December, 2008

Life / Publishing / Technology — 6 Comments
30
Dec 08

Why I Don’t Like Reading Books

As a person who loves reading and has bought and read literally thousands of books, I never thought I’d say it, but I don’t like reading books anymore. It’s not that I don’t enjoy reading stories, or novels, nonfiction, etc. – it’s that I don’t like reading books.  That’s right, the ink-on-paper all bound in one big lump of dead tree things.  I can’t stand them.

Ever since getting my Kindle I’ve become more and more accustomed to reading on its e-ink display. For a while it was all I read on (other than the computer, but I refuse to read full-length novels on a computer screen). Sure, at first it took a bit of getting used to: holding a hunk of plastic and not having the feel of paper beneath my fingers, but when I started reading a new book (who shall remain nameless), it simply was not available for Kindle – so I had to read it in dead-tree form.  I hated it.

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Marketing / Publishing / Technology / Web — 1 Comment
19
Dec 08

Should I Self-Publish? (Part 1)

Please note this is first in a series.

As most of you know, I work for an online publisher/retailer (albeit, for music publishing) and we sell several million dollars of downloadable content every year. Some of this is extremely popular, and some of it has a very small, but very devoted fanbase.

Our top 20 sellers make up less than 10 percent of our sales. Most of our sales comes are of products that are quite far down the long tail (if you don’t know what that is, go read The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson). They are far down the tail in a combination of actual sales numbers on our site, as well as through general public knowledge.

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Marketing / Technology / Web — No Comments
19
Dec 08

Amazon Tags: The Latest Book Marketing Experiment

As I mentioned previously, my debut novel, The Trouble With Being God, is now available for purchase in both paperback and kindle format on Amazon.com.  Now that the book is up, I’m continuing my self-publishing marketing experiment, and trying out different methods of social viral marketing within Amazon itself, currently focusing on tagging.

As most of you are probably aware, tagging is the simple practice of adding relevant keywords to a product, similar to the way meta keywords were used in web pages. Instead of these tags being added by the creator, however, the tags are added by other members of the community, as it is assumed that tags from outsiders are much more relevant than those created by a self-serving advertiser/creator.

Amazon.com uses tags for their products as a way to easily filter what is relevant in a specific category.  They are primarily used within different groups on the site, as well as community discussions and cross-sell opportunities (tags on their listmania lists are used quite a bit in this manner).

So, what I’m doing now is focusing on getting my reader base to tag The Trouble With Being God with appropriate tags, such as “murder,” “crime,” philosophy,” “thriller,” “suspense,” and other tags they find relevant for the book to help drive the book up in relevancy in Amazon’s rankings.  Simply put: the more times a book (or other product) is tagged with a specific term, the more relevant it appears to be to that topic on the Amazon website.

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Marketing / Writing — No Comments
15
Dec 08

Debut Novel on Amazon.com / Switching from Freemium to Premium

As already stated on the official book site, my debut novel, The Trouble With Being God, is now available for purchase at amazon.com.

Due to this wider availability of the book, the book is no longer available as a free download.  Previously I suggested that content creators offer their material as free to build up a fan base, and I still stand by this suggestion.  One thing I failed to mention, however, is that once you’ve achieved that base, if your goal is to sell a product, then you need to switch gears.

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