Hitting the Reset Button on emedia
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.
Building and Curating Your Community, Part I
With all of the negative news of late about the collapse of the publishing industry and the “death of print”, combined with the report that Captain America, Chesley Sullenberger, “scored a $3.2 million two-book deal with HarperCollins’ William Morrow imprint” for a memoir and a book of inspirational poetry, one might understandably think that jumping
Peter Shankman on the Future of Social Media
When my CEO sent me a friend request on Facebook last year, I had to rethink how I was using the site. When Facebook changed its Terms of Service earlier this month, before quickly backtracking in the face of a growing uproar, I started to rethink my approach to social media overall. Last night, I
Rise of the Publetariat
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
Building Communities Around Content #TOC
Today kicked off the Tools of Change for Publishing Conference here in NY, and while I wasn’t able to attend, I was following it throughout the day on Twitter (#TOC), particularly via the Tweets of @annmichael, @RonHogan and @thewritermama, the latter of whom practically transcribed what appeared to be the highlight of the day: Building
The Problem With Self-Publishing
HarperStudio — one of a handful of publishers who really seems to understand how to use the internet and social media — is running a web poll on their home page right now that asks: “Are you less likely to read a book if it is self published?” As I write this, there have been
Free Chapbook: Crazy White Devil
It’s been years since I created a chapbook. Six, to be exact. I released Selected Squares of Concrete — a de facto “best of” poetry collection of new, revised, never-before-released and old favorites — back in March of 2003, smack in the middle of the razor-thin slice of time between my return to the NYC
Is the Future of Publishing…GOOD?
The bad news in the publishing industry didn’t let up last week as reports of cutbacks and layoffs and dramatically decreased revenues continued to pour in, and TheMediaIsDying tweeted every depressing bit of it, from major publications to small local radio stations, the rare bit of positive news they offered up paling in comparison. One
Twitter Tips for Writers
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
Is Print Advertising Dead?
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