Brett Sandusky

Brett Sandusky is Digital Marketing Manager at Kaplan Publishing. He is also the founder of Publishr, an ever-growing collection of essays that explores the world of digital publishing through both theory and practice. He lives in Brooklyn.

The (Real) Story of Free

One of the most discussed pricing strategies is 'Free'. Anecdotally, free product has been said to increase print sales of the same title, to play a marketing role in acquainting customers with an unknown quantity, to allow for a later up-sell, and to provide branding opportunity.

This week, Kaplan is placing nearly 100 of our eBook titles on sales for free for a week on the iBookstore. Something of a grand experiment, we've planned a veritable marketing bonanza to publicize the promotion. In the end, the experiment itself will yield more information about our consumers' interests, how we connect to our readers, and our eBooks themselves than any other products we are selling this year.

Is DRM More Costly Than Piracy? Thoughts on leveraging marketing strategy and DRM-free content

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about building better (read: strategic) eBooks. The more that I’ve tried to wrap my head around what would work and what wouldn’t, I keep coming back to the idea of reversing self-imposed constraints and searching for opportunity in areas from which we’ve closed off opportunity. One such area is DRM.   As a practice,…