Greetings:
The five-part series on indie writers is available as an eBook in ePub format for anyone who wishes to request it of me.
ePub is compatible with hardware eBook readers like the iPad and Kindle and software readers like Calibre, FBReader and Stanza. Personally I use an ePub plug-in for the Firefox browser.
Cheers.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Indie Writers & Social Media - Part 5
David Shaw © 2010
As Alice said, "I lost count," when the White Queen asked, "What's one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one?"
You’ll never have time to write that best seller!
Maybe you should open a co-op bookstore….
Obviously part of the solution is to collaborate. One person might have an interest in developing a specific skill, and another another, and another another, until you lose count.
But what if you…
Also, collaborating online is not conducive to cross-training. There’s a lot more “throw it over the wall” going on, and fewer opportunities to share technical skills. Not everything can be put into words.
So this is my idea. Independent writers join together in a club or association for the purpose of collaborating in the many skills required to be successful. I think there should be a physical meeting place, a kind of drop-in centre in some ways, and also a production centre where writers can access tools and be trained in their craft.
Location is important. It should be visible to the public, and encourage community involvement. That’s why I’m calling it a bookstore. A location next to a college or university might be ideal. In my town, I would put it on the main drag between a coffee shop and a print shop.
One of the important functions of the co-op would be to function as an umbrella publisher and promoter for the group using some of the techniques discussed in Parts 1 through 4.
The next blog article will be the start of a new series addressing social media and some other type of business.
What I Tell You Three Times is True
Well, if you follow the strategy for indie writers outlined in Parts 1 through 4, you will be a busy little beaver. What with acting as a publisher and public-relations expert; developing and executing engagement strategies for social media; developing single-source production; writing a blog; and wittering about your terribly bad-hair week.As Alice said, "I lost count," when the White Queen asked, "What's one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one?"
You’ll never have time to write that best seller!
Maybe you should open a co-op bookstore….
Return of Craft
It’s possible to be an indie writer today because of the return of craft. The tools of writing and publishing have become accessible because of the digital and network revolution we have experienced, driven by Moore’s Law and the vision of Steve Jobs. For example:- The Apple Macintosh revolutionised film and sound production, making it possible for one person to edit and master a commercial film on one machine. Singer Buffy Sainte-Marie was one of the first to take music production to an indie craft level using an early Macintosh. Today you can storyboard and edit a movie with a $20 digital-clapboard application on the iPad.
- In manufacturing, you can design a physical gizmo using open-source CAD software from Google, and produce a working prototype using an inexpensive desktop 3D printer. A year ago small 3D printers were $15,000; now you can get desktop models for $1,500 or less. Once you’re satisfied with the prototype, you can send the CAD files to one of thousands of low-volume manufacturers in China and have batches of one to several thousand made.
The Challenge
But it’s a lot of work, and we don’t all have the multi-faceted talents needed to pull this off successfully. Some of the challenges an indie could face include:- Access to editors and peer reviewers
- Promotion and social-media smarts
- Production expertise in the technology of small-scale single-source publishing
- PDF and ePub production
- Collaborators to provide voices for audio books
- Book design and typography
- Expertise in producing video trailers for YouTube
Obviously part of the solution is to collaborate. One person might have an interest in developing a specific skill, and another another, and another another, until you lose count.
But what if you…
Open a Co-Op Bookstore
There are all kinds of models for collaborating online. Some things are easier than others to do online. You can share a work in progress, and get reviewers’ comments, but the final polishing might be easier with a face-to-face discussion.Also, collaborating online is not conducive to cross-training. There’s a lot more “throw it over the wall” going on, and fewer opportunities to share technical skills. Not everything can be put into words.
So this is my idea. Independent writers join together in a club or association for the purpose of collaborating in the many skills required to be successful. I think there should be a physical meeting place, a kind of drop-in centre in some ways, and also a production centre where writers can access tools and be trained in their craft.
Location is important. It should be visible to the public, and encourage community involvement. That’s why I’m calling it a bookstore. A location next to a college or university might be ideal. In my town, I would put it on the main drag between a coffee shop and a print shop.
One of the important functions of the co-op would be to function as an umbrella publisher and promoter for the group using some of the techniques discussed in Parts 1 through 4.
Next Time
This is the final article of five in this series for independent writers. Hopefully it has included some useful ideas. Many of them had little to do directly with social media; however, social media cannot be discussed without an understanding of the greater social context.The next blog article will be the start of a new series addressing social media and some other type of business.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Indie Writers & Social Media - Part 4
David Shaw © 2010
I don’t like reading online. Transmitted light is tiring and the environment is not immersive like a magazine spread. Higher resolution shrinks the size of type. The new ultra-landscape form-factor of LCD screens is best for wide spreadsheets or multiple open windows, but not long documents. A thousand is the most words most people will tolerate reading on screen before they get twitchy.
But I’ve decided the technology is now good enough. Hot type, cold type, laser printing, multimedia – things move on. Here are my reasons.
ePub was developed as an open standard and when Apple adopted it for the iPad and Amazon also adopted it, it became the de facto standard. ePub is compatible with hardware eBook readers like the iPad and Kindle and software readers like Calibre, FBReader and Stanza. Personally I use an ePub plug-in for the Firefox browser.
ePub doesn’t include DRM (digital rights management) but I don’t see that as a big issue. I’m not a fan of DRM and its inclusion in the proposed copyright act, but that’s another conversation.
Time to jump in.
You can readily produce the PDF yourself if your book is one colour, but be sure to get a specification from the service you plan to use. If you're ambitious you can use a desktop publishing program like the open-source Scribus. I used to use Microsoft Word with Acrobat Distiller but lately I've switched to OpenOffice and its built-in PDF converter.
If you want to include four colours, then I recommend that you take your document to a quick-print shop and have them preflight the PDF for you. Just remember that services like LuLu have a sweet spot in their business model that excludes 600-page full-colour books.
(That's why my book about trawlers was still-born. As an alternative I started to convert it to a free blog book, but then that got derailed when I decided to turn it into a social-media portal for boaters. That's coming soon I hope.)
In this Part 4 we continue to build on this print strategy by adding eBooks.
In Part 3 this was partly shown by mentioning speaking at events to promote your book. But it also includes sending review copies to the traditional media and bloggers, and press releases to various book networks. A full discussion of this is outside our scope here - just remember not to be blinded by the hype around social media, and to explore, use and test all promotional avenues.
Even if your strategy is to publish eBooks, it might be worth printing a few to send to reviewers and others. They might be more receptive to dead trees.
eBook distribution is through our familiar friend Amazon and new channels like the Apple iBook store and Google's eBook store. Today eBooks can be read on desktop computers, laptops, eBook readers and smart phones.
In the graphic, we show a single text source feeding separate processes for PDF and ePub. This is again a bit techie but not that difficult. We'll explore this a bit more in Part 5.
This deserves serious consideration. The best audio books are done like radio plays of old, with different voices for each character. This too segues into the next part of this series when we discuss collaboration.
eBooks are Happening Now
[updated 20100720] Several events in the last six months have heralded the maturing of eBooks. Don’t get me wrong. I like print. As Isaac Asimov said years ago at a Folio magazine conference, if digital had come first, some one would invent print and we would all think it was amazing: portable, tactile, durable, high resolution, reflected not transmitted light, open standard, long lasting and so on.I don’t like reading online. Transmitted light is tiring and the environment is not immersive like a magazine spread. Higher resolution shrinks the size of type. The new ultra-landscape form-factor of LCD screens is best for wide spreadsheets or multiple open windows, but not long documents. A thousand is the most words most people will tolerate reading on screen before they get twitchy.
But I’ve decided the technology is now good enough. Hot type, cold type, laser printing, multimedia – things move on. Here are my reasons.
- eBooks are outselling dead-tree hardcovers on Amazon
- ePub has become the de facto standard, displacing several others.
ePub was developed as an open standard and when Apple adopted it for the iPad and Amazon also adopted it, it became the de facto standard. ePub is compatible with hardware eBook readers like the iPad and Kindle and software readers like Calibre, FBReader and Stanza. Personally I use an ePub plug-in for the Firefox browser.
ePub doesn’t include DRM (digital rights management) but I don’t see that as a big issue. I’m not a fan of DRM and its inclusion in the proposed copyright act, but that’s another conversation.
- ePub books cost $0.00 to produce and store.
- ePub books are easy for indies to produce.
- Like the iPhone before it, the iPad is a game changer.
- Apple announced the iBook store and Google announced an eBook store.
Time to jump in.
Our eBook Strategy
In Part 3 of this series for indie writers we outlined a social-media framework around a print-on-demand strategy. As shown in the below graphic, this uses a PDF format sent to a publishing service such as Lulu or one of the others listed in Part 3. Lulu takes care of listing the book with Amazon. Amazon sells the book for a reasonable fee.You can readily produce the PDF yourself if your book is one colour, but be sure to get a specification from the service you plan to use. If you're ambitious you can use a desktop publishing program like the open-source Scribus. I used to use Microsoft Word with Acrobat Distiller but lately I've switched to OpenOffice and its built-in PDF converter.
If you want to include four colours, then I recommend that you take your document to a quick-print shop and have them preflight the PDF for you. Just remember that services like LuLu have a sweet spot in their business model that excludes 600-page full-colour books.
(That's why my book about trawlers was still-born. As an alternative I started to convert it to a free blog book, but then that got derailed when I decided to turn it into a social-media portal for boaters. That's coming soon I hope.)
In this Part 4 we continue to build on this print strategy by adding eBooks.
Other Professional Networks
While this series is mostly about using social media to promote your book by executing an engagement or communications plan, we shouldn't forget other professional networks as an ingredient in creating market buzz.In Part 3 this was partly shown by mentioning speaking at events to promote your book. But it also includes sending review copies to the traditional media and bloggers, and press releases to various book networks. A full discussion of this is outside our scope here - just remember not to be blinded by the hype around social media, and to explore, use and test all promotional avenues.
Even if your strategy is to publish eBooks, it might be worth printing a few to send to reviewers and others. They might be more receptive to dead trees.
Do It Yourself
The nice thing about eBooks is that they are easy for an indie to produce. The ePub format is a bit technical but once you get your head around it, it's pretty simple. (Of course, I used to think the same about sex.) Just kidding.eBook distribution is through our familiar friend Amazon and new channels like the Apple iBook store and Google's eBook store. Today eBooks can be read on desktop computers, laptops, eBook readers and smart phones.
In the graphic, we show a single text source feeding separate processes for PDF and ePub. This is again a bit techie but not that difficult. We'll explore this a bit more in Part 5.
Audio Books
Another digital book format is MP3. Audio books are a somewhat untapped market that is on the verge of kicking off. Folks everywhere are listening to pods on the go. And eBook readers like the Kindle and iBook for iPad have been updated to handle audio and video.This deserves serious consideration. The best audio books are done like radio plays of old, with different voices for each character. This too segues into the next part of this series when we discuss collaboration.
Next Time
In the final and Part 5 of this series, we will look at ways of using social media as a collaboration tool for indie writers.Monday, May 17, 2010
Indie Writers & Social Media - Part 3
David Shaw © 2010
In Part 1 we looked at commoditization and its effects, and the hype surrounding social media that gives so many people so much false hope. In Part 2 we explored the difficulties in being sales driven, the traditional book publishing model, and how we might use the economics of the long tail.
Now, with this background, we can get down to some practical nuts and bolts of the thing.
There has always been a stigma attached to self publishing. Obviously there are some issues like the lack of access to a helpful editor or some kind of peer review, which we’ll discuss in Part 5. Most of the bad press was really about defending the status quo in the traditional publishing model.
The status quo is not sustainable and, as discussed in Part 2, it keeps many deserving books off the market.
Essentially these services print copies on demand to fulfill orders. You can print one or small batches such as 10-100 and put them in inventory. The services are very economical, costing around $10 per copy for simple books with no inside colour.
Another approach is to write your book as a series of blog articles, and turn that into a book:
Lulu, for example, will take care of getting an ISBN for your book and listing it on Amazon. You could, of course, sell your book on your own web site but Amazon has more foot traffic and can spin the long-tail effect; whereas your site can not. I think it’s a form of hubris to use your own site. Amazon has better reach and is a bargain for around 30% of your cover price.
I can’t suggest a cover price. How many copies can you sell @$80? @$26? @$10? Maybe (nearly) free is more profitable. You have to figure that out, and it’s not easy.
You will remember we defined a hypothetical audience of 13 million young American women ages 25 to 34 that we were going to reach by advertising on FaceBook.
This is just an example; your audience might not be on FaceBook or there may be better ways to do this.
All of these messages should link to the point of sale at Amazon, and they should cross-promote (join me on FaceBook, follow me on Twitter, etc.).
Generally, Twitter is CB Radio. It’s best for daily tweets and your headline news.
On FaceBook, you should have an account for yourself as an author that is separate from your personal account. Keep the personal account for your real friends and family. Set up a group for your book, and link it to an externally facing FaceBook ‘page’. Engage your followers at least every few days. Be imaginative, for example ask them to suggest plot lines or vote about your characters.
FaceBook is important because, like Amazon, it's where 400 million people go. Also, in June 2010, FaceBook linked to Yahoo! (600 million users) so updates can be shared across both networks. In turn, Yahoo! owns the social bookmarking service Delicious and the photo site Flickr.
You might also consider a blog as part of your promotional mix. A blog is like a daily or weekly newspaper, and a regular frequency is vitally important. You should aim to publish 250 words/day or 1,000/week about your thoughts as an author on any remotely related subject X. (Yes, I break both rules.)
FaceBook has numerous plugins for your web site to create viral feedback loops
On your blog, add some code for FaceBook Connect or FaceBook Like so there is a viral loop between the two sites. And everywhere you can, put a Share This link to social bookmarking sites.
Example Share at the top of the right-hand panel on this blog
Develop an email list. I suggest using it monthly because people hate spam. Use it to tell people to visit your latest blog, or to announce a sale or whatever. Don’t forget to put in links to Amazon and FaceBook and so forth.
Finally, don’t forget public engagements. Make yourself available as a speaker, attend book fairs and any other event you can wrangle. Take a few books with you, too. (There are services that will take credit cards over your smart phone.)
Social Media Strategy for Print Publishing
In this Part 3 of a five-part series on indie writers and social media, I suggest a framework for self-publishing printed books.In Part 1 we looked at commoditization and its effects, and the hype surrounding social media that gives so many people so much false hope. In Part 2 we explored the difficulties in being sales driven, the traditional book publishing model, and how we might use the economics of the long tail.
Now, with this background, we can get down to some practical nuts and bolts of the thing.
There has always been a stigma attached to self publishing. Obviously there are some issues like the lack of access to a helpful editor or some kind of peer review, which we’ll discuss in Part 5. Most of the bad press was really about defending the status quo in the traditional publishing model.
The status quo is not sustainable and, as discussed in Part 2, it keeps many deserving books off the market.
Core Strategy
The core of our strategy is to use a web-based print-on-demand service. The diagram below shows Lulu but there are several such services and probably others that I haven’t found:Essentially these services print copies on demand to fulfill orders. You can print one or small batches such as 10-100 and put them in inventory. The services are very economical, costing around $10 per copy for simple books with no inside colour.
Another approach is to write your book as a series of blog articles, and turn that into a book:
Lulu, for example, will take care of getting an ISBN for your book and listing it on Amazon. You could, of course, sell your book on your own web site but Amazon has more foot traffic and can spin the long-tail effect; whereas your site can not. I think it’s a form of hubris to use your own site. Amazon has better reach and is a bargain for around 30% of your cover price.I can’t suggest a cover price. How many copies can you sell @$80? @$26? @$10? Maybe (nearly) free is more profitable. You have to figure that out, and it’s not easy.
Marketing Plan
In terms of overall strategy you need to develop a marketing plan and an engagement strategy (see below). A marketing plan identifies your audience (see Part 2) and provides enough information for you to make decisions about things like pricing and how to reach your audience.You will remember we defined a hypothetical audience of 13 million young American women ages 25 to 34 that we were going to reach by advertising on FaceBook.
This is just an example; your audience might not be on FaceBook or there may be better ways to do this.
Engagement Strategy
The above diagram positions several social media on a time scale. Your engagement strategy should define the type of message that you publish through these different media. In essence it's a communications plan. The purpose of these messages is to engage your audience, so they have to contain something about your book or about you and your activities that resonates and causes your fans to respond. You’re trying to create a buzz.All of these messages should link to the point of sale at Amazon, and they should cross-promote (join me on FaceBook, follow me on Twitter, etc.).
Generally, Twitter is CB Radio. It’s best for daily tweets and your headline news.
On FaceBook, you should have an account for yourself as an author that is separate from your personal account. Keep the personal account for your real friends and family. Set up a group for your book, and link it to an externally facing FaceBook ‘page’. Engage your followers at least every few days. Be imaginative, for example ask them to suggest plot lines or vote about your characters.
FaceBook is important because, like Amazon, it's where 400 million people go. Also, in June 2010, FaceBook linked to Yahoo! (600 million users) so updates can be shared across both networks. In turn, Yahoo! owns the social bookmarking service Delicious and the photo site Flickr.
You might also consider a blog as part of your promotional mix. A blog is like a daily or weekly newspaper, and a regular frequency is vitally important. You should aim to publish 250 words/day or 1,000/week about your thoughts as an author on any remotely related subject X. (Yes, I break both rules.)
FaceBook has numerous plugins for your web site to create viral feedback loopsOn your blog, add some code for FaceBook Connect or FaceBook Like so there is a viral loop between the two sites. And everywhere you can, put a Share This link to social bookmarking sites.
Example Share at the top of the right-hand panel on this blogDevelop an email list. I suggest using it monthly because people hate spam. Use it to tell people to visit your latest blog, or to announce a sale or whatever. Don’t forget to put in links to Amazon and FaceBook and so forth.
Finally, don’t forget public engagements. Make yourself available as a speaker, attend book fairs and any other event you can wrangle. Take a few books with you, too. (There are services that will take credit cards over your smart phone.)
Next Time
In Part 4, we will modify this framework for eBooks.Sunday, May 16, 2010
Indie Writers & Social Media - Part 2
David Shaw © 2010
The promise of the web is that it can amplify the presence of an indie, so that we all look as successful and well fed as the big corporations. Sort of. The problem of the web is that if you have a good idea, several million other people thought of it at the exact same instant, and you’ll be buried on page 42 of the search results.
Suppose that we decide to go for volume (low price) instead of niche specialization (high price) or an aggregation model (e.g., be a blog publisher, not a blogger). In Part 1, I posited a book for young American women ages 25 to 34. There are around 13 million on FaceBook. If we could sell to only 1% at $26 we would gross a cool $3.38 million.
Whooo hooo!
The difficulty is that as an indie, we are sales driven not market driven. We have to ‘work our network’ to make individual sales to family, FaceBook friends and Twitter followers. With a brand, you’re market driven: people come to you.
We could partially address this by buying an ad on FaceBook targeting our demographic. FaceBook has a program to do this that allows you to set a monthly advertising budget.
But we still have to convert people to a sale through a sales funnel. To do this, we could make the ad clickable to a shopping basket application. All that is left is processing credit cards, printing and stocking some books, packaging and shipping. In spare time, we could write the next book.
An alternative is to write a best seller and find a branded publisher to deal with the grubby nuisance of making money.
So let’s digress and look at the business model of book publishers and how the long tail creates opportunities for indies.
Publishers have to print books from dead trees, ship copies to book stores, wait for the stores to sell some of them, and then remainder the rest while paying for designers, editors and other stuff, plus bricks and mortar. Obviously this is high risk, so the general-consumer business model revolves around best sellers more so than intellectual content. Book stores follow the same model. For an extreme example, take a stroll through your local HMV and see how restricted is the music and video selection.
In the printed-book business model a typical consumer book will be priced around $26 with 50% going to the retailer. That leaves $13 for the publisher, who will spend $5.05 on production and $4.05 on overhead and profit. That leaves $3.90 for the author. Obviously you have to have a best seller (high volume) to play in this game.
To yield a modest salary of $70,000 for you, your publisher would have to sell around 18,000 copies of your book (average in my town was an astounding $96,000 last year).
But if you could reduce the retailer from 50% to 30%, and keep the other costs constant, you could net $9.10 per copy. Now you only have to sell 7,700 to earn your annual salary. That starts to sound interesting, eh? We’ll explore a strategy to do that in Part 3.
An eBook is a bit better for the publisher but worse for the author. eBooks are selling around $9.99 to $12.99. Assume the best case with the retailer getting $3.90. That leaves $9.09 for the publisher who spends $1.28 on production and $5.54 on overhead and profit. That leaves $2.27 for you.
In this case we can’t reduce the retailer much, since it is already at 30%, but we can produce the book ourselves. So our net is $2.27 + $1.28 + $5.54 ($9.09). We’ll explore a strategy to do that in Part 4.
Both strategies will use the economics of the long tail.
Think about that. It doesn’t matter if you have a huge luxury super yacht or a row boat, a rising tide will lift both the same amount.
The long tail is a special mathematical curve that has been facilitated in business by the Internet. In any product there will always be best sellers, lesser sellers and onesies trailing off into the sunset. This is the long curve, if you can picture it.
Before the Internet, book publishers couldn’t afford to print and distribute the lesser sellers and onesies, no matter how valuable the intellectual content. Book stores wouldn’t carry them.
But the cost of listing inventory on the Internet is close to zero. Amazon can list all the books in the world, even those that only sell one copy, at almost no cost. All that is left is fulfillment, which we will explore in the next few articles.
Engagement raises the participation level
However, the long tail has two peculiarities:
Amazon also delivers point-of-sale services, shipping and delivery. All that’s left is production.
And Amazon, and now the Apple iBook Store and Google’s new eBook service can work the long tail to raise your indie sales tide.
Whooo hooo!
Know Your Audience
In Part 1 I said that social media could be used to support an existing brand, but not to establish a new brand, and that it was not a sales tool. I didn’t mention that social media is a collaboration tool. To me, this is the most important aspect, but I’ll leave that for the last article in this series.The promise of the web is that it can amplify the presence of an indie, so that we all look as successful and well fed as the big corporations. Sort of. The problem of the web is that if you have a good idea, several million other people thought of it at the exact same instant, and you’ll be buried on page 42 of the search results.
Suppose that we decide to go for volume (low price) instead of niche specialization (high price) or an aggregation model (e.g., be a blog publisher, not a blogger). In Part 1, I posited a book for young American women ages 25 to 34. There are around 13 million on FaceBook. If we could sell to only 1% at $26 we would gross a cool $3.38 million.
Whooo hooo!
The difficulty is that as an indie, we are sales driven not market driven. We have to ‘work our network’ to make individual sales to family, FaceBook friends and Twitter followers. With a brand, you’re market driven: people come to you.
We could partially address this by buying an ad on FaceBook targeting our demographic. FaceBook has a program to do this that allows you to set a monthly advertising budget.
But we still have to convert people to a sale through a sales funnel. To do this, we could make the ad clickable to a shopping basket application. All that is left is processing credit cards, printing and stocking some books, packaging and shipping. In spare time, we could write the next book.
An alternative is to write a best seller and find a branded publisher to deal with the grubby nuisance of making money.
So let’s digress and look at the business model of book publishers and how the long tail creates opportunities for indies.
Be a Best Seller
This is how book publishing works.Publishers have to print books from dead trees, ship copies to book stores, wait for the stores to sell some of them, and then remainder the rest while paying for designers, editors and other stuff, plus bricks and mortar. Obviously this is high risk, so the general-consumer business model revolves around best sellers more so than intellectual content. Book stores follow the same model. For an extreme example, take a stroll through your local HMV and see how restricted is the music and video selection.
In the printed-book business model a typical consumer book will be priced around $26 with 50% going to the retailer. That leaves $13 for the publisher, who will spend $5.05 on production and $4.05 on overhead and profit. That leaves $3.90 for the author. Obviously you have to have a best seller (high volume) to play in this game.
To yield a modest salary of $70,000 for you, your publisher would have to sell around 18,000 copies of your book (average in my town was an astounding $96,000 last year).
But if you could reduce the retailer from 50% to 30%, and keep the other costs constant, you could net $9.10 per copy. Now you only have to sell 7,700 to earn your annual salary. That starts to sound interesting, eh? We’ll explore a strategy to do that in Part 3.
An eBook is a bit better for the publisher but worse for the author. eBooks are selling around $9.99 to $12.99. Assume the best case with the retailer getting $3.90. That leaves $9.09 for the publisher who spends $1.28 on production and $5.54 on overhead and profit. That leaves $2.27 for you.
In this case we can’t reduce the retailer much, since it is already at 30%, but we can produce the book ourselves. So our net is $2.27 + $1.28 + $5.54 ($9.09). We’ll explore a strategy to do that in Part 4.
Both strategies will use the economics of the long tail.
The Long Tail
A rising tide floats all boats.Think about that. It doesn’t matter if you have a huge luxury super yacht or a row boat, a rising tide will lift both the same amount.
The long tail is a special mathematical curve that has been facilitated in business by the Internet. In any product there will always be best sellers, lesser sellers and onesies trailing off into the sunset. This is the long curve, if you can picture it.
Before the Internet, book publishers couldn’t afford to print and distribute the lesser sellers and onesies, no matter how valuable the intellectual content. Book stores wouldn’t carry them.
But the cost of listing inventory on the Internet is close to zero. Amazon can list all the books in the world, even those that only sell one copy, at almost no cost. All that is left is fulfillment, which we will explore in the next few articles.
Engagement raises the participation levelHowever, the long tail has two peculiarities:
- It never goes to zero.
- Activity at the head of the curve (the best sellers), drives more activity in the tail (and vice versa). The overall level of sales rises.
Amazon also delivers point-of-sale services, shipping and delivery. All that’s left is production.
And Amazon, and now the Apple iBook Store and Google’s new eBook service can work the long tail to raise your indie sales tide.
Whooo hooo!
Next Time
Part 3 print strategyMonday, May 10, 2010
Indie Writers & Social Media - Part 1
David Shaw © 2010
She didn’t know that less than 10% of blogs have a livable revenue stream. Blog revenue runs around $4 per 1000 readers per publishing cycle. Some well known blogs only have 20,000 readers.
As Dickens might have texted today to his followers on Twitter, “This is an awesome time to be an indie writer. Not.”
Let’s deal with the “worst of times” first. I’ll write about the best of times in a follow up, because there is opportunity here too.
We live in an age when tremendous forces are combining in ways that make the immediate future unknowable. We can only read the tea leaves and poke the chicken’s entrails, without the help of the fumes-sniffing Oracle at Delphi. Please, give me back sailing ships, sealing wax and slow communications. (Yes, the Oracle was high.)
What we see in our cups is commoditization of nearly everything. Globalization, Moore’s Law, gross speculation in financial markets, outsourcing labour, the open-source movement and other factors are making everything made of bits and bytes a commodity. And, with a commodity you can only profit through volume sales, aggregation, or specialization in a high-value niche market.
Add the web to this mix and it turns established business models inside out. Coming to our rescue is the latest superhero, social media. Not.
But you still won’t be able to use FaceBook or some other social media because they’re not sales tools, they’re promotional tools. That’s a big difference.
In comparison, American Idol pulls around 29.8 million men and women per episode. All to say that you should always analyse any claims about anything.
Anyway you can’t manage these large numbers manually. If you’ve read any of my previous articles, you know that I don’t discount the network effect, but I argue that the software has to run filters to make meaningful connections.
It’s different if you’re a local masseuse or pie maker or pub, with a few hundred loyal customers. Then, you can use Twitter or some other social media as a promotional tool for your sausage links.
For example, the Avant Garde bar in my town uses a simple email newsletter far more effectively than most nightclubs use FaceBook. The Mercury Lounge is a slight exception; its social director knows how to use FaceBook very well but you still won't find a FaceBook login on the club's web page. There's no cross-promotion to create the buzz I've written about in previous articles.
Ultimately social media is a marketing tool, not a sales tool. Even as a marketing tool, it can only be used to support an existing brand. It cannot be used to develop a new brand: the average number of friends on FaceBook is around 110; the average number of followers on Twitter is 10. That's not brand territory.
From a sales perspective you could spend hours a day working your network and never convert a single person to a sale outside your family. Never mind reaching your third level.
The Worst of Times
The writers at a recent seminar wanted to know how to use social-media to sell their wares. Later at a gathering of journalists a woman complained about the low word rates paid to freelancers, and said she was going to start a blog.She didn’t know that less than 10% of blogs have a livable revenue stream. Blog revenue runs around $4 per 1000 readers per publishing cycle. Some well known blogs only have 20,000 readers.
As Dickens might have texted today to his followers on Twitter, “This is an awesome time to be an indie writer. Not.”
Let’s deal with the “worst of times” first. I’ll write about the best of times in a follow up, because there is opportunity here too.
We live in an age when tremendous forces are combining in ways that make the immediate future unknowable. We can only read the tea leaves and poke the chicken’s entrails, without the help of the fumes-sniffing Oracle at Delphi. Please, give me back sailing ships, sealing wax and slow communications. (Yes, the Oracle was high.)
What we see in our cups is commoditization of nearly everything. Globalization, Moore’s Law, gross speculation in financial markets, outsourcing labour, the open-source movement and other factors are making everything made of bits and bytes a commodity. And, with a commodity you can only profit through volume sales, aggregation, or specialization in a high-value niche market.
Add the web to this mix and it turns established business models inside out. Coming to our rescue is the latest superhero, social media. Not.
Money for Nothing, Chicks for Free...
Everyone thinks social media is the road to riches. Every time I run into one of the below claims, I'm reminded of the guy in the store watching MTV in the hit song Money for Nothing by Dire Straits.- The guest on Breakfast Television was explaining to the host how he became a multi-millionaire selling wine on FaceBook.
But you still won’t be able to use FaceBook or some other social media because they’re not sales tools, they’re promotional tools. That’s a big difference.
- The presenter at a seminar was prattling on about how he had three degrees of separation from President Obama.
- Another presenter at a high-tech seminar was extolling LinkedIn and explaining how he spent several hours a day working his network.
- FaceBook is larger than any television network
In comparison, American Idol pulls around 29.8 million men and women per episode. All to say that you should always analyse any claims about anything.
Anyway you can’t manage these large numbers manually. If you’ve read any of my previous articles, you know that I don’t discount the network effect, but I argue that the software has to run filters to make meaningful connections.
It’s different if you’re a local masseuse or pie maker or pub, with a few hundred loyal customers. Then, you can use Twitter or some other social media as a promotional tool for your sausage links.
For example, the Avant Garde bar in my town uses a simple email newsletter far more effectively than most nightclubs use FaceBook. The Mercury Lounge is a slight exception; its social director knows how to use FaceBook very well but you still won't find a FaceBook login on the club's web page. There's no cross-promotion to create the buzz I've written about in previous articles.
Ultimately social media is a marketing tool, not a sales tool. Even as a marketing tool, it can only be used to support an existing brand. It cannot be used to develop a new brand: the average number of friends on FaceBook is around 110; the average number of followers on Twitter is 10. That's not brand territory.
From a sales perspective you could spend hours a day working your network and never convert a single person to a sale outside your family. Never mind reaching your third level.
Next Time
I'll write more about a social-media strategy for writers in a multi-part follow-up: watch for Indie Writers & Social Media – Part 2 coming soon to a pixel screen near you.Saturday, May 8, 2010
Dating & Social Media
David Shaw © 2010
As part of my ongoing research into the many ways and mores of social media, I recently signed up for Ashley Madison, a dating site that specialises in people looking to have an affair. In a previous experiment, I joined eHarmony to check out its Christian bias.
I haven’t reported on these here before; although my eHarmony adventure has made it into a short story.
Both of these, maybe eHarmony more so, are based on algorithmic mating. This is the idea that if you match someone on 42 or so dimensions, then you are very likely to have a successful relationship. After a bit of Guided Communications, you’re ready for the altar. Or not, with Ashley.
This kind of social engineering is very prevalent today. The idea is that if you take some couples who have been married happily for 30 years, and profile them for commonalities, then you can use the same profile to predict happiness for new matching pairs. Or not.
While it’s obvious that couples must have some critical things in common, the idea that I would wake up every morning to someone like me in 42 or more dimensions would bore me rigid. I prefer to go with the biological theory that we seek to mate with people whose DNA is different from our own.
So back to Ashley Madison. Apparently there are several thousand women in my small town looking for an affair.
Several have sent me an email, suggesting we hook up.
Here’s the interesting bit.
I don’t have a photo on the site. I don’t even have a profile of any kind. Just a user ID and city.
Maybe there’s only one important dimension here.
But cuteness aside, let's not be too judgmental. People are desperately lonely.
These sites and others like them (and there are many) are running filters on profiles to match people, in the same way as FaceBook suggests candidates for friends. In the same way that Amazon and Google do it far more successfully with inanimate objects on the long tail.
If you've read my other articles here, you'll know that I'm a big believer in running filters on social networks. But I find that I balk when it comes to my own life.
The questions never seem to fit who I am. For example, eHarmony coerces answers to present my family values, but it never asks if I am pro-choice (I am). In the same way, the job questions always seem to have been devised by someone who hasn't got a clue.
Whether it's a job, friends, love or sex I think there are only three important questions about fit: Can you do it? Do you want to do it? Can we work together successfully and have fun doing this?
And they can only be answered in person.
Mating Algorithmically
As part of my ongoing research into the many ways and mores of social media, I recently signed up for Ashley Madison, a dating site that specialises in people looking to have an affair. In a previous experiment, I joined eHarmony to check out its Christian bias.
I haven’t reported on these here before; although my eHarmony adventure has made it into a short story.
Both of these, maybe eHarmony more so, are based on algorithmic mating. This is the idea that if you match someone on 42 or so dimensions, then you are very likely to have a successful relationship. After a bit of Guided Communications, you’re ready for the altar. Or not, with Ashley.
This kind of social engineering is very prevalent today. The idea is that if you take some couples who have been married happily for 30 years, and profile them for commonalities, then you can use the same profile to predict happiness for new matching pairs. Or not.
While it’s obvious that couples must have some critical things in common, the idea that I would wake up every morning to someone like me in 42 or more dimensions would bore me rigid. I prefer to go with the biological theory that we seek to mate with people whose DNA is different from our own.
So back to Ashley Madison. Apparently there are several thousand women in my small town looking for an affair.
Several have sent me an email, suggesting we hook up.
Here’s the interesting bit.
I don’t have a photo on the site. I don’t even have a profile of any kind. Just a user ID and city.
Maybe there’s only one important dimension here.
But cuteness aside, let's not be too judgmental. People are desperately lonely.
These sites and others like them (and there are many) are running filters on profiles to match people, in the same way as FaceBook suggests candidates for friends. In the same way that Amazon and Google do it far more successfully with inanimate objects on the long tail.
If you've read my other articles here, you'll know that I'm a big believer in running filters on social networks. But I find that I balk when it comes to my own life.
The questions never seem to fit who I am. For example, eHarmony coerces answers to present my family values, but it never asks if I am pro-choice (I am). In the same way, the job questions always seem to have been devised by someone who hasn't got a clue.
Whether it's a job, friends, love or sex I think there are only three important questions about fit: Can you do it? Do you want to do it? Can we work together successfully and have fun doing this?
And they can only be answered in person.
Monday, April 5, 2010
I've Been Delinquent
Dear Reader:
I haven't been writing here lately so here's a short update:
In general, I've been busy:
I have several articles researched for presentation here as soon as I find time to write them up.
I haven't been writing here lately so here's a short update:
- Before Christmas I presented to the American Society for Quality on how to use a wiki for personal knowledge management.
- Last month I gave a talk to the Ottawa Independent Writers Association on using social media to promote their wares.
- I managed to publish a new article at my other blog http://bluewater-trawlers.blogspot.com/.
In general, I've been busy:
- Going to school studying threat-risk assessment.
- Working with a large association on a knowledge-management system.
- Working with a government agency on an eLearning strategy.
- Working with an association on governance of standing committees.
- Developing an eLearning course.
- Building a web portal using Elgg.
I have several articles researched for presentation here as soon as I find time to write them up.
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