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."

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.

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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.

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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.)

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

Online vs. Print Reality Check

Buried in a glowing American Journalism Review article about the success of The Politico -- a politics-only news website that launched a couple of years ago and is getting 25 million page views/month -- is the fact that 60% of its revenue comes from its laser-targeted, thrice-weekly 27,000 circ print edition, without which, the site would  "be losing catastrophic amounts of money." THE PLIGHT OF POLITICO -- AND EVERYONE ELSE. The success of Politico actually seems like an incredibly discouraging sign for the media. Here you have this forward-thinking, primarily virtual venture to create a political news organization that marries…

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

Thrillerfest: Buzz Your Book

I was only able to make it to one session at Thrillerfest yesterday, but it was one I had a particular interest in as it focused on book marketing, a huge black hole in the industry as the minuscule budgets publishers set aside for it are invariably dedicated to the can’t miss A-list authors while the mid-list and debut authors receive little if any support at all. And that’s for commercial fiction; it’s even worse for literary fiction and poetry, never mind comic books.

M.J. Rose and Doug Clegg have their “Buzz Your Book” format down cold and after a brief introduction that noted how they both got lucky (translation: opportunity met preparation) with what they did for their own books, they explained that, while their successes aren’t necessarily duplicable, they do offer a fundamental model that any author can follow up on. Instead of prattling on in generalities, or offering examples of ideas that can’t be duplicated, they called on volunteers to pitch their own books and then offered specific ideas for them to market them effectively and interestingly.

Sadly, none of the ideas included traditional advertising in writing magazines!

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