Every day I spend about 5 or 6 hours working on my next novel. It's the first draft and its both a labor of love and a labor. For something I get to do at home, by myself, from my imagination, wearing leggings and a big sweater, with the dog by my side and music playing it hardly seems fair to call it work. But it is work.(Not complaining, just saying.)
In the midst of that work is the other work, the marketing work, which includes staying aware of the marketplace and new ideas.
That means every so many hours I switch computers - from the novel writing computer to the email/business computer and find any number of emails and updates telling me more about things I know I need to know but at the same time cause grief.
Because how can I keep up with the ideas? And at the same time, how can I stop from trying to figure out how to use the ideas to help market my work and other writer's work?
Along with writing fiction, solving marketing problems is in my blood.
Sometimes all the ideas are inspiring, but lately I'm overwhelmed with the possibilities of how all the trends and ideas and possibilities can best be served for books.
Over the weekend I read more than a dozen articles (three of which are linked below) that inspired this rant.
Every day it seems our society becomes more and more marketing driven. People wear brands, live brands and become brands. Whether you are in Paris, Vienna, the mall in Stamford, CT or Chicago, you can buy all the same name brand clothes by all the same designers and drink all the same name brand coffee if you want to. (Well, there’s no Starbucks in Vienna, but there are McDonald's and Gaps. Anyway, you get the point.)
Tiger Woods wears a Nike cap in a Lexus commercial. Paris Hilton has her own clothing line and still appears in ads for other manufacturers. In an ad for a Nissan – a guy uses a Mac laptop.
Actors, models, singers, celebrities are all their own brands as well as shills for other brands. Everyone but authors. We may be bestsellers but we're not stars. We're the last group to get in on the action. Yes, Danielle Steel has her own perfume, but how many of us have real brand potential. And what will happen if more of us don’t get it? Or if more of us do? And how many of us would take it even if it was the only way to really make it at this gig?
The same old opportunities and the same old ways of attracting readers to books and books to readers are still out there but they are becoming less and less effective every single year.
And there are brand new opportunities out there but they are going to require some innovative thinking that is going to test the traditional ways publishers and authors look at and think about themselves and their books.
The communication and entertainment wires are crossing and crisscrossing and somewhere in the mess of movies and music and pod casts and videos on your phone is room to bring our words to potential readers.
Sure it can be an author reading a page or two. But it can go much further than that.
Except who is going to orchestrate all these possibilities for us? There will always be a handful of author who can play guitar and sing or perform stand up or create mini movies of their books or write games that mesh with their thrillers. But are we all going to have to become multi-dimensional in order to survive?
How many of us can afford to be plain old novelists anymore proficient in only one static flat dimension? Who is going to work with us to turn us into multi-media artists? Who at the publishing house is going to create the opportunities? Or even stay ahead of the curve?
Here are just 2 of the upcoming trends. How can publishing take advantage of them? Who is going to figure them out?
1. Mobile TV
“Mobile television will be a product for global masses in 2008, according to Sweden's LM Ericsson. According to media reports, Per Nordlof, Ericsson's director of Product Strategy said at a joint press briefing with Sony in Stockholm that in 2008 about one third of the world's mobile phone users will regularly be watching TV broadcasts on their handsets.
“Ericcson and Sony will work together to develop software to link their products through wireless networks and to cash in on the expected boom for mobile TV.”
Read more on the deal.
Another take on mobile tv from the LA Times:
Director Kevin Smith teaches UCLA students to make videos for his show, airing on an MTV channel and on cellphone.
The nine-minute segments produced under Smith's tutelage air on three venues: on mtvU, on the channel's website at http://www.mtvU.com and on phones of cellular start-up Amp'd Mobile Inc., in which MTV is an investor. The shows feature offbeat entertainment such as turtle racing or all-female roller derby.
2. The Pod Cast Future
"Listening to podcasts has hardly become common among Internet users, but it's not a fad, according to researchers at the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
"Mary Madden, senior research specialist, said an August survey of Internet users found 12% of them, or 17 million people, said they had downloaded a podcast for use on their PC or portable player. By comparison, research in six months earlier found 7%, or 10 million, had experience with a podcast.
Read more about the report. Or listen to on podcast.
As a 10-year advertising vet (and aspiring mystery novelist), I share your interest in emerging media. It strikes me that writers/publicists could take advantage of mobile TV/podcasts in three ways:
1) Affiliation with content providers. As existing media brands (NYT, Kirkus, C-Span) expand into new media forms, it should open up new avenues for reviews and author placement. From the content-providers’ perspective, they’re now expected to offer fresh interviews or book reviews that are not simple re-gurgitations of yesterday’s newspaper article or TV segment. So the pressure’s on them to continually provide new, unique content on multiple platforms. Here’s some current examples:
http://podcasts.yahoo.com/series?s=da3b68acd25c06194c2126d822ba14f9
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/multimedia/podcasts.html
2) Advertising platforms. As you observe at the top of your website “there are over 175,000 books published a year and they can't all get reviews in the NYTBR.” True… but that’s not to say other authors couldn’t sponsor a 15-second advertisement to run right before the NYTBR’s podcast. Something along the lines of: “Today’s interview with Joseph Wambaugh is brought to you by M.J. Rose, author of “The Venus Fix,” which was hailed as ‘One of the year’s best thrillers’ by the Chicago Sun.” Currently, the audience for these sorts of podcasts would be low – unlike buying a page in ‘People Magazine’ --but the costs should reflect that, and you’d be hitting a highly-qualified, book-reading target.
3) Adapting to the technology. What if -- as an adjunct to your Brilliance Audio publishing deal – you serialize your audio book into 30-minute segments downloadable to a mobile phone? That way, a commuter could listen in short increments while taking the bus/train to work. You could also synch up the audio with still images… perhaps photos the author took while researching locations. Ideally, your work would be available for purchase by the chapter or as the entire novel (like the iTunes model).
Posted by: gregory huffstutter | November 28, 2006 at 03:35 PM
I hear you. It's what an interactive , multi-media world seems to want - interactive, multi-media artists. So much of being an author these days is beyond the basics - writing books.
Posted by: Kate Allan | December 01, 2006 at 05:12 PM