Marketing

Commentary and advice on marketing, mostly for publishers (traditional and brands) and writers, but sometimes from a broader perspective.

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

On Inception, The Passage, and Writing in The Obama Era

Inception

The weakness of “It’s all a dream” — why we hate that, why we feel cheated when narratively anything is revealed to be all a dream — is that you’ve just asked me to spend so much time and emotional capital investing in the stakes of this, and you’ve now swept it away with the most anti-narrative structuralism that doesn’t have anything to substitute in its place. It’s laughing at you for even taking it seriously. You don’t want to feel like a victim of the narrative, and I don’t think Christopher Nolan would do that.

Inception’s Dileep Rao Answers All Your Questions About Inception

Nuanced, brainy and thought-provoking, Christopher Nolan’s provocative sci-fi masterpiece (yeah, I said it) isn’t your typical formulaic summer blockbuster. Even its car chases, gun fights, explosions and special effects wizardry exist on a whole ‘nother level, raised by the sheer audacity of Nolan’s demanding that moviegoers sit still, pay close attention and think hard about what they’re seeing for 2.5 hours rather than be spoon-fed the usual red/blue pablum Hollywood spews out like clockwork from their “me, too” factories.

There’s no filler, no empty calories, no short cuts, no opportune pee breaks; Nolan packs something worthwhile into every second of screen time, and you blink at your own risk. It’s an action movie for intelligent adults who are tired of being treated like teenagers, and it will stick with you long after, whether you loved it or not.

It’s also a call-to-action of sorts for writers and publishers. Or could be, if they’re listening.

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

So You Have a Platform; Now What?

Abandoned Train Station in San Juan Province, Argentina by redteam

And now blogging is — and very shortly became — something people do do because they are ambitious.

–Lizzie Skurnick

When all is said and done, one of my personal highlights from 2010 will undoubtedly be the “Why Keep Blogging?” panel I participated on at SXSW, partly because it was a great session that was very well received, and partly because it introduced me to Lizzie Skurnick, of whom I am now a complete and total fanboy.

The quote above is from a post that represents almost everything I love about the whipsmart and outspoken Skurnick distilled into one wonderfully compelling rant, and it’s a must-read, if only peripherally related to the rest of this post, which is mainly about social media, “platforms” and an article I wrote for the September 2010 issue of Writer’s Digest on 10 questions writers should be asking themselves about the future of publishing.

One of those questions is, “What else am I going to do with MY platform?”

You’re blogging; you’ve amassed a decent number of fans and followers on Facebook/Twitter; you even have a book deal (or for my DIY friends, a formatted book and/or eBook).

Now what?

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Continue ReadingSo You Have a Platform; Now What?
An arm with a tattoo: "I was made for the library, not the classroom."

BEA 2010: Maybe it’s just me?

Don't believe the Devil, don't beLIEve his book by Celeste

BEA is North America’s largest gathering of book trade professionals, typically attracting between 20,000 – 30,000 people. Book industry professionals who attend BEA include: booksellers (independent, specialty, and chain); book distributors; marketing and publicity professionals; editors, agents; scouts.  BEA is also attended by assorted film and TV professionals and is covered widely by the media for the attention it brings to upcoming books as well as for the notable authors it attracts to the event itself.

BEA Show Overview

Book Expo America represents a bizarre conundrum for me. Maybe I’m just burned out on publishing conferences, and since I’m not buying or selling books and have never cared about free galleys, it feels less relevant to me personally than some of the other conferences I’ve attended this year.

I don’t know if it’s just too big for me to get a firm grip on, or maybe it’s trying to be too many things to too many people?

This will be my third time attending BEA, and the first time I’m attending more than one day, and by all rights it should feel like Book Nerd Nirvana, akin to how I felt about the first NY Comic-Con (was that REALLY back in 2006?!?!), but in reality, it just feels like three really long days of extra work standing between me and the holiday weekend. (more…)

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

Shout-Outs: Lanier, Wendig and the Robots

"The combination of hive mind and advertising has resulted in a new kind of social contract. The basic idea of this contract is that authors, journalists, musicians, and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising." Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget I'm knee-deep in final preparations for Digital Book World next week (look for the new website to relaunch by Tuesday, built by me!), but I wanted to give…

Continue ReadingShout-Outs: Lanier, Wendig and the Robots
An arm with a tattoo: "I was made for the library, not the classroom."

A Quick Note on the Fabled “iPod Moment”

The Pirate's Dilema (sic) by Browserd
The Pirate's Dilema by browserd

There are millions of books on amazon.com, and on average each will sell around 500 copies a year. The average American is reading just one book a year, and that number is falling. The problem (to quote Tim O’Reilly) isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. Authors are lucky to be in a business where electronic copies aren’t considered substitutes for physical copies by most people who like reading books (for now at least).

–Matt Mason, The Pirate’s Dilemma

The op-ed I wrote for Publishing Perspectives earlier this week, “E” is for Experiment (Not E-books), got an unexpected amount of attention and I’m pretty sure it’s the most I’ve ever seen a post of mine fly around the Twitterverse. Writing for someone else’s site is much harder than blogging on your own, so full credit to Edward Nawotka for a great job of editing it, helping me bring forward my main points and carving away the extraneous content, most of which went into my previous post!

One of the comments I got on the article allowed me to elaborate a bit on one of the points I made, that “e-readers will never have their ‘iPod moment’ for one very simple reason: books are not music.”

Dan from BookLamp mildly disagreed with me, making a point about the potential benefits of cost-savings and discoverability afforded by eBooks and eReaders, making a subtle pitch for his own platform that purportedly “matches readers to books through an analysis of writing styles, similar to the way that Pandora.com matches music lovers to new music.”

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Stool, Sunlight by Voxphoto via Flickr

5 Things Books Should Learn From Magazines

Like my favorite writers, the magazines I truly value introduce me to new things, or show me new angles on the familiar, that I'd not have come across on my own. In my own series of posts for Folio: a few months back, I made the point that content + context = value, declaring that magazines that nail the equation will survive. That same math is also valid in the conversation about the future of books.

Continue Reading5 Things Books Should Learn From Magazines
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