Media

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

An arm with a tattoo: "I was made for the library, not the classroom."

Blowing smoke, breaking mirrors

The Internet is Broken!

A couple of jobs back, when I still worked only in marketing, I used to joke around with an ebiz friend about which of us had the bigger “smoke and mirrors” job.  I developed media kits, sell sheets and emails to promote our wares, and fought with our emedia department tooth and nail on developing the right tools for us to sell to our specific market; meanwhile, he was focused on finding new emedia products that worked on a corporate level and which the emedia department would have to implement and support across multiple markets.  Neither of us had any solid metrics for what we did to really determine our effectiveness, while the sales reps depended on both of us to do our jobs well in order to effectively navigate the magical revenue stream that runs through cyberspace.

Except, of course, there is no such magical stream, as many publishers are now finding out.

Seth Godin, of whom I’m quickly becoming a disciple, isn’t a big fan of the emedia=revenue mindset that’s driving a lot of initiatives in the publishing world these days, but he’s not simply a naysayer with a soapbox, instead positing a different approach to emedia that, in his opinion, leads organically to revenue…when it’s deserved:

First, the market and the internet don’t care if you make money. That’s important to say. You have no right to make money from every development in media, and the humility that comes from approaching the market that way matters. It’s not “how can the market make me money” it’s “how can I do things for this market.” Because generally, when you do something for an audience, they repay you. The Grateful Dead made plenty of money. Tom Peters makes many millions of dollars a year giving speeches, while books are a tiny fraction of that. Barack Obama used ideas to get elected, book royalties are just a nice side effect. There are doctors and consultants who profit from spreading ideas. Novelists and musicians can make money with bespoke work and appearances and interactions. And you know what? It’s entirely likely that many people in the chain WON’T make any money. That’s okay. That’s the way change works.

Amen.

(more…)

Continue ReadingBlowing smoke, breaking mirrors
An arm with a tattoo: "I was made for the library, not the classroom."

Review: TRIBES by Seth Godin

Just do it.

Or, as Gandhi put it, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

That, in a nutshell, is the primary message of Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, Seth Godin’s masterful mini-manifesto on what it takes to be a leader and why YOU should be the one to take the lead.

“I can tell you this: leaders have nothing in common.

They don’t share gender or income level or geography. There’s no gene, no schooling, no parentage, no profession. In other words, leaders aren’t born. I’m sure of it.

Actually, they do have one thing in common. Every tribe leader I’ve ever met shares one thing: the decision to lead.”

Emphasis mine, but it’s a point Godin returns to several times throughout the book, illustrating it with numerous examples of people from various walks of modern life who didn’t take no for an answer: they rejected the status quo, risked failure to achieve success by being deeply committed to what they believed in, attracted like-minded people to their cause as a result, and led them forward.

“All you need to do is motivate people who choose to follow you…

This leads to an interesting thought: you get to choose the tribe you will lead.

Through your actions as a leader, you attract a tribe that wants to follow you. That tribe has a worldview that matches the message you’re sending.”

Through the wide range of instructive and/or inspirational examples he cites, from the requisite Steve Jobs and Starbucks, to the far more interesting Grateful Dead and Nathan Winograd — he even throws in a nod to Barack Obama, although unnamed, in a brief section sub-titled “Criticizing Hope is Easy” — Godin gets in front of almost every likely objection someone might have for why his premise doesn’t apply to them and knocks them down.

(more…)

Continue ReadingReview: TRIBES by Seth Godin
An arm with a tattoo: "I was made for the library, not the classroom."

Goodbye Borders, Hello Kindle?

Things are looking shakier by the day for Borders, with GalleyCat now reporting that a Major Distributor Raises Concerns about their financial situation:

GalleyCat has received a copy of a “special alert” sent from a major book distributor specializing in independent publishers to its clients, warning them that Borders, whose financial difficulties are widely recognized, “now tell us that they will not be paying us for two months due to anticipated excessive returns,” a situation the company views with understandable concern. This distributor “typically carries receivables of approximately two million dollars with Borders,” the memo continues. “A default of that amount would by no means put [us] out of business, but it would be painful, weaken the short-term health of the company, and would mean we would have to defer some of our plans for future growth.”

This on top of Barnes & Noble announcing their expectations for a brutal holiday season and no sign of things getting better any time soon:

The chairman of Barnes & Noble Inc. last week told employees via an internal memo that the nation’s largest bookstore retailer is “bracing for a terrible holiday season,” and that he expects “the trend to continue well into 2009, and perhaps beyond.”

In his memo, Leonard Riggio, the retailer’s largest shareholder, noted that comparable store sales, a key retail indicator, recently declined for the first time in the retailer’s history.

“Never in all of the years I’ve been in business have I seen a worse outlook for the economy,” wrote Mr. Riggio. “And never in all my years as a bookseller have I seen a retail climate as poor as the one we are in. Nothing even close.”

So, if the two biggest brick-and-mortar book retailers in the country are having such a rough time of it, perhaps Amazon.com is picking up the slack and the future of bookselling lies online and the printed book slowly gives way to the Kindle and iPhone?

(more…)

Continue ReadingGoodbye Borders, Hello Kindle?
An arm with a tattoo: "I was made for the library, not the classroom."

Apology Unnecessary

The K Chronicles: Tales From the Campaign Trail
The K Chronicles: Stories From the Campaign Trail

There’s a bit of a tempest in a teapot happening over at Montclair State University thanks to a “controversial” episode of the Keith Knight comic strip, The K Chronicles, that was published last week in the student newspaper, the Montclarion, and included the word “nigger”.

Twice!

Well, kind of…

Seemingly lost on most of those in a tizzy over the strip (reading some of the comments is just one more reason to not take anything for granted before the election results are in and officially certified) is the fact that Knight was simply repeating a story told by a canvasser in Western Pennsylvania, where conventional wisdom has it that people are simply too racist to support Obama, as evidenced partly by Hillary Clinton’s thumping him out there during the primary.

It’s a story that’s been referenced in several places over the past week or so, and Knight’s take on it was simply addressing what has become one of the more fascinating sub-plots of this election as the economy has taken center stage and helped turn John McCain’s ill-conceived selling of his soul campaign into a sputtering hot mess: Racists for Obama.

“I wouldn’t want a mixed marriage for my daughter, but I’m voting for Obama,” the wife of a retired Virginia coal miner, Sharon Fleming, told the Los Angeles Times recently.

One Obama volunteer told Politico after canvassing the working-class white Philadelphia neighborhood of Fishtown recently, “I was blown away by the outright racism, but these folks are … undecided. They would call him a [racial epithet] and mention how they don’t know what to do because of the economy.”

(more…)

Continue ReadingApology Unnecessary
An arm with a tattoo: "I was made for the library, not the classroom."

Why Your Book Will Never Be in Borders

The odds are pretty slim, and not just because they’re on the verge of going out of business:

“I market books for a living, so I can tell you an unpleasant truth: the order for any book, from any account, starts at zero,” [Andrew Wheeler, a marketing manager at Wiley] warns. “The publisher’s sales rep walks in the door with tipsheets and covers, past sales figures and promotional plans, to convince that bookseller’s buyer to buy that book… Sometimes, that buyer is not convinced, and the order stays at zero.”

(h/t GalleyCat)

The distribution system in publishing is arguably broken, partly a result of the industry’s major players’ short-term thinking, and partly because the overwhelming number of books being published these days is more than the system can support.

(Writer’s Digest publishes an aptly titled book: Some Writers Deserve to Starve! Think about it.)

(more…)

Continue ReadingWhy Your Book Will Never Be in Borders
An arm with a tattoo: "I was made for the library, not the classroom."

And he has a sense of humor!

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5SWQJWm6Tg] "And I got my middle name from somebody who obviously didn't think I'd ever run for President." I just got around to watching Obama's speech at the Al Smith Dinner the other night and it's funny as hell, taking shots at McCain, Clinton, Schumer, Bloomberg, Giuliani, Wall Street and, most importantly, himself, showing a sense of humor that has rarely been on display during the campaign or in the majority of SNL's political skits.

Continue ReadingAnd he has a sense of humor!
Newer Posts
Older Posts