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.
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 into the publishing game right now would be like investing in Ruth Alpern’s new hedge fund based on the advice of Jim Cramer, no?
Actually, no; not at all.
While the major publishing houses continue their suicidal death spiral, and being a mid-list author or aspiring newbie at one of them is less appealing than it’s ever been, this is arguably the proverbial moment of opportunity in a time of crisis for indie authors and publishers.
As I’ve noted previously, self-publishing is becoming an increasingly viable option for non-fiction writers and poets, as well as for ambitious genre fiction writers who understand that, no matter who their publisher is, they’re going to have to bust their ass to market their book and hand-sell it to as many people as possible, one copy at a time, in person and online. These savvy authors know that they have to build a platform for themselves over time — something almost every major publisher requires these days — and know how to use it, attracting a loyal tribe and continually nurturing it.
This exact same opportunity exists for indie publishers who can identify an under-served genre or topic of interest, carve themselves a niche and build a platform around it, and produce quality content that attracts a following that they can then nurture into a passionate community, or tribe.
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 had the pleasure of attending a presentation/Q&A with social networking guru Peter Shankman — who suffers from a self-described extreme case of ADOS (Attention Defici- Oh, Shiny!) and an abundance of eccentric charisma (one of his many claims to fame is as the original creator of the “It Sank. Get Over It!” t-shirts) — and while it was targeted to PR professionals and focused on his terrific Help a Reporter Out initiative, there were a lot of general marketing-related takeaways that I found interesting.
I wish I had taken notes, or live-Tweeted some of his comments, but I was so engaged in the moment that I didn’t want to be distracted by trying to share it with others!
PR is the most effective form of marketing and, these days, we’re all marketers at some level, no matter what our actual job title is or income bracket we’re in. We’re all influencers, and while our respective tribes might be small, through social networking we have exponentially more individual power than ever before. It’s something publishers are slowly realizing, though some might argue, much too late.
Shankman spoke a lot about Twitter, but went beyond the usual hype of it being the platform du jour, offering some excellent tips on communicating effectively that were just as applicable to email, telephone and in-person communication. We’re bombarded with an average of 17,000 separate demands on our attention every day — from family and co-workers to email to “don’t walk” signs — so getting to the point quickly is crucial.
On Twitter (he’s @skydiver), brevity also happens to be a requirement: 140 characters to get your point across; always add value to the stream.
ie: don’t just Tweet “I’m eating yogurt.” Instead, Tweet “Pinkberry has 50% off coupons all day, today only.”
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,…
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 Communities Around Content.
It’s a topic that’s become Priority #1 for many publishers, books and magazines alike, as well as more marketing-savvy writers, and it’s one I have both a personal and professional interest in, too.
Touching on everything from defining one’s community, to determining ROI, to leveraging the natural inclination to form tribes, this session alone was probably worth the cost of admission for most attendees, and it would have been a great opportunity for someone from Portfolio to be standing outside selling copies of Seth Godin’s Tribes!
There were two particularly interesting points raised that piqued my interest enough to retweet, the first of which was right out of Tribes:
@annmichael the social infrastructure of the community is much more important than the technology infrastructure #TOC
@RonHogan #toc what kind of Return On Attention are you offering readers?
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 15 votes and “YES” is winning with 60% of them. Of course, it’s not the least bit scientific (and doesn’t claim to be), but I wouldn’t be going too far out on a limb to predict that, barring some targeted effort by Author Solutions, no matter how many responses they end up getting, “YES” will win, because the phrasing and context of the question favor that response.
I voted “NO” because I know better.
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 poetry scene after living down in Virginia for a year, and my walking away from it again about three months later, more or less permanently.
I’ve wanted to create a new chapbook for a little while now, just for myself, to collect in one place the handful of newer poems I’d written over the past few years, for those random times I end up at a poetry reading and want to get on the mic. Like last night, for example, when I decided to check out my local poetry reading and had to dig through a pile of random poems, several of which were 2-3 edits old, to find something I liked.
It was interesting reading in a totally unfamiliar setting with only one other person I knew in the small audience, and there were a couple of poets there I would have liked to have had something to give, partly to promote Spindle, but also to establish myself in the scene since I’m a terrible self-promoter.
That’s when the idea hit me; an experiment in social networking: offer a free chapbook and see how big my platform, and what my social “reach” is!