Will eBook Exuberance Kill Publishing?
“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
Freemium for writers is two debates
[This is a guest post by Dan Holloway. His info is at the end of the post.] 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
You are not your iPhone, not your Kindle
“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
Is Social Publishing simply Vanity Publishing 2.0?
“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
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”,
Platform 201 for Busy Writers: 1,000 True Fans
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
Review: GROUNDSWELL, by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
Solid info and insights, coupled with clear (if sometimes incomplete) case studies make GROUNDSWELL: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies (Harvard Business School Press; 2008) ideal for the C-Suite skeptic and those trying to influence their embrace of socialization. Published last year, and working primarily from data collected in 2007, it holds up
Platform 101 For Busy Writers: 3 Simple Steps
“The best time to start promoting your book is three years before it comes out. Three years to build a reputation, build a permission asset, build a blog, build a following, build credibility and build the connections you’ll need later.” —Seth Godin In an era of immediate gratification and information overload, patience is something few
Free is wrong for writers; Freemium might not be
What [FREE author Chris Anderson] is proposing is down somewhere, on the scale of ethics, well beneath Wal-Mart’s policies of no longer hiring any full-time workers so as to avoid health and unemployment insurance. It is in fact some weird sort of neo-feudal, post-contract-worker society, in which he will create a dystopian and eager volunteer-slave system
The Limitations of FREE; Godin vs. Gladwell
For Anderson, YouTube illustrates the principle that Free removes the necessity of aesthetic judgment. (As he puts it, YouTube proves that “crap is in the eye of the beholder.”) But, in order to make money, YouTube has been obliged to pay for programs that aren’t crap. To recap: YouTube is a great example of Free,