Media

Commentary on various aspects of publishing and marketing, primarily focused on books, magazines, and social media.

Read more about the article Six People in My (Virtual) Neighborhood

Six People in My (Virtual) Neighborhood

Bottled Liquor Newsstand by Bill on Capitol Hill
Bottled Liquor Newsstand by Bill on Capitol Hill

This fervid desire for the Web bespeaks a longing so intense that it can only be understood as spiritual. A longing indicates that something is missing in our lives. What is missing is the sound of the human voice.

David Weinberger, The Cluetrain Manifesto

A year ago, I used to get most of my information from a variety of traditional and new media sources primarily via Google Reader. Now, loathe as I am to admit it, Twitter has replaced it as my primary aggregator, and the mix of sources is very different, too.

This past weekend, I did a major purge of my RSS feeds in Reader, clearing out more than 2/3rds of them (now down to 61 feeds), including some that were duplicates of Twitter feeds I follow, and many others I realized weren’t terribly essential when a hectic day found me hitting “Mark all as read” on 1,000+ items. But while Twitter is good for taking the pulse of the moment and flashes of conversation (or debate), I still look to blogs for more thoughtful insight and, increasingly, a sense of community.

I’ve noted before that Twitter is a great professional networking tool, more cocktail party than office, and the people I follow there are primarily in publishing and marketing, but there’s a specific subset of which I’ve become particularly fond: writers with great blogs.

(more…)

Continue ReadingSix People in My (Virtual) Neighborhood
Read more about the article Your Tools Don’t Matter (Or, Why I Love My Job!)

Your Tools Don’t Matter (Or, Why I Love My Job!)

Hammer birds by andy castro
Hammer birds by andy castro

Why is it that with over 60 years of improvements in cameras, lens sharpness and film grain, resolution and dynamic range that no one has been able to equal what Ansel Adams did back in the 1940s?

Ken Rockwell, Your Camera Doesn’t Matter

First, disclosure: this post is primarily about the day job and is a total sales pitch for Digital Book World. If you follow me on Twitter, you’re probably already aware of my connection to it, but this is the first time I’m explicitly writing about it here.

As I’ve noted before, I’m very optimistic about the future of what I call the community service of publishing, and the underlying mission of Digital Book World is to get past the hype surrounding the digital toys du jour and provide real strategies for consumer publishers to transform their business models and thrive in the digital age. It’s not about eBooks or Twitter or any other tree in the forest–it’s about the fundamental strategies publishers need to profitably maximize their assets in the short term while developing and executing a digital strategy for the long-term.

I’m very excited about this Conference for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I’m playing several roles, from Audience Development and Sponsorship Sales, to managing the DBW blog, to programming our series of free webinars that kicked off with last month’s The Truth About eBooks: Devices, Formats, Pirates (Oh, My!).

But the main reason I’m excited about it is so much simpler: I’m getting to work on something that I’m truly passionate about and fully believe in, and am in on the proverbial ground floor.

(more…)

Continue ReadingYour Tools Don’t Matter (Or, Why I Love My Job!)
Read more about the article Do Publishers Still Need Authors?

Do Publishers Still Need Authors?

Its a giant cupcake and Android! (@ Googleplex - B44) by David Recordon
It's a giant cupcake and Android! (@ Googleplex - B44) by David Recordon

Just as many entrepreneurs no longer need venture capitalists to launch their companies, authors no longer need publishers to publish.

Mark Coker, Do Authors Still Need Publishers?

Picture this: In the future, as the risks of publishing shift from the publisher to the author, publishers will be able to invest in technologies that allow them to bypass authors completely, developing sophisticated algorithms to scrape their content from the Internet, repurpose and repackage it for non-discriminating readers, and charge advertisers fistfuls of money for their wandering eyeballs!

It sounds even better if you say it out loud in Dr. Evil’s voice. Or Chris Anderson’s. Or Arianna Huffington’s.

Resistance is futile!

If Coker’s second linkbait advertorial for the Huffington Post didn’t add anything new to the conversation, it did at least spawn a new hashtag on Twitter, #publishersmatter, and generate some interesting discussion around the value publishers do, and don’t, offer authors nowadays.

My take?

(more…)

Continue ReadingDo Publishers Still Need Authors?
Read more about the article Burning Down the House: True Story
My Bookshelf (one of them)

Burning Down the House: True Story

Arguably my "biggest" publishing credit is co-authoring Burning Down the House: Selected Poems from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe's National Poetry Slam Champions (Soft Skull Press, 2000), and while I am both proud of and eternally grateful for its publication, its existence has more to do with timing and opportunism than the quality of the work therein. Besides my own attempts at zines and chapbooks, it was my first real introduction to the world of publishing, and it left a permanent mark that partly explains my cynical passion and/or pragmatic idealism for the publishing industry.

Continue ReadingBurning Down the House: True Story
Read more about the article Publishing is a Community Service

Publishing is a Community Service

Theme 1: Change by xcode
Theme 1: Change by xcode

Only those who know nothing of the history of technology believe that a technology is entirely neutral… Each technology has an agenda of its own. It is, as I have suggested, a metaphor waiting to unfold.

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

There’s a lot of hand-wringing and finger-pointing happening in publishing these days, both by those struggling to find solutions to the challenges the industry faces, and by various Joker-pundits who apparently “just want to see the world burn.” Demagogues and idealogues love the spotlight, and attention-seeking media outlets happily provide them a stage to stoke faux controversies over what’s not being done, or is being done wrong, yelling loudly about the inevitable end of publishing as we know it!

Personally, I’m pretty confident that the end is not near; in fact, I’m very optimistic that new generations of readers will continue to be served by ambitious authors, passionate publishers, and brazen booksellers for many years to come. The individual players and channels may will change, of course, but that’s neither new nor a bad thing.

Change is good, inevitable, and in publishing, very necessary.

(more…)

Continue ReadingPublishing is a Community Service
Read more about the article Ignoring No

Ignoring No

[This is a guest post by Tara Betts. Her info is at the end of the post.]

book from above by stephmcg
book from above by stephmcg

come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

— from Lucille Clifton’s Book of Light (Copper Canyon Press, 1993)

I kept notebooks as a little girl, and I always knew I had books in me – books other people would want to publish and read. I still have one of my handmade books, bound with purple yarn, the lavender construction paper cover sealed in clear shelf paper. The title in purple marker reads “Differences”. It’s the earliest collection of my poems that I still have.

Since then, I’ve published poems, essays, and articles in noted journals and anthologies in the U.S. and other countries; written for magazines about hip hop and literature; and blogged about whatever mattered to me. I toured across the country and trekked to London and Cuba where I led and took workshops and performed my work. I shared poems on Chicago radio stations that I listened to as a high school student in Kankakee, IL, and eventually appeared on television doing the thing I loved most—sharing my poems.

These were all things that no one expected from people where I grew up.  Kankakee is a small town, just south of Chicago, predominantly Black and hit very hard when the last factory downsized and eventually closed while I was still in high school.  At one point, our town was voted the worst place to live in America, and the economy still has never really recovered. Before that, my friends and I talked about writing, making music, starting businesses, and going to college as our escape into adulthood and away from Kankakee. We talked about all these big dreams.

The thing is, no one ever told you how to get past the dreaming and get to the doing.

(more…)

Continue ReadingIgnoring No

No more posts to load

Newer Posts
Older Posts