Mother, child, traditional printed book
Publisher Mia Freedman has just announced on her Mamamia website that her company will be publishing e-books in 2012. Managing Editor of Mamamia Publishing will be Rebecca Sparrow, columnist, author, and until recently, Mamamia’s deputy editor.
The Mamamia platform is a textbook launching pad for an e-book publishing venture. Over the past several years, Mia Freedman has leveraged the internet, her traditional media experience and her personal credibility on women’s issues to create a large and devoted following in newspapers, on television and across the web.
According to the announcement, it appears that most of these e-books will be authored or co-authored by either Freedman or Sparrow. Freedman explains:
We’re both passionate about writing and communicating but as authors – as consumers – we’re a bit disillusioned with the traditional publishing model.
We want to be able to reach a lot of people easily and directly. We want to be able to drill down deeper into some of the fantastic topics we discuss here on the site. And with an audience of 500,000 people (mostly women) every single month, Mamamia is in the perfect position to do that.
As usual, she’s spot-on. Most authors dream of such a platform while they tweet, blog, write freelance articles, and usually hold down another job to pay the bills. Mamamia is its own self-contained target audience, a marketer’s dream. The “traditional publishing model” is only necessary if you need to get printed books into bricks-and-mortar bookstores.
It will be interesting to see how Mamamia will choose to promote or give editorial space to traditionally published books  that appeal to their audience. There must be an editorial policy in the works. Until that’s clear, a few publicity managers will be scratching their heads over how to reach the Mamamia audience beyond a potential e-book wall of Mamamia’s own making.
But you can’t deny it’s a brilliant business move.
