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
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
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
In a time of crisitunity, you gotta have soul!
“Ad networks have scale and data, but they lack soul. Customers don’t join ad networks.” —John Battelle, Founder & CEO, Federated Media Federated Media’s Conversational Marketing Summit earlier this week was an unconditional success by any measure, particularly with regards to acheiving their goal of presenting insightful and instructive case studies of conversational marketing programs
6Qs: Maria Schneider, Editor Unleashed
“I don’t know if there’s any light at the end of the tunnel for publishers, but I think the future for writers is bright.” –Maria Schneider, Editor Unleashed I had the pleasure of working with the Editor Unleashed herself, Maria Schneider, for about 18 months, back when we were both with Writer’s Digest — as Editor
Tone Deaf Publishers Need Savvy Writers
In response to a question about lessons they’d learned from the failure of a book to sell as well as expected — something that was acknowledged several times as being the norm not the exception — one offered an example of an unnamed book that the stars had seemingly all aligned for: it was a great book the editor loved, that their publisher believed was going to be a hit, that got great reviews from all of the major mainstream outlets… and it flopped. In the final bit of unacknowledged irony, one of them briefly noted that examples of successful self-publishing were rare and magical.
Advertising is Failure
Digital guru Steve Rubel interviews Jeff Jarvis, author of “What Would Google Do?“, who makes an interesting point that I suspect many marketers are going to have in the back of their minds when the economy ultimately turns around and they reassess their marketing strategies and measure the results of their responses to the meltdown.