Ultimately, publishers' primary focus should be to curate great content that people are willing to pay for, and to organize and nuture a community around that content and the authors who create it. That community will exist in multiple places and spaces, physical and virtual, and it will flow into whatever container suits it best.
While preparing for a series of meetings on emedia strategy over the weekend, one thought kept nagging at me: What the hell is emedia anyway?
Online and email advertising, webcasts, virtual trade shows, ebooks, ecommerce…oh, my! In the publishing world, it is the holy grail that will save us all thanks to high profit margins and easy scalability (relative to print media), but it seems like the goal posts that define it and its success are getting moved every year as the smoke gets thicker and the mirrors are repositioned.
Where does emedia really fit in the big picture of magazine publishing? Is it another revenue stream running off of Content Mountain — I still believe Content is King, though Context is now his equally powerful Queen — or is it something new and different altogether that calls for a brand new canvas and change of scenery?
If print media is the physical container that content and advertising is packaged into and delivered to the reader, and the subscription and advertising revenues it generates is offset by its related editorial, printing, production, circulation and fulfillment expenses, then shouldn’t emedia be budgeted and defined the same way? Would the profit margins for a website be as high if it had to bear even half of the burden of the expenses of the print container from where much of its content and most of its brand awareness comes from?
If there were no print host, could the electronic parasite survive?
If you're a self-published author or independent micro-press, these are very interesting times we're living in as Amazon officially announced the new Kindle, major publishing companies are in meltdown mode, and the entire industry is scrambling to figure out what's next. While following the Tools of Change Conference on Twitter, I came across an intriguing tweet from @indieauthor: #TOC Publetariat.com "outed" in Rise of Ebooks panel - can't stuff the genie back in the bottle, so I'm going w/ it: www.publetariat.com Cool name, and intrigued by the alleged "outing", I clicked through to find a website that aims to fill what, to my knowledge,…
The Atlantic has a must-read essay from James Warren, “When No News Is Bad News” (h/t @guykawasaki), that does an excellent job of putting into perspective how the Internet played a role in the death spiral of newspapers. Most interestingly, he makes it crystal clear how precarious the road ahead is for real journalism’s survival as a result, while calling bloggers out on their exaggerated self-importance and understated reliance on traditional media.
Newspapers have been and remain by far the largest source of news coverage and analysis in any city or town. Without the local paper, the TV and radio stations would be in difficult shape, despite the good work they often do. The most popular websites—Yahoo, the Drudge Report, MSNBC.com, CNN.com, the Huffington Post, you name it—also rely heavily on the work of newspapers, more often than not appropriating and linking to their stories without providing a penny in payment. As I write, the headline on the lead Huffington Post story is about the Bush administration “Burrowing Political Appointees into Career Civil Service Positions.” Upon closer inspection, this Huffington Post Story turned out to be a truncated version of what was in fact a quite interesting Washington Post story. (And upon even closer inspection, the actual story made clear that this had been common practice among all administrations in their final days and cited about 50 examples of the Bill Clinton administration doing the same thing.)
I raved about my former Writer’s Digest colleague, Maria Schneider, a couple of weeks back — towards the end of a long rambling post that no one but my wife probably read — because she’s put together one of the best websites for writers out there at editorunleashed.com.
She’s not only producing some great content including tips on writing and getting published and links to great free resources, she’s interviewing writers and agents, hosting a vibrant and active community, and has even started offering workshops on everything from writing an effective query letter to intensive fiction workshops designed to help you finish that novel.
Her post today about Twitter was particularly timely as I’ve started using it a lot lately, both personally and professionally, but I’m not sold yet on its real value. I’m still in the early stage of what she likens to “being at a cocktail party where you know no one”, but her tips on how writers can get the most out of it and 25 Twitterers to follow is a great resource:
There’s a bunch of publishing types using Twitter and following them is tapping into the zeitgeist—a never-ending stream of conversations, random thoughts and links. It gives you access to lots of smart, interesting, connected people.
But if you’re just getting started on Twitter it can be really intimidating, so I’ve made this list of 25 good follows for writers composed of the twitterati, book bloggers, agents, publishers and writers. This is by no means an exhaustive list of twitterati, but it may be a good start for you. Check out who these folks follow to find many more.
There are several people on her list I wasn’t following whom I added, including Bo Sacks (who surprisingly only has 83 followers?!?!) and Ron Hogan, and I was glad to see my old publisher Soft Skull there, as Richard Nash has a very high signal:noise ratio (something many Twitterers, myself included, haven’t quite figured out yet).
I’ll add to her tips that you can also do a version of Google Alerts on Twitter Search, and get an RSS feed for any topic of interest being discussed on Twitter.
Check out @themediaisdying on Twitter for a glimpse at the convulsions of an industry that’s either at death’s door or, for the more optimistically inclined, in the midst of a violent but necessary transformation.
I’ve worked in magazine publishing for 15 years now — consumer, B2B and non-profit — and as has been noted pretty much everywhere recently, 2008 was an ugly year. Mass consumer and B2B brands are getting hit the hardest, but even local and niche brands with strong subscriber bases are getting hammered by this perfect storm, and surprisingly to almost no one with any sense some people, the Internet has turned out to not be the magic bullet it was proclaimed to be.
(In fact, in many cases, online publishing is effectively “trading dollars for pennies“, and the economic fallout that’s affected print advertising is undoubtedly going to affect online advertising, too. ETA: It already has.)
Flip through the most recent issues of your favorite magazines and you’ll probably notice they’re a little bit lighter than they used to be. Less editorial content; thinner paper; deeply discounted, sometimes desperately worded subscription offers.
Almost all of them likely have less ads (and in many cases less relevant ads) than they used to, too.
I was cautiously optimistic that the major damage might be limited to 2008, and 2009 could be a rebuilding year for most brands on flat revenues, with some going under and a few even pulling off a Miami Dolphins-style turnaround, but 13 days into the new year, it looks like things still haven’t quite hit bottom.
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.