Marketing Archives — Page 15 of 43

Soda Pop Stop Lessons for Bookstores

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:August 31, 2009
Post category:Media
Post comments:1 Comment

“Thank you very much, Pepsi-Cola, for reminding me that I own my shelf space and I can do anything I want. So I immediately went out and found 25 little brands of soda that were still in glass bottles…”

—John Nese, Galcos Soda Pop Stop

John Nese, proprietor of Galcos Soda Pop Stop in Los Angeles, shows independent bookstores one way they can deal with major publishers and compete with Barnes & Noble, Amazon, etc. — depth over breadth.

I came across a great example of this approach while on vacation a couple of weeks ago, at Adventures Unlimited Books in Cottonwood, AZ, located on North Main Street in the historic part of town. Covering two decent-sized storefronts (maybe 800 sq. feet total?) with a small entrance connecting them that doubles as a seating/reading area, the left side features a modest selection of the kinds of new, recent and notable books across the typical categories that are found in most small, independent bookstores.

The right side, though, is an alternative history, conspiracy theory, sci-fi/fantasy aficionado’s dream, featuring an impressive selection of Adventures Unlimited Press books as well as books from other publishers covering similar topics and territory. It’s about as niche as you can get, sort of a bricks-and-mortar take on Tor.com‘s store, or the book equivalent of Nese’s impressive selection of 500+ sodas not produced by Pepsi or Coca-Cola.

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You are not your iPhone, not your Kindle

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:August 11, 2009
Post category:Media
Post comments:11 Comments

“Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn’t have to experience it.”
—Max Frisch

That an author needs to establish their own marketing platform nowadays has pretty much become a given, but I’ve seen many complaints about how difficult and time-consuming it is, and of course there’s the predictable flood of marketing gurus pushing all kinds of technology-enabled solutions to make things “easier”.

Some are well-intentioned and worthy of consideration, like the next-generation “social publisher”, Cursor, and the new, marketing-centric Writer’s Digest Conference. Others are just quick cash-grabs, like the brazenly opportunistic Twitter Boot Camp and 140 Characters Conference, my favorite description of which came from Loren Feldman: “biggest circle jerk of nothingness“. (NSFW!)

As Twitter’s still feeling the effects of last week’s crash, and Facebook’s acquisition of Friendfeed have shown, focusing on specific tools is the wrong approach, and limiting your platform development to your online presence is a recipe for disaster.

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Get Serious About the Business of Publishing

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:August 5, 2009
Post category:Media
Post comments:2 Comments

A book’s success is too important to entrust to somebody who doesn’t have a stake in it. Editors are already fierce enough advocates to have persuaded their bosses to let them acquire the books in the first place; why not let them keep on advocating?

–Ron Hogan, “Hey Editors! Less Max Perkins, More Billy Mays“

Hogan, GalleyCat’s Senior Editor, makes a valid point — that an editor’s name should theoretically have some pull with readers — but it’s undermined by the tiresome meme that social media will be publishing’s savior, and a misguided sense of entitlement, implying that publishers are preventing editors from establishing an influential public voice of their own.

Social media are excellent tools for building personal brands — the jury’s still out on where they fit within the corporate picture — and their primary appeal is that they’re free for anyone to use. Just like authors are expected to build themselves a platform before seeking out a publishing deal, editors should be doing the exact same thing for themselves.

It’s not rocket science, it’s free, and no one’s permission is required.

No matter who your editor is, or what their influence (or lack thereof) with readers might be, though, when it comes down to it, the best, most passionate promoter of a book is going to be its author.

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Staying on Message: It’s all about Community

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:August 3, 2009
Post category:Media
Post comments:10 Comments

There’s a hand-painted sign that hangs over my desk at work, that my wife picked out years ago at a crafts fair in Virginia, that says:

“I’m not bossy, I just have better ideas.”

Anyone that’s worked with me, reads this blog, or follows me on Twitter, probably isn’t the least bit surprised by that. Publishing and marketing have been twin passions of mine forever — in high school, I published a newsletter for my fantasy football league, using my Commodore 64 and The Newsroom software — and I’ve been fortunate to have a day job related to them, in one form or another, for over 15 years now. I’m generally a laid-back guy, but when it comes to certain topics, I can be quite outspoken; that’s partly where the “loudpoet” moniker came from, a riff on the influential Aloud: Voices From the Nuyorican Poets Café.

At the beginning of this year, I shifted the focus of this blog firmly in the direction of those particular passions, with the goal of establishing loudpoet.com as an outlet to voice my opinions on things in the industry that had previously been limited to backchannel emails and happy hour debates with friends and colleagues. Poking back through the archives, the combination of Twitter and the Tools of Change Conference really got me going, with the discussion on the former about the latter’s “Building Communities Around Content” session leading to the first notable wave of connections being made there and traffic being driven here.

Since then, I’ve written several posts that I consider to be must-reads, including the four noted as “Features” over in the right-hand column, but the word cloud above, generated via the blog’s RSS feed at Wordle.net, highlights two prominent words that best represent what this blog is really all about: community and people.

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Is Social Publishing simply Vanity Publishing 2.0?

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:July 30, 2009
Post category:Media
Post comments:20 Comments

“Yes, Sir, there are many happy people here. There are many people here who are watching hundreds, and who think hundreds are watching them.”

Samuel Johnson, Quotes on Vanity

“Digital publishing”, “ePublishing” and “social publishing” are the buzzwords du jour; Web 2.0 business models based on the idea that eBooks are the next big thing and social media platforms and tools are the best way to sell them.

There’s seemingly a new “publisher” putting up a digital shingle every day, and while the description and details vary somewhat among them, the usual common denominators are a savvy marketer’s dream combination of truth, opinion, hype, and a dash of old-fashioned “snake oil” opportunism:

Print is dead.
The distribution system is broken.
eBooks are teh future.
Social media has made us all publishers and journalists.
Writers will do anything to get published.

That last point typically represents the digital start-ups’ primary source of income, monetizing a community of aspiring writers by selling their work back into the community, or by offering them fee-based services that allow them to do it themselves. In their ideal scenario, they double-dip.

While generally offering legitimate contracts and something resembling a distribution and marketing program — the latter of which will still fall primarily in the author’s lap — there’s a vague whiff of old-school vanity underlying the whole thing that’s bothered me from the beginning.

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Keep it Simple, Stupid

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:July 21, 2009
Post category:Media Personal
Post comments:0 Comments

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. The spiritual lure of the Web is the promise of the return of voice. "The Longing", by David Weinberger, from The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual My wife and I celebrated our 11th anniversary this past weekend with a little family getaway to Lancaster County, PA, and had the wonderful kind of physically exhausting, mentally stimulating time that…

Platform 201 for Busy Writers: 1,000 True Fans

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:July 14, 2009
Post category:Media
Post comments:8 Comments

Mets Fan at Shea Stadium (Queens, New York) by Luke Redmond

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.
—Kevin Kelly, 1,000 True Fans

The “1,000 True Fans” theory states, effectively, that 1,000 literal fanatics each spending $100/year on your stuff is all you need for a sustainable career. It’s a model for which Trent Reznor is often used as an example, and much like the discredited “Long Tail Theory” it’s based on (Kelly and Chris Anderson are colleagues at Wired), it is overly simplistic and doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny.

It does, however, offer a reference point for the next step in building an author’s platform.

Platform 101 was about laying the foundation, physically and virtually. Once you have your foundation in place, you will slowly begin to attract an audience, some of whom might one day become enthusiastic fans who will not only buy your books (and short stories, and CDs, and t-shirts, etc.) but, perhaps more importantly, will also mobilize and spread the word far and wide on your behalf, sometimes without your even having to ask.

Platform 201 is about attracting, engaging and energizing that community, and these are three fundamental points to keep in mind while doing so:

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