we use it for our store? So, we had our web store and site designer build an interface to receive the ONIX data and use that data to create and update the database for our web store. Each week, when we have the file of updated entries from Firebrand, the interface allows us to make those changes we made into Eloquence right into our store. We have gone from having a chaotic collection of metadata about our books to having one consistent flow of information for everyone.

You can read the entire piece here.

Fran Toolan on the Challenges of Content Management

Recently, Joe Wikert of O'Reilly interviewed Fran for a podcast on managing the production of ebooks. You can download that podcast here.

November Shout-Outs!

At Ebooks For Everyone Else: San Francisco, by Joshua Tallent on Twitter.

In Publishing Perspectives, by Ed Nawotka.

Firebrand Founder Fran Toolan Speaks at Frankfurt

At Publishing Perspective's Metadata Perspectives Conference, which took place just prior to the opening of the Frankfurt Book Fair, Fran Toolan gave a presentation on the importance of metadata in the supply chain.

Toolan argued that this failure to engage with the topic was indicative of the continued ‘print mentality’ in publishing that was seriously hindering the switch to digital.

He asked delegates to consider the effort made to ensure the quality of a sales catalog or a book before it was allowed to leave a publishing house compared to the amount of time spent checking ONIX files. Printed materials are checked many times by many people while data rarely gets a once over.

"Managing data needs to be a strategic priority," he asserted. "Our readers have changed overnight, so why can’t we?"

More information about the Metadata Perspectives Conference can be found here.

Firebrand and NetGalley: New Presidents Appointed

On September 15th, we announced the appointments of Doug Lessing as the new President of Firebrand Technologies, and Susan Ruszala as the new President of NetGalley. Toolan will remain as CEO. "I cannot say enough good things about Doug and Susan," said Toolan. "In Doug's twenty years with Firebrand, he has done every job there is to do, and has done it better than anyone who preceded him. He is an inspiration to all that work with him both internally and at our clients. I cannot wait to see how the company grows under his leadership."

"NetGalley is still a start-up company in many ways," said Toolan. "Susan has done an absolutely amazing job of utilizing a small team with limited resources to build a service that is now the industry standard for publicists and professional readers alike. In a little over 18 months, NetGalley has welcomed more than 120 publishers, including all of the Big 6, and grown the professional readership seven-fold, to more than 38,000 readers. I am confident that under Susan's leadership, NetGalley will continue to grow and flourish."
 

Firebrand Launches Firebrand Associates

Firebrand has launched a new affiliate company, Firebrand Associates, an independent management consulting organization. The new company will be led by Don Linn, former Book Group Publisher at The Taunton Press, and former owner and CEO of Consortium Book Sales and Distribution.

"Don and I have been looking for an opportunity to work together for some time now," said Fran Toolan, Chief Igniter of Firebrand Technologies. "As publishers struggle with managing both their existing print publishing programs and their growing digital publishing programs, there are urgent needs to reorganize processes throughout the organization." Read the full press release.

Both Fran and Don will be at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Email fran@firebrandtech.com or Don at don@firebrandtech.com to set up an appointment.
 

Penguin Group (USA) Launches Title Management and Eloquence

On August 1st, several hundred new users at Penguin Group (USA) starting tapping away on Firebrand's Title Management Enterprise web-based applications. Penguin's successful launch marked the culmination of a project focused on metadata management and marketing activities, including tip sheets and metadata distribution through Eloquence. Title Management is now the gateway for data entry into Penguin's already-installed SAP Projects and Product Master, and the source for title information on www.penguin.com (USA).

Doug Whiteman, Executive Vice President of Business Operations for Penguin USA, commented, "With the growing number of digital issues that a publishing company faces today, such as search, e-commerce, data feeds, e-book management, etc., it's clear that an enterprise title management system is vital. Prior to our selection of Firebrand as our title management tool, we considered a number of options, but Firebrand kept coming out as the clear leader in areas like industry experience, reputation, and price. We have now launched Title Management at Penguin, and I'm happy to report that the user community feedback is excellent, the project came in right on time (miraculous in this day and age), and slightly under budget."

"This was a complex project with an intense delivery timeframe: just nine months," says Doug Lessing, President of Firebrand Technologies. "Penguin manager Ed Dulinski and I knew it was going to take unprecedented team work from several different groups within Penguin, Pearson, and Firebrand. There were many, many moving parts, and we intentionally set a pressure deadline to keep the pace. This team has set a new standard of cooperation and productivity and, in short, were a pleasure to work with."

Dulinski, VP Technology Project Management for Penguin Group USA, adds, "Penguin's implementation of Firebrand required interaction with many teams both inside and outside the organization. The Firebrand project team helped Penguin reduce these complexities by assigning very skilled staff with extensive publishing industry knowledge, project management and systems design."

The Penguin project forges ahead with 3 additional phases to be completed early in 2012.

New Customers; Laura Dawson speaks out on "Doing the Work"

July 21, 2011

We're very pleased to welcome so many new publishers to the Firebrand and NetGalley communities this quarter.

Our newest service, Content Services, will soon be distributing ebooks for a host of new publishers, including Bookmobile, Rutgers University Press, University of Oklahoma Press, and Warner Brothers.

Have you taken a look at the NetGalley catalog lately? The service continues to grow at a rapid pace. Today there are over 32,000 professional readers registered on the site, and over 100 publishers using the service. We were also recently featured in the Boston Globe.

Finally, on the Eloquence side, we are now distributing metadata for Baker & Taylor Marketing Services, Liberty Fund, University of Oklahoma Press, Warner Brothers and Worthy Publishing.

Plus, read this article from Laura Dawson, Firebrand's Content Chief, on why publishing is a lot more work than it used to be: http://www.ljndawson.com/p/doing-the-work.

University of California Press Selects Title Management

February 3, 2011

University of California Press has adopted Title Management Enterprise and Eloquence Metadata Services to support 125 users. Erich van Rijn, Assistant Press Director, Publishing Operations, commented, "After an exhaustive search and exploring many possible alternatives, we're very excited to be partnering with Firebrand. Firebrand offered the most complete solution in Title Management and Eloquence Metadata Service to help us manage our book and journals publishing programs."
Looks like we are heading to Berkeley!

BISG Elects Firebrand to Expanded Board of Directors

February 3, 2011

As part of a larger board expansion project, the Book Industry Study Group has elected Firebrand, represented by Chief Igniter Fran Toolan, to their Board of Directors. BISG is the US book industry's leading trade association for policy, standards & research.