I’m sitting here on the floor at Austin’s South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive conference, waiting f0r the next panel discussion on my schedule to start, but as I sit here I wonder a bit what the point of coming to these conference really is. Sure, there are a lot of smart people here, and for the most part the panels have some great ideas… but are they ideas I couldn’t have acquired by simply reading sites like Mashable, Internet Retailer or other tech blogs and news sites? The answer here is pretty clearly “no.”
Technology
4
Mar 09
Balance: Nature vs. Technology
Lately I’ve been trying to put a lot more focus on the idea of balance. In particular, finding balance between nature and technology within everyday life. I’ve always been a lover of both, but beyond personal interest I am a strong believer that finding an equilibrium between the two of them is key in having a prosperous existence in today’s world. Continue reading →
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.
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
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.
30
Oct 08
#1 Reason to Buy an Amazon Kindle
The other day I wrote a post about seven reasons to buy a Kindle from Amazon. Today I’m adding one more reason to the list – and as far as I’m concerned it’s the most important reason of all.
No, it’s not Oprah’s recent recommendation/endorsement.
28
Oct 08
You As a Brand vs. A Popularity Contest vs. Just Plain You (Twitter)
I’ve been on Twitter for (logs on to personal twitter account and looks at history) for four months and nine days as of today. So even though I wasn’t an early adopter to the service, I definitely have been on for long enough to as where I am really starting to see some trends in use and misuse of Twitter.
