Commentary and advice on marketing, mostly for publishers (traditional and brands) and writers, but sometimes from a broader perspective.
With some exceptions for family, friends and notable side interests, I primarily follow people and brands that are directly related to publishing, new media and marketing, and am militant about keeping a very high signal:noise ratio in my stream.
[This is a guest post by Tara Betts. Her info is at the end of the post.]
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.
A recent meeting with two Caucasian well-respected literary agent friends of mine cemented that concern when one announced, “We’re all the same, [people the publishing industry]. We’re all white, we’re all over-educated, Ivy-leaguers, many of whom are trust fund babies.”
Jeff Rivera, Declining Book Sales?
WTF? Seriously?
This is apparently going to be remembered as Rant Week since I’ve been forced to emphasize the loud in loudpoet way more than usual, so bear with me a minute and don’t jump to any conclusions.
One of the few things I hate more than pundits are stereotypes, especially when they’re being used to make a point I might otherwise be inclined to agree with, but Rivera’s well-intentioned point in his GalleyCat op-ed so overshoots the mark that it’s kind of embarrassing, especially in light of his usual editorial role there as, well, the token guy of color.
Or so it felt for his first few months when the majority of his posts included the qualifier… “of Color“.
There’s been a notable spike in new traffic here lately, partly from Twitter and partly from the blog being favorably cited recently by Editor Unleashed and ASMP’s Strictly Business Blog. (Thanks!) In light of my last two posts being a bit more ranty than usual, and my schedule next week being crazy, I thought it would be a good idea to pull together some of my favorite posts so far this year, starting with those focused on writers and marketing.
Developing a Platform
Tone Deaf Publishers Need Savvy Writers
After offering our individual takes on a variety of topics and looking into our crystal balls to speculate on where things were going — a unanimous vision of increased disintermediation and the power of writers to control their own careers — we took questions and what was most notable was that the majority in attendance were not terribly marketing savvy and something as simple as setting up a blog struck many of them as being a significant challenge. A few didn’t see the value of it at all, missing the forest for the trees, seemingly still believing that a writer’s only job is to write.
Platform 101 For Busy Writers: 3 Simple Steps
I’ve realized over the past several months that there’s a tendency to oversimplify things, to assume everyone has a certain level of web and marketing savvy (not to mention free time), starting discussions about writers’ platforms, curating communities and “free vs. freemium” way too far ahead of the curve. For a lot of writers. something as seemingly simple as setting up a blog can become a huge, time-consuming effort for which the long-term value isn’t always quite clear or worthwhile.
By offering consumers a low cost digital product, the economics of ebooks create a virtuous, self-reinforcing cycle. The low price expands the available market by making it affordable to more consumers; low production and distribution expenses allow the publisher to earn a healthy margin; and the larger addressable market allows publishers to sell more units at greater profit margins.
Mark Coker, Why We Need $4.00 Books
One of the problems with the new media business model of trading exposure for content and attempting to monetize the eyeballs (a la The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, Geek Dad, etc; all a variation on the B2B editorial model, but with even more of a self-promotional angle) is that it makes the content suspect. Without a firm editorial vision, the result is typically a mish-mash of shallow opinion and punditry, with the occasional gem slipping through.
In his first essay for The Huffington Post‘s new Books section, Smashwords founder Mark Coker offers a half-hearted op-ed on ebook pricing, taking the narrow position that print books are too expensive for many consumers, especially those in developing economies, and that $4 ebooks are the mass-market paperback of the future.
Of course, there’s not a single mention of the prohibitive costs of eReaders, smartphones and their expensive data plans, or broadband Internet access. It’s a classic case of willfully ignoring the forest for the trees.
“Basically, the best-selling five hundred books each year will likely be published much like Little Brown publishes James Patterson, on a TV production model, or like Scholastic did Harry Potter and Doubleday Dan Brown, on a big Hollywood blockbuster model. The rest will be published by niche social publishing communities.”
Richard Nash, former publisher of Soft Skull, has been making waves ever since stepping down from the acclaimed indie earlier this year to “go all in” and pursue his vision of the future of publishing. Equal parts philosopher and raconteur, his over-the-top performance at BEA’s 7×20×21 panel reminded me of Frank T.J. Mackey, Tom Cruise’s motivational speaker in Magnolia; I fully expected him to start yelling “Respect the READER!” at one point.
He caught some flak as the focal point of my post asking “Is Social Publishing simply Vanity Publishing 2.0?“, not so much because I think he’s actually going into vanity publishing, but because of the various social/digital/ePublishing initiatives I’ve seen popping up lately, Cursor seemed to have the closest thing to a viable business model worth critiquing.
After doing exactly that backchannel, he graciously agreed to a brief interview to shed some more light on the subject and I’m thrilled to have him as the second in a sporadic series of interviews with insightful publishing and marketing professionals – Richard Eoin Nash, Social Publisher.
1) Define “social publishing” in terms the average book reader would understand; no buzzwords, no “organic gurgle of culture”. What is it, and what’s in it for the reader?
“If you can just assemble these 30,000, 50,000, 100,000 people who love literary fiction, then you’ve earned the right to be the ringleader, the leader of that tribe—and you’ll never, ever again have trouble selling literary fiction.”
–Seth Godin, How to Fix the Publishing Industry
Seth Godin arguably did not have the Best Week Ever last week, between his ill-conceived Brands in Public initiative, and his controversial talk at a brown bag lunch put together by the Digital Publishing Group here in New York City. Harsh reactions to both raged on Twitter and in the blogiverse, and he quickly walked back his brandjacking project, a brazenly opportunistic social media scam that effectively sought to leverage the real-time web and SEO tactics to extort $400/month from brands looking to control the presentation of their dirty laundry via his Squidoo site.
Between these two incidents, and his ill-advised comments on non-profit organizations and social media a couple of weeks ago (for which Geoff Livingston and Ike Pigott deftly cut him down), I’m starting to think the old man has lost a step.
Or three.