Ignoring No
[This is a guest post by Tara Betts. Her info is at the end of the post.] come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed. — from Lucille Clifton’s Book of Light (Copper Canyon Press, 1993) I kept notebooks as a little girl, and I always knew I
Are Publishers Too White to Survive? Who Cares!
A recent meeting with two Caucasian well-respected literary agent friends of mine cemented that concern when one announced, “We’re all the same, [people the publishing industry]. We’re all white, we’re all over-educated, Ivy-leaguers, many of whom are trust fund babies.” Jeff Rivera, Declining Book Sales? WTF? Seriously? This is apparently going to be remembered as
8 Marketing Posts for Proactive Writers
There’s been a notable spike in new traffic here lately, partly from Twitter and partly from the blog being favorably cited recently by Editor Unleashed and ASMP’s Strictly Business Blog. (Thanks!) In light of my last two posts being a bit more ranty than usual, and my schedule next week being crazy, I thought it
New Media’s Credibility Problem
By offering consumers a low cost digital product, the economics of ebooks create a virtuous, self-reinforcing cycle. The low price expands the available market by making it affordable to more consumers; low production and distribution expenses allow the publisher to earn a healthy margin; and the larger addressable market allows publishers to sell more units
6Qs: Richard Eoin Nash, Social Publisher
“Basically, the best-selling five hundred books each year will likely be published much like Little Brown publishes James Patterson, on a TV production model, or like Scholastic did Harry Potter and Doubleday Dan Brown, on a big Hollywood blockbuster model. The rest will be published by niche social publishing communities.” —About Richard Eoin Nash Richard
On Branding, Tribes, and Seth Godin Goes Wild
“If you can just assemble these 30,000, 50,000, 100,000 people who love literary fiction, then you’ve earned the right to be the ringleader, the leader of that tribe—and you’ll never, ever again have trouble selling literary fiction.” –Seth Godin, How to Fix the Publishing Industry Seth Godin arguably did not have the Best Week Ever
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
Soda Pop Stop Lessons for Bookstores
“Thank you very much, Pepsi-Cola, for reminding me that I own my shelf space and I can do anything I want. So I immediately went out and found 25 little brands of soda that were still in glass bottles…” —John Nese, Galcos Soda Pop Stop John Nese, proprietor of Galcos Soda Pop Stop in Los Angeles, shows
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