Three Tips for Curating the Community #TOC
This week’s Tools of Change Conference ended yesterday and even though I wasn’t in attendance, thanks to the laudable efforts of several Tweeters (@thewritermama, in particular), I felt like I was there the whole time. As is typically the case after a good conference, I’m simultaneously mentally exhausted and recharged by the ideas and opinions
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
How the Internet (and Advertisers) Killed Journalism
The Atlantic has a must-read essay from James Warren, “When No News Is Bad News” (h/t @guykawasaki), that does an excellent job of putting into perspective how the Internet played a role in the death spiral of newspapers. Most interestingly, he makes it crystal clear how precarious the road ahead is for real journalism’s survival as a result, while
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
Awkward Class War Humor
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ov3bqmSKW28] Part of me appreciates the wry humor, and part of me is totally offended by the young black mailroom guy playing the lottery. I thinks it’s really advertising the lottery itself that’s bothering me, as it’s basically a sucker tax on the poor, “acceptable” because some of the revenue supposedly goes to schools. Of course, not in direct
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
Game Changers
Pictures are very often worth much more than 1,000 words, and something about this one, as the rumors of Clinton being on the verge of becoming Obama’s Secretary of State appear to be true, is oddly reassuring. Despite all the heated rhetoric of the primary season, I share Sullivan’s slightly cynical take on it: The