Lawson Music Media Signs Contract with Apple

For eBook Publishing in iTunes New iBook Store!

Lawson Music Media is very excited to announce its new publisher relationship with Apple, Inc on their new iBook Store, part of the iconic, industry-changing iTunes application responsible for selling over a billion songs to consumers, along with TV shows, movies and other digital media.

“The iBook Store on iTunes is a game-changer for the publishing business, especially for publishers like Lawson Music Media, and its clients.” says LMM founder, Mike Lawson. “We purchased an iPad on release, and simply paging through the eBook that came with it, Winnie the Pooh, was a seriously exciting new way to read books. I had the kind of epiphany for books I had when I first put downloadable songs online for CompuServe in 1992. I could just feel that this was going to change everything.”

Being able to publish in digital format removes a longstanding barrier from expanding our areas of publishing interest. We’ve concentrated on music and media production instructional titles, our key area of expertise, since the mid-90’s. Working with Apple and publishing for the iPad in particular will also allow us to expand our area of publishing interest into any non-fiction title we happen to find interesting and want to invest our editorial, design and marketing resources into, while even letting us dip our toes into the fiction arena.

The common misconception is that there are no costs for making eBooks, but the reality is that what goes away is the physical printing, the shipping and the warehousing. All of these things really add up, but they don’t remove all of the expense of publishing a book. Working with a good publisher gives an author significant advantages over trying to self-publish, even in the eBook world.

Since we’ll no longer be faced with annually rising costs for paper, printing, shipping and other hard costs, the barrier to publish a title is reduced to our costs for working with competent editors, proofreaders, index editors, cover designers and other skilled labor who will design the interior of the books. This allows us to focus on content, design, and marketing efforts, passing on significant savings that we can in turn pass on to great authors.

In addition, Lawson Music Media will begin partnering with other content publishers who don’t have an eBook publishing plan, but want to get into the market without needing to invest the resources to do so, providing content to repurpose into eBooks and sharing revenues with Lawson Music Media. From periodical publishers to small book imprints looking to expedite their move into eBooks, Lawson Music Media will now be able to create revenue streams from content otherwise not in use in this format and add value to the companies providing the content.

Its an exciting time to be in the publishing industry!