Online retailer Amazon.com said today that it’s selling more electronic books than printed versions. The company says it sells 105 e-books for every 100 physical copies it sells.
Next Tuesday rival Barnes & Noble will ratchet up the competition when it introduces a new generation Nook e-reader to compete with Amazon’s Kindle.
B&N chief executive William Lynch told the Wall Street Journal that despite a late start his company has captured 25% of the digital books market. It has also grabbed a good chunk of the market for electronic magazine subscriptions. “We’ve also sold more than 1.5 million magazine subscription orders and single copy sales on the Nook newsstand.”
The irony of Tuesday’s announcement (or maybe the marketing strategy) is that it happens during the week of BookExpo America (BEA), which bills itself as the largest publishing event in North America. It has traditionally promoted paper copies. This year BEA will co-host a session on electronic publications with the IDPF Digital Book Conference 2011, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Tom Wujec stands before the crowd at this year’s TED conference and talks about a tool that restores balance to the team-building process. As he says on his website, the Marshmallow Challenge is a “fun and instructive design exercise that encourages teams to experience simple but profound lessons in collaboration, innovation and creativity.”
But it’s more than that.
The task looks simple: in 18 minutes, teams must build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string and one marshmallow. The marshmallow needs to be on top. And after 18 minutes, it needs to stay there.
The real lesson has as much to do with creativity as with collaboration, as Wujec shows when he reveals who does well and who doesn’t during the challenge. The worst performers are recent graduates of business schools. The best performers are architects and engineers — no upset there. The surprise is that after that group, the best performers are kindergarten students.
Wujec is a fellow at Autodesk, which makes software for the design and engineering community, so he should know about visual collaboration and teamwork. So when he says that B-school grads do poorly because “they are trained to find the single right plan,” it’s time to re-examine the model. Kindergarteners do well because they build prototypes. They experiment. They have fun without latching onto a single solution at the beginning.
No right or wrong, at least not at first. Just an openness to explore the possibilities. Then we turn it over to the engineers. After all, we want whatever we’re creating to work.
Maybe it’s the wedding of Price William and Kate Middleton that brings it to mind but it seems as if Victorian England is all the rage in fiction. What might have started with Sherlock Holmes in 1887 has morphed into young adult books, mysteries and a branch of science fiction called steampunk that together deliver an apocalyptic message finely tuned for our times.
Philip Pullman’s Sally Lockhart quartet heads the list of YA books that bring London of the late 1800s to life. The lead figure in The Ruby in the Smoke and the novels that follow is a brave 16-year-old who surmounts her fears to discover the fate of her father, and her own strength.
Pullman populates his London of 1872 with finery and fops, dirt and decay. For every noble move by the Baker Street Irregulars who support Sally the underworld launches a counter offensive that would discourage all but the most resourceful. The author’s voice rings of an authentic England, from descriptions to slang to the narrator’s comforting address to the reader.
Pullman (The Golden Compass) has written other novels with resolute female characters but the Lockhart books stand as some of his best, a series that adults as well as teens will find refreshingly current.
Will Thomas could have been channeling Pullman in the first of his Barker and Llewelyn mysteries, Some Danger Involved, set 12 years later. Thomas’ characters, a private detective who calls himself an enquiry agent and his assistant, investigate the source of anti-Semitic activities and in the process provide readers with a swift course in forgotten history. As with Pullman’s work, the interest lies in a fast romp by sympathetic characters through a dark and secret world, an alternate reality that seems as real as our own.
Then there’s the wildly successful Anne Perry, who has penned two Victorian series, one featuring Charlotte and Thomas Pitt and a second starring investigator William Monk. Both evoke the class distinctions as well as the crimes of the era.
Steampunk pushes reality in an alternate direction. A subgenre of science fiction steampunk evokes an era where steam power, dirigibles and analog devices rule. One of the earliest examples is the 1990 novel The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. If you saw the 2009 movie version of Sherlock Holmes starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law, you have an idea of the visuals common to steampunk literature.
Much as its cousin cyberpunk mashes the exotic with the familiar to jolt readers out of time and place, steampunk creates an alternate history that can be both intriguing and chilling. As do many of the writers who set their stories in that era. They contrast the veneer of civility with its morally corrosive underside to create a dystopia that any post-9/11 reader can appreciate.
Let’s hope that’s not the case with the newest royal couple.
It happened so fast I couldn’t react. One minute I was driving home in the dark on a two-lane road through the woods. The next I heard a crash, more like a crunch, and looked to see the head of a deer in the passenger window. And just like that it was gone.
The insurance agent offered his condolences for the damage to the car. He said most people think deer are pests. I watch them out the back window of our house almost every day, foraging on the hill, and consider them graceful creatures who belong here as much as we do. Just not in the road, playing dodgeball with cars. Or spreading ticks.
For some reason I wasn’t worried about the damage. I told the agent we can fix the car, not the deer.
Ever since Bernard Silver and Norman Woodland invented the barcode in 1949 business has worked to turn objects into information. The recession in advertising, the migration from print to digital media, consumer preference for mobile devices—all have accelerated the trend toward digitizing the physical world.
Enter the QR, or quick response, code. What looks like a stamp, a maze or a square hieroglyph is really a portal to a new world of information-rich advertising. QR codes allow people with cameras in their smartphones to load websites just by pointing the device at, say, a magazine ad that carries the code. They function like hyperlinks on websites, taking readers directly to the information they want.
It’s more than the latest online fad. The technology just might help authors connect with an elusive audience.
Specialty publications are among the first to adopt the technology. The October issue of This Old House is loaded with codes. And not only in the ads. The editors are using the little squares for contests, access to how-to videos and requests for literature—techniques authors might adopt to publicize their work and promote their brand.
Trade publications are embracing the technology, too. Last month Randall-Reilly’s trucking division sent an email to media buyers announcing a program to allow readers to “unlock access to multimedia content.” Consumer publications are also rolling out programs. A recent issue of People featured a QR code in an ad for Panasonic. Why not publish the codes in any printed collateral used to publicize your work? You can track the responses, analyze the data and reach out to new audiences with targeted messages on the device of their choice.
Our agency joined the movement last week when we designed a QR code for a social media platform I helped to create. Printed on postcards that we’ll distribute at a tradeshow next month, the code will lead smartphone users to a blog that highlights trends in the industries in which our clients compete.
Try it yourself. Download an app like QR Reader, hold your smartphone up to this screen and visit the site—all without having to key in a lengthy URL.
The very technology that threatened to destroy print is enabling it to reach new readers. As the economy recovers and mobile devices spread, writers can use that knowledge to turn dead wood into dynamic sources of data . . . and revenue.
I picked up a collection of short stories Ray Bradbury wrote in the 1940s and 1950s, R is for Rocket, created before the dawn of the space age. An ancient paperback, its pages as brown as parchment . . . a book I’d read in high school, dreaming of the day humans would fill the vast emptiness among the stars. I haven’t read science fiction in years because the older I grow the more trite it seems, its stories filled with brave commanders of vast armies of hollow ships and mindless machines.
And then I read the title story, about a 15-year-old boy and his best friend who watch the rockets blast off on their way to the moon and long for a life neither thinks he’ll ever see. And I knew at once why I’d enjoyed Bradbury as a kid: he writes with heart. He captures what people feel but can’t seem to describe, even to themselves. He writes about a boy who wants the rocket to knock the stars out of orbit and wants to be there when it does, who feels the kick of liftoff in his chest and abandonment in his soul.
“It gripped me in such a way I knew the special sickness of longing and envy and grief for lack of accomplishment,” he thinks as other men trace his dreams like the imaginary lines that form our constellations. Bradbury writes about an old man who understands the heart of a prehistoric creature called out of the depths by a fog horn on a lighthouse. About a father who can only send one family member on a trip to Mars and instead gives all of his children the gift of imagination.
Jennifer Crusie has a new and delightful take on the old saw Publish or Perish: just as you don’t have to get married to validate yourself, you don’t have to publish to validate your talent.
“Just as women had to give up being married as a life goal before they could lead full lives as women, so writers must give up being published as a career goal before we can lead full lives as writers.”
Her suggestion about getting published? Don’t make that your only objective. “When we write the stories we need to write, we take back control of our lives because we’re meeting our own needs, not looking for validation elsewhere.”
To draw a parallel of our own, Crusie sounds a lot like Marsha Sinetar in her book Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow: write what you love and maybe the editors will follow. No guarantees from the management, but at least you’ve liberated yourself.
First we had cavemen sitting around the fire telling stories. Then gossips and reporters. Then came chat and blogs and we cycled back to citizen journalists.
With the rise of social media we now have citizen publicists. Like volunteer journalist, they want to speak their mind. When they listen, they want to hear what their peers are saying, not just the company line. And through the really big amplifier called the Web they can have an outsized influence on our work.
As creatives, we want to reach them.
Our agency regularly counsels clients who want to join the social media wave but are afraid of getting swamped. There are too many networks and monitoring them is a time-sink. So for those clients who want to dip a toe into online communications, we’ve developed an approach called the Social Media Platform that allows organizations to engage their audiences as well as publish their ideas.
It’s a perfect fit for artists, photographers, writers and other creatives who can’t afford a publicist.
Here’s the strategy: Organizations need to monitor and influence what people are saying about their brands. So do creatives, with the added task of promoting their work far and wide. We social media because that’s where our future editors, clients and benefactors hang out. With a social media platform we can harness the power of peers, asking influentials who like our work to spread the word. The social media platform is no substitute for a full-blown marketing campaign that uses advertising, direct mail, media relations and microsites. But it offers creatives a turnkey operation that allows them to join, monitor and influence the online conversation.
Here’s how it works: The platform is an integrated collection of social media networks and tools. It includes the major social and business networks—Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, SlideShare and YouTube—but has room for numerous sites, forums and communities. At the heart is a white-label blog without branding for an independent look and feel. With the blog creatives can manage reputations, disseminate key messages and establish expertise in the market—this might apply more to non-fiction than fiction writers. Creatives who’ve already built a reputation can use the platform to solve issues before they become wide-spread problems.
There are six parts in the process of establishing a social media platform:
Create. We start with a blog hosted on an independent site. Posts and comments radiate from the blog to the major social and business networks. The system notifies the blog administrator each time someone from the outside posts a comment. For your peace of mind, comments can be approved, edited or deleted before anyone on the ‘Net sees them. Tools: WordPress software, web host.
Listen. Tapping into the online conversation about our brand is essential. Specialized search engines allow us to listen to what people are saying about our work. PR people call it reputation management. Tools: Social Mention, Google Alerts, Gmail to verify social network accounts.
Contribute. Based on your expertise, you can contribute original text, slides, photos and video. Crowdsourcing allows you to obtain feedback on work. You can even use your network to float ideas for future projects. Tools: those listed above.
Publicize. Blogs are like parties. You have to invite the right people to achieve critical mass. We start with the internal audience, your friends and business associates, and add editors, writers and bloggers in traditional and digital media. Tools: LinkedIn, Twitter.
Monitor. The conversation is ongoing. The monitoring needs to be, too. But checking multiple sites dozens of times a day can get crazy. A dashboard can simplify the process: Tools: HootSuite, TweetDeck.
Evaluate. You’re not a major corporation. The goal isn’t to fill spreadsheets and generate charts that dazzle but yield no useful information. We measure the volume and tone of comments but take everything with two grains salt. Tools: Twitrratr (Twitter rater), Twendz (Twitter trends), Tweet Level.
Does the system work? Yes. Our agency is seeing a good adoption rate from editors and bloggers as well as retweets of original material. Why does it work? Because it leverages three potent forces in our society: the shift toward digital media, people’s desire to hear recommendations from peers rather than companies and journalists’ need to discover leads rather than waiting for pitches.
That’s almost as good as telling stories around the campfire.
What does it take to create a trend, a movement, a runaway success? Leaders? Followers? Or someone in between? An important question for creatives, marketers and others who try to harness the wildfire properties of the Internet.
Along comes Derek Sivers, a musician who founded CD Baby, which became the largest seller of independent music on the web. From this three-minute video clip he calls “Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy,” Sivers has extracted several lessons in inspiration and group-think that apply to artists as well as executives.
The first is obvious. The second is amazing, maybe even a little unsettling.
We need leaders. But we might need what Sivers calls the first follower even more.
It takes guts to be a leader. But it also takes guts to be a follower (just ask the apostles). The dancing guy has no effect on the people around him except to provide mild amusement . . . until a second person overcomes his aversion to risk and gets up to dance. And then a third, and then. . . .
“The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader,” Sivers says, echoing Malcolm Gladwell’s contention that any viral movement is spread not by the creator but by people he calls mavens–those with both the contacts and the social standing to gain the attention of followers. It’s those first followers who use their influence to help the movement achieve critical mass–or to use Gladwell’s term, the tipping point.
“We’re told we all need to be leaders, but that would be really ineffective,” Sivers says. “The best way to make a movement . . . is to courageously follow and show others how to follow.”
A new service debuts today that could change the way writers publicize their work, and their areas of expertise.
NewsBasis is the communications equivalent of a matchmaker. Journalists issue requests for information and writers can respond. It’s a targeted way for both parties to find sources and promote their work, without a lot of waste.
In some ways NewsBasis is similar to Help a Reporter Out (HARO) and PR Newswire’s ProfNet. All three services allow journalists to post questions and search for expert sources. They also allow PR pros, companies and writers to search for questions from journalists or receive those queries via email. The idea is to allow journalists to cut through the clutter of unsolicited pitches and writers to better target their queries to the journalists who want the information.
NewsBasis differs from the competition with the introduction of real-time commentary on published articles. The service allows writers to embed their point of view or corrections directly in articles on the Internet. Journalists signed with the service will see those comments when they view the article online. They’re also notified by the service when a source leaves a comment.
Other features will look familiar to people using either HARO or ProfNet. The NewsBasis media notification tab allows users to type keywords into the search bar and read real-time activities by journalists. As with HARO, users also can receive email alerts.
With this week’s launch NewsBasis pits itself against some stiff competition. HARO brings nearly 30,000 reporters and bloggers, more than 100,000 news sources and thousands of small businesses together to exchange information. In addition to pumping out alerts to sources, ProfNet lets journalists search a database of more than 30,000 expert profiles.
HARO is free to PR pros, companies and writers. It also offers a free Twitter feed, especially helpful for communicators toting mobile devices. ProfNet is free to reporters but charges a fee to experts and their representatives. NewsBasis, which is in beta, is free at this point.
All of these services could change the face of publicity for authors, and not just because they provide a more efficient way to pitch their work. They give us the choice between active and passive publicity. Instead pf cold calling journalists, we’re now able to contact them directly about a topic in which they’re interested.
It can also allow authors to contribute to the news, rather than react to it through Google Alerts or other monitoring services. We can get the inside story about who’s writing what before journalists publish those articles and blogs. That should reduce the frustration so many authors feel when promoting their work.
B&N chief executive William Lynch told the Wall Street Journal that despite a late start his company has captured 25% of the digital books market. It has also grabbed a good chunk of the market for electronic magazine subscriptions. “We’ve also sold more than 1.5 million magazine subscription orders and single copy sales on the Nook newsstand.”
