Today, we welcome back author Pam Jenoff, who wrote a great article for Booksquare called “A Rose By Any Other Name: Has Genre Become Irrelevant?”. Today, Pam explores publicity challenges facing authors, including shifts in world of literary agents as they develop programs to help authors in the wild world of publicity. As you’ll see, there are no easy answers to the questions Pam is asking, and she invites new thinking into her paradox.
The first thesis of The Cluetrain Manifesto is “markets are conversations”. Stretch, twist, transform, voila!: books are conversations. I was reminded of this last week as fragments of a Twitter discussion caught my eye: a reader and bookseller (both located in different states) engaged in a conversation about buying from local booksellers. The reader noted that while romance readers buy a lot of books, independent booksellers are not always romance-friendly; thus these book buyers go elsewhere. The bookseller said (and I paraphrase), “Hmm. Maybe we could do a better job of attracting these readers.”
While it can seem like the move to digital is the only topic consuming publishing industry, online marketing has resurfaced as a trending topic. Once the province of display ads (with a few wild experiments with the evil pop-ups!), online marketing is now, for better or worse, all about social media. Your MySpace, your Facebook, your Twitter. Just as when the blog craze hit (remember when everybody had to have one, even if the reason wasn’t clear?), social media mania is filling the halls of the publishing business. It’s not a bad thing. Because, social media (and marketing) is, at
I cringe a little when I hear that someone is “working on a viral campaign” for a product or service. I see viral marketing as taking a fingers crossed approach to marketing — hoping that you’ve created something cool enough that others will want to pass it on to their friends — while social networking means that you take an active role in cultivating and maintaining relationships with your friends, customers, fans, and other interested parties. To me, it’s the difference between passive and proactive action. Social networking is not a magic new concept. If anything, it’s a return to
The BS team spent the first full day of 2008’s Book Expo America watching booksellers, publishers, agents, authors, and everyone else get religion. In 2006, Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics, spoke to what should have been this crowd about the future and how the publishing business needed to move forward quickly…sadly, Tapscott spoke a large contingent of well-wired bloggers and a few other bodies. That room should have been packed to the gills. At this year’s Book Expo, held in unbelievably gorgeous Los Angeles — city of beautiful weather and clear skies (yes, the skies are clear) — the educational
Dan Green is one of my favorite bloggers — smart and provocative — even though we see the world from very different perspectives. I would rather read a 1000 of his words over 10 of most bloggers, even when he takes exception to one my recent comments, one where I was baffled about authors who shun marketing: Why should this be baffling? If writers wanted to be marketers, presumably they would have become. . .marketers. Instead they chose to be writers, presuming that marketing was the job of publishers. If one wants to be a “writer” and just write, that
Once there was an author who wrote a book. He (though he could have been she) sent the book to his editor who cried at the beauty of the words and published the book and the people bought this book and declared it a thing of wonder and the book was deemed an American Classic (because it was so good) and the author kept on writing books and publishing books and never bothered with anything so mundane as publicity because the author was a writer and writers write and marketing somehow happens magically and people just buy the author’s books.
It is rare that I hear something on the radio that makes me go “Yeah, tell it like it is, sister” (okay, brother), but there was a great story on the Marketplace Morning Report last Friday about social networks and mailing lists and who owns your list. If I were a better person (I’m not), I’d write a nice publishing specific post about this. Instead, I’m just going to be lazy and link to the larger rant I wrote at Medialoper. Basically, if you don’t own your fans, you don’t own Jack.
I’m still trying to create some coherence from this year’s SXSW Interactive Festival. Lots of ideas coming in, very few coming out. I think there’s a high level meeting happening in my brain. Presumably, the neurons will let me know when it’s time for me to get involved. In the meantime, one quick thought about social networking. There is a sense that much of what’s happening online when it comes to social networking is being made up as it goes along. Fair enough. Everyone grasps the importance of reaching out and making connections; it’s the who, what, why, when, where,
While I wait patiently for the kind folks at Hatchette to send me a Sony eReader (surely I am the next logical step in their process), I am thinking about the myth of Sisyphus. You recall it, of course: Sisyphus mails tons of ARCs and press releases to a closely guarded mailing list, only to repeat the same process over and over and over again for eternity…cursing the fact that there is no measurable, provable rate of return. It’s easy to slap a mailing list on a book and hope for the best. Since time began, this has been the
