Month: February 2011

Authors As Salespeople

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A question from my ex-publisher stimulated me think about the pay structure in traditional publishing. The question she asked was: Why couldn’t you sell all those books when you were still under contract? Many factors came into play at the same time to quickly boost my e-book sales. Pricing strategy, volume of books, and massive effort all played a part. But one of the biggest issues was motivation, aka incentive.

In the business world, salespeople work for a small base pay and most of their income is in the form of incentive pay and bonuses. The more they sell, they more money they make. To some extent, this is true in traditional publishing, except that after the initial advance, writers (aka salespeople) only get paid every six months. If other businesses functioned that way, they’d have a hard time hiring and keeping salespeople. It’s hard to stay motivated when you wait half a year for a paycheck… then realize your publisher has kept most of it.

The other factor is information. Most salespeople get constant feedback on their performance. They know at any point exactly how their sales numbers are adding up. They can use that information to tailor their techniques and improve their sales. In traditional publishing, sales information comes too late to be effective and is often hard to decipher.

When you self-publish on Amazon, through both the Digital Text Platform and Create Space, after the initial six-week wait, you get paid every month. You also have access to hourly, daily, and monthly sales data. This information is direct feedback that you can use to figure out what promotional techniques work best. It can also function as incentive. When you see the sales bump up, it’s exciting and motivating.

Together, the steady income and the sales data provide a great incentive to spend time everyday blogging, tweeting, posting comments, and writing press releases. Wouldn’t it be interesting if traditional publishing houses followed Amazon’s lead and incentivized their writers to be diligent salespeople as well?

Publishers will say: It’s not possible. It’s too much bookkeeping. We’ve always done it this way. But Amazon knows what it’s doing, and it’s kicking ass in the publishing world.

What do you think? Would you work harder if your publisher gave you more sales data and paid you more often?

L.J. Sellers is the author of the bestselling Detective Jackson mystery/suspense series: The Sex Club, Secrets to Die For, Thrilled to Death, Passions of the Dead, and Dying for Justice.

 

This is a reprint from LJ Sellers‘ blog.

The Borders And A&R Collapse

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Everyone is blogging about the collapse of REDgroup, the company that owns the bookshop chains of Borders and Angus & Robertson (and Whitcoulls in New Zealand). I was going to write a big long ranty post all about it, but the truth is it’s all been done. A quick web search will yield more opinions than you can fit on a ballot sheet. But I will add, very briefly, my perception of the whole thing. (Which probably means I’m about to write a big long ranty post!)

Lots of people are trying to establish exactly what this collapse is and what caused it. I’ll tell you what it’s not. It’s not the great ebook revolution; it’s not shitty management by REDgroup; it’s not the global financial crisis; it’s not the rising cost of physical shop rents; it’s not the massive surge in online shopping and stores like Amazon stealing business. At least, it’s not any one of these things. It’s all of these things.

It’s the progress of industry. Sure, the management of the whole group was blindly stupid and greedy, but without the other factors they’d probably have survived. Sure, Amazon, Book Depository and stores like them are having a massive impact on brick and mortar bookstores, but without the other factors they’d probably have survived. When you combine all the factors at once, this stuff is inevitable. Pretty much every major bookstore chain will suffer. The nature of the industry is changing. It’s a terrible shame for all those people that are going to lose their jobs, but that’s a part of life. It’s like the shipbuilders on the Tyne, the coalminers in the Welsh hills, the dudes that used to run photo processing shops specialising in dark room development. The world moves on, things change, technology develops and old methods and jobs slowly disappear. But new ones also emerge. The smart and the rich are the ones that stay ahead of the curve.

Putting shitty American coffee chains in shitty American book store chains wasn’t going to suddenly make Borders a going business concern. Turning Angus & Robertson into cheap remainder bins with plate glass windows was never going to ensure their survival. High street and mall book stores, just like paper books, are going to be disappearing. There will still be paper books (I’ve talked about this a lot before) but they’ll be specialty books, or Print On Demand books from online stores. Just the same, there will still be book shops, but they’ll be specialty stores, catering to a particular niche of collectors or genre and they’ll have to diversify – comic books, trading cards, games, collectibles – all the stuff that fits the niche.

Whether we like it or not, the world is constantly changing. With change comes death and rebirth. Some things crumble to dust while others are born from the ashes of their predecessor’s demise. There were once people that were skilled at many things that no longer have a place in the world. You can’t blame any one thing except progress. The same is true of the recent book store collapse. There are many mitigating factors that contributed to the stores going under at this particular time, but that’s the small stuff. The changing face of publishing, reading and book selling is going to keep changing.

Within the next decade, I predict, we’ll see very few, if any, big chain book stores. Mass market stuff will be in all the department stores and K-Marts and places like that, but mainly online. Eventually you’ll only get your mass market release in hard copy at a POD booth or ordered that way online. There’ll be specialist stores dealing with specialist buyers and collectible books, while pretty much everyone else buys their stuff online. And the vast majority of it will be ebooks, with a small chunk held by POD releases. There’ll be a rise in collectible, beautiful, probably limited edition hardback releases. Kids starting school now will look at print books the same way we look at vinyl and tape cassettes. If you compare books to albums, you can look at the ebook as the CD and the print book as the vinyl release. The ratios will be pretty similar soon enough, I expect. And before long the CD and will disappear unless you order one, POD style. There’ll be a rise in small press releases with short print runs, and more small press will utilise online bookstores and ebooks for their distribution. Eventually the small press print run will be a thing of the past.

It’s all going to happen, so trying to find a particular reason for the demise of Borders is like trying to look for a particular reason for the demise of the Victorian era. It didn’t die because Victoria did – it ended because we all moved on, in a slow and incremental way with all kinds of contributing factors. That’s life.

Told you I wasn’t going to write a big long ranty post.
 

 

This is a reprint from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

The Numbers Game

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This post, from JA Konrath, originally appeared on his A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing blog on 2/18/11.

So I just got off the phone with an acquaintance of mine. She’s a writer whom I met last year at a conference, and she called me asking for advice.

First some background. She’s hit the extended NYT list several times in both hardcover and mass market, and has a backlist of ten books. She was just offered a contract from one of the Big 6 for $200k a book, for a two book deal.

The royalties offered are industry standard 25% for ebooks on net.

She’s thinking about releasing the book herself, and needed some help crunching the numbers. She’s had several previous contracts for $200k a book, but so far none of her books have earned out their advance, even six years later. (This is common, by the way, even though she’s had multiple printings. If I’d been paid $200k for Whiskey Sour or Afraid, I wouldn’t have earned out either.)

Here’s what I told her:

The 25% the publisher is offering is actually based on net. So you’re getting 17.5% of the list price. (Amazon gets 30%, they get 52.5%–which is obscene)

When your agent gets her cut, you’re earning 14.9% of list price on ebooks.

For a $9.99 ebook, that’s $1.49 in your pocket for each one sold.

If ebook prices go down (and they will) it would be 75 cents for you on a $4.99 ebook

If you release a $4.99 ebook on your own, at 70%, you’d earn $3.50 an ebook.

Let’s say you sell a modest 1000 ebooks per month at $4.99.

That’s $9000 a year you’d make on ebooks through your publisher vs. $42,000 a year on your own.
 

Read the rest of the post on JA Konrath‘s A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.

Promote Your Books in the Publications Section on LinkedIn

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In a recent post, I gave instructions for promoting your books on your LinkedIn profile by using the Reading List by Amazon application to post a book cover image and a link to your book’s Amazon sales page.

Another way to get visibility for your books on LinkedIn is to use the new Publications section on the profile. The great thing about this Publications area is that you can list any type of publication, regardless of whether it is available on Amazon. You can even list free ebooks or newsletters.

Just follow these four easy steps to promote your books and other publications on LinkedIn:

1. Click on “Profile” and make sure you are on the “Edit Profile” tab.

2. Go to the “Are You Published” area and click on “Add Sections.”

LinkedIn3

Note: If you don’t see the “Are You Published” box on your profile, look for a similar box that says “Add sections to reflect achievements and experiences on your profile.”

3. On the next screen, click the “Publications” button on the left and then click the “Add to Profile” button.

LinkedIn4

4. Complete the publication description on the next screen, then click the “Add Publication” button.  Remember to include important keywords in your publication descriptions, to help people find your profile and your publications when they search by keyword.

Here is what the finished product looks like on my profile:

LinkedIn6

The book title is hyperlinked to the book sales page on my website. On my LinkedIn profile, the “Publications” section appeared below the “Experience” section, but you can move some of the sections around by dragging and dropping them.

To add additional books, go back into "Edit Profile" mode, scroll down to the "Publications" area, and click on "Add a Publication."

 

This is a reprint from Dana Lynn Smith‘s The Savvy Book Marketer.

Authors as Salespeople

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A question from my ex-publisher stimulated me think about the pay structure in traditional publishing. The question she asked was: Why couldn’t you sell all those books when you were still under contract? Many factors came into play at the same time to quickly boost my e-book sales. Pricing strategy, volume of books, and massive effort all played a part. But one of the biggest issues was motivation, aka incentive.

In the business world, salespeople work for a small base pay and most of their income is in the form of incentive pay and bonuses. The more they sell, they more money they make. To some extent, this is true in traditional publishing, except that after the initial advance, writers (aka salespeople) only get paid every six months. If other businesses functioned that way, they’d have a hard time hiring and keeping salespeople. It’s hard to stay motivated when you wait half a year for a paycheck… then realize your publisher has kept most of it.

The other factor is information. Most salespeople get constant feedback on their performance. They know at any point exactly how their sales numbers are adding up. They can use that information to tailor their techniques and improve their sales. In traditional publishing, sales information comes too late to be effective and is often hard to decipher.

When you self-publish on Amazon, through both the Digital Text Platform and Create Space, after the initial six-week wait, you get paid every month. You also have access to hourly, daily, and monthly sales data. This information is direct feedback that you can use to figure out what promotional techniques work best. It can also function as incentive. When you see the sales bump up, it’s exciting and motivating.

Together, the steady income and the sales data provide a great incentive to spend time everyday blogging, tweeting, posting comments, and writing press releases. Wouldn’t it be interesting if traditional publishing houses followed Amazon’s lead and incentivized their writers to be diligent salespeople as well?

Publishers will say: It’s not possible. It’s too much bookkeeping. We’ve always done it this way. But Amazon knows what it’s doing, and it’s kicking ass in the publishing world.

What do you think? Would you work harder if your publisher gave you more sales data and paid you more often?

L.J. Sellers is the author of the bestselling Detective Jackson mystery/suspense series: The Sex Club, Secrets to Die For, Thrilled to Death, Passions of the Dead, and Dying for Justice.

The Do's And Don'ts Of Cover Design: Publishing Lesson #1

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This post, by Bob Mayer, originally appeared on his Bob Mayer’s Blog on 2/18/11.

A good cover can make or break a book, especially for on-line buying. In a bookstore, most books are racked spine out, so author name sometimes means more. Readers can pick up your book, thumb through, get a feel for story and writing and then decide. On-line, readers see your cover. It has to say, “buy me, I’m a good book” to the reader. If it doesn’t, why would they take the time to possibly download a sample, or even look at product description? The changes in publishing have given the author many great opportunities and self-publishing is a viable option. However, self-publishing requires the author to make a few major decisions, and one of those decisions is cover.

You have a couple of options. You can do it yourself or your can hire a cover artist. There are many programs out there to choose from. There are many do it yourself programs, free programs, even programs that come with your computer that can create cover design. Even Word has the capability of designing a basic cover, but will the cover be good enough to invite the reader in?   The question you have to ask yourself is it worth your time and energy to do it “right”. Hiring someone to do your covers can run as low as $50.00 and as high as $600.00.

This is not an easy decision, especially when you factor in other costs that go into making an eBook available to the reader. We made the decision to invest in the proper tools to do it ourselves because we had the design background, and the technical ability. We purchased the complete InDesign package from Adobe ($1,299.00) partly for the ability to create covers for on-line purchasing, but also because it made it much easier to create the full-jacket cover for our print-on-demand books and for web design.

Even with the proper tools we made a few cover mistakes along the way.

Publishing Mistake #1: Always Judge a Book by its Cover.

Read the rest of the post on Bob Mayer’s Blog. Note that while the author opted to purchase a professional software suite, the design tips provided in the article are equally applicable for use with consumer-grade software or when working with a hired cover designer, they are not specific to InDesign.

INDIE AUTHOR: Being a 21st Century Author Means Re-Thinking Your Path

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This guest post, by Kris Tualla, originally appeared on Beth Barany’s Writer’s Fun Zone on 2/22/11.

I’m rearranging the order of things and having a guest columnist talk about her adventure into becoming an award winning bestselling indie author! Please meet the talented and savvy Kris Tualla. She’s stopping by during her blog tour during the release of her first trilogy. Please give her a warm Writer’s Fun Zone welcome!

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I have an agent. I have full manuscripts requested by major publishing houses. So people ask me all the time, “What made you decide to pursue independent publishing?”

Well… The traditional publishers did. “We don’t do American historicals… no one can sell Scandinavia… publishers LIKE their boxes…” I’ve heard it all.

And this is one of the rejections I received: “I think LOVING THE NORSEMAN has a lovely cast of characters, and a nice, cinematic quality to it. I also liked the balance Ms. Tualla creates in Ryder’s character, allowing him to be vulnerable yet strong. That said, medieval Scotland is a very crowded market…” Blah blah blah.

Looked like it was time to take my “lovely cast” to the people myself.

But there was a huge risk: self-published authors usually produce books which are severely sub-standard. From the writing to the editing to the formatting to the covers, these ignorant hopefuls have worked in a vacuum and have no idea how awful their books are.

So with my agent’s blessing, I took my American-Norwegian historical romance trilogy to e-publishing and print on demand (POD). And I did all the work myself.

Be warned. This is not a path for the faint of heart. The key is adequate editing – because it is IMPOSSIBLE for any author to edit themselves. Even traditionally published print books go through 3-4 rounds of editing before they are released – and many still have typos!

So for anyone reading this post who is considering this path, here is my process:


Read the rest of the post on Beth Barany‘s Writer’s Fun Zone.

Invitation To The Madhouse ~ Report On Self-Publishing

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Alert: Stay turned to this channel for a special broadcast, Monday, 28 Feb.
Irina Avtsin will tell us all about the power of the word, “No!”.
~~~~~~~~~

{This post is almost a rant and purposefully written in a voice I rarely use…}

A madhouse is where insane persons are confined or a place exhibiting stereotypical characteristics of such a place.

This, to me, right now, is what self-publishing is.

Let me define my terms a bit more precisely:

“Sanity” has roots indicating “healthy condition” or “soundness of mind”. If I temporarily constrict my argument to the term “publishing”, most people who are trying to keep up with the frenetic pace of change in this arena of human experience would, I feel, tend to agree that publishing is not in a healthy condition or showing soundness of mind.

Many of those same people would go further and claim that self-publishing is the medicine needed for the sick field of publishing.

Well…

I’ve been involved in self-publishing for about six years now and the last year has seen me working overtime to come to terms with how to best take advantage of the opportunities that self-publishing seems to offer.

I don’t have space in this post to detail the ills of the traditional publishing route but anyone interested can easily find much to ponder.

So, try to accept one point on a conditional basis: self-publishing can bring a book to market faster and supply the author with higher royalties than traditional publishing, as long as the author is not already on the bestseller lists or in the stable of a publishing house being preened to take the book-world by storm when the right marketing moment arrives.

If the above statement is true, one would think that an author would find it easier to self-publish…

My experience has been that the word “easy” needs to be carefully defined with ample attention being paid to whether said author has what it takes to build their own following and work intensely at experimenting till they find the particular combination of tasks that can assure them a sufficient platform of eager individuals waiting to render them aid on publishing day.

If you are comfortable with building relationships, if you can be honestly altruistic in those relationships, if you can multiply the number of those relationships, if you have the time to attend to them with care and diligence, if you have the money to pay for or can trade for the expertise of editors, artists, and publicity specialists, then, maybe you would say self-publishing is easier than going the traditional route.

The reason I’ve been willing to persevere in the madhouse of self-publishing isn’t because I can easily fulfill all the ifs in the last paragraph.

I will continue to do all I can to successfully self-publish my work-in-progress because I lack the patience to search for an agent who would accept the unusual book I had to write and must publish, because I don’t have a few years to wait while such an agent finds a publisher who thinks my book can sell and negotiates a contract, because I refuse to be paid a royalty that can have itself disappear in paybacks to the publisher if the book doesn’t sell, and because finding an editor I don’t have to pay and supplying cover artwork are something I was able to personally handle.

So, from my perspective, the crumbling house of traditional publishing and the raucous adolescent scene of self-publishing are both “madhouses” but I’m a writer and I have a book I’ve written and I want people to read it and I had to make a choice…

I chose self-publishing.

I’ve written about this topic before in this blog and using the handy Top Tags Cloud in the side panel will lead you to those other musings…

What are your thoughts, theories, experiences, and rants or raves about traditional publishing and self-publishing?
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A Self-Publisher's Guide To Metadata For Books

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This article, by Carla King, originally appeared on PBS.org‘s MediaShift on 10/12/10.

Metadata used to be a wallflower, hiding out at the library with the Dewey Decimal system. Now it’s at every party, flitting about gathering and sorting books on mobile devices, e-readers, and websites. Metadata is a core component of digital information and news; so good book metadata is good book marketing. It’s an essential tool for all self-publishers.

For those unaware, metadata is data about data, words about words. In the semantically driven matrix of search, all words have a value, and "key" words have more value still. These keywords must be strategically selected and then placed where they can do the most good. Creating metadata tags for your work is a marketing challenge that requires both editing skill and narrative common sense.

"As our digital landscape explodes — as web search becomes not just one way but THE way readers find what’s next on their reading lists — metadata only becomes more important," wrote Laura Dawson of Authorweb.

It might sound daunting, but if you know who your audience is, and you can fill out a form, you can create metadata for your book. Here’s what you need to know about providing metadata for your book record on the Bowker system and for all your web activities.

Identify Your Keywords

First, we must spill into search engine optimization (SEO) territory. The typical self-published author doesn’t need to hire an SEO expert. But I spoke with expert Mark Petrakis who helped me create these steps to identifying a solid keyword list:

  1. Imagine the words and short phrases your readers might enter into a search engine to find you and your book. Begin to eliminate the less important and more generic words and phrases from your list. Try to keep the number of repeated keywords to a maximum of three. The final list should be no more than 10 to 20 words with a 900 character maximum. This constitutes your "keywords" metadata and can be used for your book metadata, for creating tags on blog posts, and in your social media activities. Most major search engines (like Google) no longer factor in the keyword metatags at all in search results, so this just makes having effective TITLE and DESCRIPTION tags all the more important. (Similarly, your file names should be descriptive.)


Read the rest of the article on PBS.org‘s MediaShift.

Web Seminar Debates How Self-Publishing Will Lose Its Stigma

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This post, by Lynn Andriani, originally appeared on Publishers Weekly on 2/23/11.

Thanks to the well-publicized success of authors like J.A. Konrath, Amanda Hocking, and Seth Godin, the stigma surrounding self-publishing is fading fast. Still, it’s far from gone, and a web seminar sponsored by PW and Digital Book World yesterday titled The Evolution of Self-Publishing covered the reasons for self-publishing’s stigma, how and why it’s losing that stigma, and what the industry and individual authors need to do in order to help self-publishing move even further into the mainstream.

But first, about those aforementioned bestsellers? Panelist and author Jason Pinter expressed his frustration at always hearing the same few names repeated as examples of how lucrative self-publishing can be. “What annoys me is that the same names are always used: Godin, Konrath, Hocking, The Shack,” he said. “There’s a sense of people latching on to a couple of individuals who’ve found success and then those people get a lot of publicity. Then it’s, ‘They can do it; I can!’ There is a bit of a fallacy there; it’s not always the case.”

Though there are, of course, many reasons most self-published books don’t sell well. One of the main reasons mentioned by the panelists? Marketing. “It’s one of the hardest things to do,” Pinter said. “Authors really need to look at what their goals are and how they’re going to realistically achieve them.” Carolyn Pittis, svp, global author services at HarperCollins, agreed: “Marketing is the issue of our time. Book marketing is the biggest challenge that anyone in the book business is facing today, purely because there’s so much noise and so much content getting created and so many potential distractions.” Marketing often determines a book’s commercial success—or failure, said Phil Sexton, publisher and community leader at Writer’s Digest. “It’s about what the intent of the author is. How much they’re going to back [their book], whether or not they’re going to try and sell it.”


Read the rest of the post on Publishers Weekly.

The Imminent Collapse Of The Publishing Bubble

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This post, by Candice Adams, originally appeared on the examiner.com site on 1/7/11.

Booms and bubbles are considered economic inevitabilities—when the getting is good, people will keep buying and selling until the last dollar to be made is had. Recent times have witnessed the burst of the tech and housing bubble. Most bubbles generally don’t survive longer than a decade due to a continued escalation in the destructive behavior that eventually dooms the industry. But what if a bubble lasted longer? Could the traditional publishing model be seeing the end of a 40-year bubble?

Bubbles occur for several psychological reasons, but the one that pertains most closely to the traditional publishing model is “The Greater Fool Theory.” This theory, although not scientifically proven but empirically observed, relies on the market’s overvaluation of a product leading to an inflation in price. The price continues to rise as long as a seller can find a greater fool than himself to sell it to. When the price finally plummets, the bubble bursts.

Moreso than books being overpriced, the traditional publishing model has been propped up by several illogical modus operandi that could eventually lead to the collapse of this house of cards.

1. Dog eat dog: Over the past 40 years, the publishing industry has gone from small publishers working with authors to instead being dominated by the “Big Six” corporate publishing houses (Random House, Macmillian, Simon & Schuster, Pearson/Penguin, HarperCollins, Hachette). Corporate publishing eventually led to the rise of the literary agent and the retail behemoths Barnes & Noble and Borders. Corporate publishers continued to acquire smaller presses that couldn’t compete with the large advances that corporations could offer. Larger advances led to more complicated deals, which needed to be brokered by an agent who preferred to work with corporate publishers who offered larger advances. With more books in their catalogues and backlists, the small independent bookstore could no long house, nor move, that quantity of inventory, and they were soon largely put out of business by the corporate mega-bookstores. However, in order for corporate publishers to continue to see profit in a very mature industry (and every corporation has to see profit), the Big Six began acquiring and producing fewer titles and attempting to sell more of the books they produce (i.e., publishing high concept book that could be optioned for their film rights, celebrity tell-alls, etc.) So while there is more book-selling space, fewer books are actually sold.

Read the rest of the post on examiner.com.

Borders Closing: An Author's Perspective

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This post, by Steve Yates, originally appeared on his Fiction and History blog on 2/17/11.

Springfield, Missouri Borders on bankrupt chain’s closure list

There is a tumult in my heart about the Wednesday (2.16.2011) announcement that Borders will be closing 200 stores, including the location in Springfield, Missouri, the store in which Moon City Press first launched my novel Morkan’s Quarry.

The characters in my novel, the Morkans, owners of a limestone quarry in Civil War-era Springfield, would likely take a cold-hearted line on all this. Michael Morkan could easily see why a Borders at that Glenstone location would be one of 200 stores losing $2 million each day for the retailer. 25,000+ square feet of books right across the street from a Barnes & Noble store of equal square footage, that’s 50,000 square feet and surely lots of duplication. In those 50,000 sq. ft., think how many shelves HAVE to carry specific books that frequently sell—Harry Potter, The Twilight Series, the Da Vinci Code, and the like.

But walk-in, foot traffic markets have limits, capacities to absorb and demand any given product. In the heyday of giant retailers, back when Montgomery Ward still existed, and book buyers had few choices and no internet, such side-by-side offerings might have been sustainable. But this Starbucks-gone-wild passion for expassion came on after Montgomery Ward and lots of other retailers had already died and left fossils and empty shells.

The minute Morkan learned the space at Borders was leased, and the staff had to be paid an established minimum wage, and there would be no hope of free county prison labor… he would opt that every book in the place, every ISBN or SKU in retail parlance, be one that tears out of there faster than an opium and alcohol-saturated tonic (see energy drink) from a traveling medicine show.

There’s one source of the tumult: it is very hard to be unique and become a costumer’s favorite local bookstore when you have to carry what a corporate supervisor in Michigan chooses, items that can be sold to everybody. Giant scale, which can seem to the untrained eye a wowing advantage, becomes a deathtrap. And carrying all those hotcake items as your mainstay becomes unsustainable when your customer has already picked up The Chronicles of Narnia at Kroger or Sam’s or Wal-Mart at an humungous discount.

Read the rest of the post on Steve Yates‘ Fiction and History blog.

How To: Deal With Negative Online Sentiment About Your Brand

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This article, by Maria Ogneva, originally appeared on Mashable on 2/21/11. Maria Ogneva is the Head of Community at Yammer, where she is in charge of social media and community programs, and internal education and engagement. You can follow her on Twitter, her blog, and via Yammer’s Twitter account and company blog.

Brands try to inspire excitement among their communities so that their fans and supporters will do the selling for them. That’s called advocacy, and it’s much more powerful than self-promotion. There are of course many ways to cultivate that fan base and get your advocates motivated

On the flip side, however, are “badvocates” –- the folks who spread negative comments about you with their networks. For example, Kevin Smith’s experience with Southwest Airlines.

It’s important for any business learn how to handle this badvocacy. To do so, you must first understand its causes.

Causes of Badvocacy
 

In most cases, badvocacy is a result of negative experiences with your brand. These can come from:

  • Inconsistency across channels and touchpoints. With social media, you can touch the customer at any point in the purchase cycle: Pre-purchase, during, and post-purchase. Each of those interactions has to add value and be consistent with the rest of the experience.

    Let’s take support as an example. When you provide multi-channel support, you need to be careful about creating a consistent experience across all channels. Twitter support tends to lead other channels in its ability to provide individual solutions to customers. Other channels tend to lag behind. How many times have you called a support line only to have them route you to another 800 number because information you are looking for is in a different database? An inconsistent user experience can breed bad experiences. 

  • Inconsistency with expectations. Several times, I’ve gotten excited about a product based on the advertised promise, only to discover that that expectation was wrong. This type of disconnect certainly breeds negative feelings because time, effort and possibly money were wasted. 
  • A negative relationship with people who represent the company. Social media can humanize your brand, if used correctly. It’s important, however, that everyone adheres to the highest codes of conduct and is on the same page about company’s policies, news, product and feature releases, etc. A negative interaction with any person, whether in social or traditional channels, will mar the user’s view of the brand. 

Chronic Complainers

Read the rest of the article, which offers specific strategies for dealing with and preventing "Badvocacy" on Mashable.

Context First, Revisited

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This post, by Brian O’Leary, originally appeared on the Magellan Media Consulting Partners site on 2/21/11.

(This post provides the content for a presentation I recently gave as part of O’Reilly Media’s “Tools of Change in Publishing” conference.  It builds on a talk I initially gave last October at the Internet Archive’s “Books in Browsers” conference.  A screencast that includes the presentation visuals has been posted on Vimeo.  It runs about 23 minutes).

For the last couple of years I’ve been writing about a set of publishing topics – piracy, disruptive innovation, print on demand, workflow and content strategy, among others – that I started to think were connected by a common theme.

I first called that theme “a unified field theory of publishing”, more than a mouthful, but I think “context first” is a better and more helpful description.  In that spirit, my talk today addresses the damage done by what I call the “container model of publishing”.

My idea in a nutshell is this: book, magazine and newspaper publishing is unduly governed by the physical containers we have used for centuries to transmit information.  Those containers define content in two dimensions, necessarily ignoring that which cannot or does not fit.

Worse, the process of filling the container strips out context – the critical admixture of tagged content, research, footnoted links, sources, audio and video background, even good old title-level metadata – that is a luxury in the physical world, but a critical asset in digital ones.  In our evolving, networked world – the world of “books in browsers” – we are no longer selling content, or at least not content alone.  We compete on context.

I propose today that the current workflow hierarchy – container first, limiting content and context – is already outdated.  To compete digitally, we must start with context and preserve its connection to content.

We need to think about containers as an option, not the starting point.  Further, we must start to open up access, making it possible for readers to discover and consume our content within and across digital realms.

Without a shift in mindset, we are vulnerable to a range of current and future disruptive entrants.  Containers limit how we think about our audiences.  In stripping context, they also limit how audiences find our content.

Here, scale is not our friend.  It may well be the enemy.  As Clay Christensen first outlined in 1997, disruptive technologies don’t look or feel like what we typically value.  Often enough, they are cheaper, simpler, smaller and more convenient than their traditional analogues.


Read the rest of the post on the Magellan Media Consulting Partners site.

Book Package Deals

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I often get advertisement pieces from printers calling themselves publishers. One feature common to these offerings is the use of package deals, most of which are named with exotic titles such as the “Gold Program” or the “Star Package.” These special deals provide varying deals based around pre-press services, printing of a certain number of books, and even marketing offers. Here are a few things you should be aware of:

Each package is optimized for the max number of pages or words offered by the package deal. That means the best per page price you will ever get from them for that package is for the max number of pages they offer. Any number less than that means the per page price just keeps going up and up. For example, If the max pages allowable by a certain program is 300 pages and you have produced 250 pages, you will be getting those 250 pages at the 300 pages price.

Oft times the company will offer glowing expectations for royalties described as being in the thousands of dollars. In fact, the company is shooting for the friends and family market, some of whom have the gall to ask you for a list of everyone in your family and your friends who might be interested in purchasing your book. That book will often be way overpriced for the booksellers’ market, meaning bookstores won’t have an interest in carrying your books for the general public. Friends and family, however, may well pay the inflated price to see their loved one’s book. Once the list of contacts you provided are contacted  for sales of your book, the company moves on to the next author, even if they say they’ll market your title for years to come.

This is why experienced folks in the book business warn about the sharks and barracudas out there. Consider yourself warned.

 

This is a reprint from Bob Spear’s Book Trends.