New Media

A guillotine, a Sister of Battle, and a scrapbook picture from the 2001 National Poetry Slam.

Motivational Cliches Aren’t Business Models

Snake Oil shading and coloring by opacity
Snake Oil shading and coloring by opacity

“If the people who make the decisions are the people who will also bear the consequences of those decisions, perhaps better decisions will result.”

John Abrams, The Company We Keep: Reinventing Small Business for People, Community and Place

I hate pundits.

[ETA: Maybe I should have said I hate Twitter? Update at the end of the  post.]

Whether in politics, sports or publishing, on radio, TV or Twitter, they’re the know-it-alls who usually have no skin in the game, no accountability and, worse, no interest in seeing the big picture. They love to hear themselves talk, to offer their opinions on how things should be done, and to stir things up just to see what happens.

They also tend to love motivational quotes, dropping them into their speeches, and blogs, and tweets as if they were offering actionable advice and original insights; precious wine from water for the thirsty!

“Meh,” I say. “Meh.”

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A guillotine, a Sister of Battle, and a scrapbook picture from the 2001 National Poetry Slam.

On Branding, Tribes, and Seth Godin Goes Wild

Seth Godin Rides A Unicorn by zoomar
Seth Godin Rides A Unicorn by zoomar

“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.

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A guillotine, a Sister of Battle, and a scrapbook picture from the 2001 National Poetry Slam.

Will eBook Exuberance Kill Publishing?

One iPhone Case To Rule Them All by Photo Giddy
One iPhone Case To Rule Them All by Photo Giddy

“Originally, we weren’t exactly sure how to market the Touch. Was it an iPhone without the phone? Was it a pocket computer? What happened was, what customers told us was, they started to see it as a game machine. We started to market it that way, and it just took off.”

–Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs on Amazon and Ice Cream

There’s a particularly virulent meme running through the publishing industry that says the only thing keeping eBooks from supplanting print books tomorrow is a great eReader, and that Apple’s long-rumored Tablet is that killer device. Yesterday, another Apple event came and went and, as has happened every single time, there was neither an announcement of a Tablet, nor any mention of eBooks being a critical part of their plans for world domination.

Interestingly, Jobs specifically noted that eBooks weren’t a significant market yet, pointing to Amazon’s continued silence on the actual number of Kindles they’ve sold: “Usually, if they sell a lot of something, you want to tell everybody.”

Two other notable developments popped up yesterday that suggest the hype surrounding eBooks has hit an unwarranted level of “irrational exuberance”: the premature demise of Quartet Books (“there are very few industry best practices“), and Tor.com’s announcement of a POD-based imprint.

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A guillotine, a Sister of Battle, and a scrapbook picture from the 2001 National Poetry Slam.

Freemium for writers is two debates

[This is a guest post by Dan Holloway. His info is at the end of the post.]

Audience in Red by felipe trucco
Audience in Red by felipe trucco

The battle isn’t getting people to pay; it’s getting people to read. If they do read, they might not pay. If they don’t read, they’ll never pay.

Writers who use the “freemium” model face two distinct challenges, and the harder one isn’t always the one you think.

What a delightful piece of coincidence that I should be asked to write this blog the day before I headed off to the Reading Festival. My wife and I were going for the headline set by the most important band of the 1990s,  Radiohead (sorry, Kurt), who propelled the issue of providing content for free into the public consciousness (sorry, Trent) when they released their album In Rainbows on a set-your-own-price basis; 60% of people chose, in the event, to pay nothing.

A delightful coincidence, but not actually that significant. Radiohead are still the most important band in the world; Trent Reznor is one of the most important figures in [re]shaping the music industry; Stephen King is about the most long-term successful writer on the planet. And Chris Anderson is, well, Chris Anderson. But these are the names that come up again and again in the freemium debate – “look how great they are; see what they did!” on the one hand; “it wasn’t a success, it was a disaster; and the free wasn’t properly free!” on the other.

I want to make two points. First, the exploits of established megastars have nothing to do with the relevance of the freemium debate to new writers. Second, they actually skew the debate rather dangerously, because they focus attention on the wrong challenge, not the one that’s most important to new writers.

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A guillotine, a Sister of Battle, and a scrapbook picture from the 2001 National Poetry Slam.

You are not your iPhone, not your Kindle

tin robot by Dirty Bunny
tin robot by Dirty Bunny

“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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A guillotine, a Sister of Battle, and a scrapbook picture from the 2001 National Poetry Slam.

Is Social Publishing simply Vanity Publishing 2.0?

Mural: Vanity by by Franco Folini
Mural: Vanity by by Franco Folini

“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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Continue ReadingIs Social Publishing simply Vanity Publishing 2.0?
A guillotine, a Sister of Battle, and a scrapbook picture from the 2001 National Poetry Slam.

Keep it Simple, Stupid

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…

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