Build, Execute, then (finally) Publish
The last four steps for platform and authoring success
For the last couple of days (see part one here and part two here) I’ve been sharing what I consider the new paradigm for DIY book marketing–a kind of cart-before-the-horse strategy where you market yourself first, and then publish later.
Yesterday we looked at the planning behind this kind of marketing strategy. Today we’ll look at execution.
My Beautiful Librarette
The digital evolution of the home library
A few weeks back my husband and I watched “My Beautiful Laundrette,” Stephen Frears’s 1985 film of a Haneif Kureishi screenplay that made Daniel Day-Lewis a star. Day-Lewis plays Johnny, a London tough whose schoolboy crush on his Pakistani classmate Omar (played by Gordon Warnecke) blossoms into love as the two men make a go of Omar’s uncle’s laundromat–and cope with all sorts of prejudices of class and race and sexual identity. It’s a movie with, in other words, with themes that should stand the test of time.
Heading towards marketing first, publishing later
Laying the foundation for vision, branding, and social channels
In yesterday’s article I gave you a tantalizing introduction to what I consider the new paradigm for DIY book marketing–a kind of cart-before-the-horse strategy where you market yourself first, and then publish later.
Here’s what I think it could look like for any writer approaching the publishing process for the first time. (Warning, this a 1-2 year strategy…)
Topsy-Turvy: A new roadmap for book marketing
Collect an audience then make a product for them
Given what we’re working on at Bookigee these days, and the awesomeness we’re putting together for the February 12th TOC Author (R)evolution Day, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about the future of book marketing. What’s working? Where’s it going? WTF?
One of the things I’ve been tracking for awhile now is something I’m calling the “marketing inversion.”
Length and spine width in a digital-first world
How these print relics are hampering digital innovation
I’m still working through this extremely long exchange between Nicholas Carr and Clay Shirky about containers and contents but one point keeps jumping out at me: We have got to get away from thinking every “book” has to be at least a couple of hundred pages long.
The Carr/Shirky discussion pulls in the oft-used music analogy. And yes, the shift to digital music meant we no longer had to buy the entire album. We are now free to buy only the tracks we really like. Many look to extrapolate that into books and claim consumers are dying to buy individual chapters. That may be true for a few genres but there’s a much more important lesson here.
TOC 2013 Start-up Showcase semi-finalists announced
Online voting is now open and ends soon
This year we’re having the publishing community help us determine the 10 finalists who will come to TOC in New York to show off their product/service. Starting today, an online voting site will be open to the public. Voters will have until Friday, January 11th to cast their vote and help us choose the 10 finalists who will be invited to NYC.
Identifying DRM-free ebooks
Customers deserve to know the restrictions they're buying into
One of my colleagues, Edd Dumbill, asked me a simple question over the holidays that I thought I’d share with the TOC community:
Is there any way to quickly tell whether an ebook on a retailer’s site is DRM-free?
Publishing News: Trailblazing experiments in publishing
Experiments in serial writing, crowdsourcing and subscriptions. Also, the Internet's effect on copy culture and a bookmarklet for smart tweets.
Here are a few stories from the publishing space that caught my attention recently.
The slippery slope of bogus reviews
A very simple solution is right under Amazon's nose
By now you undoubtedly read about Amazon’s decision to remove a large number of questionable book reviews. This is a problem that’s existed since the first day Amazon reviews. Most are probably from legitimate customers but quite a few are undoubtedly from friends, family, and others who never even opened the book.
Outthink Inc. believes learning should be fun
Join their campaign to revolutionize learning
Most of us who pursued careers in publishing did so because reading, in some way, impacted us as kids. But kids today live in a vastly changed world, and tablets have now taken over. One in four adults owns a tablet. On Christmas Day this year, 51% of mobile activations were for tablets, not phones. As publishing migrates from print to pixels, and reading more directly competes with games, phones, and tablets for attention, we need to ask how those pixels might impact the futures of today’s kids the way print did for us.
