Marketing

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

Read more about the article A Quick Note on the Fabled “iPod Moment”

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.”

(more…)

Continue ReadingA Quick Note on the Fabled “iPod Moment”
Read more about the article 5 Things Books Should Learn From Magazines

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
Read more about the article What’s the Curation Algorithm, Kenneth?

What’s the Curation Algorithm, Kenneth?

A disturbance in the Matrix - Tokyo, Japan by jamesjustin
A disturbance in the Matrix - Tokyo, Japan by jamesjustin

I was recently talking with a couple of researchers who observed that the most interesting science isn’t usually in the big name journals, but rather in the mid-tier or even lower-tier publications where really radical thinking and unusual results find their way into the literature. The big name journals are publishing on popular topics well along in the scientific literature. They’re important, but less interesting.

Curating out of the middle is a major opportunity for publishers and others in the information landscape. Repetition, presentation, prominence, and context all provide curatorial power.

—Kent Anderson, The Scholarly Kitchen

The concept of curation is a hot-button topic in publishing these days, often conjuring visions of the literary boogeyman: a faceless, soulless gatekeeper whose only job is to keep the riff-raff out of the Ivory Tower and off the bestseller lists.

It’s a frustrating meme, one of the pundit class’ many ill-conceived spins on the Kobayashi Maru, typically posited without any intention of offering a dramatic test of character.

My definition of curator is not at all like the anti-progress archivist Mike Cane prefers, but closer to that of a community organizer, a la Richard Nash’s vision of social publishing or Dan Holloway’s “Why not one of us?” call to arms.

(more…)

Continue ReadingWhat’s the Curation Algorithm, Kenneth?
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 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