Hi from SueC here at Six Figure Writing! As a new reader, be sure to subscribe to my email list, and my RSS feed to get the most out of SFW. Thanks for stopping by!
I’m reading Seth Godin’s excellent book, Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing Out Of Synch?, and it describes the ways some businesses are attempting to jump on the bandwagon of the new tools and services on the Internet but are not quite “getting it”. They’re trying to just layer the latest thing onto their business-as-usual product/marketing/advertising models, and guess what? It doesn’t work.
There are plenty of warnings too - some for freelance writers even. I keep asking the same questions here: Why oh why do writers not take advantage of what the Internet means for communication?? - after all, isn’t communicating our business? - and then complain and moan about how they have to choose between money and writing, between what they love and a living. Hogwash. They are just lazy about breaking out of their comfort zone, and want to stick to the dreams they dreamt years ago (seeing their name on the cover of XYZ magazine? In the window of Barnes and Noble? On Hoprah?) - while the world is changing around them. Yes, the game has changed. Publishers mostly haven’t. Neither have so many writers, I read about dozens and dozens of them on the forums. Here’s a quote (apologies to Mr. Godin for the lengthy selection), he’s talking about Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew who published a book on the Beatles - and made $300K doing it:
“What’s noteworthy about Recording The Beatles Is what the authors didn’t do. They didn’t give the rights to a traditional publisher. They didn’t fight hard for retail shelf space. They didn’t buy co-op ads with big book chains, and they didn’t try to get on Oprah..Instead, [they] managed to sell every single copy of their book (three thousand were printed) at the very profitable price of one hundred dollars per copy. And they did it by embracing the tactics of the New Marketing…
“By self-publishing, the authors were able to accomplish several things. First, they removed a substantial ‘tax’ (85 percent of the cover price) that a publisher charges to handle thing like retail distribution, advertising, printing risk and staffing…More important, self-publishing took them out of a meatball factory mindset. Instead of publishing yet another book, a book for an anonymous, unseen group of consumers who would somehow find the book they didn’t know they wanted, the authors found a book for the readers they already knew about…Recording the Beatles has generated more revenue than 97 percent of all books ever published. And unlike other books, most of this revenue goes to the authors.”
This book is an awesome read if you’re at all concerned about making a splash or even a ripple with your writing. Isn’t that WHY you are writing? To be read? To be heard? Well, now you can, where in the old-school ways of gatekeepers, it was pretty damn tough. I’m guilty of meatball thinking too, but it’s going to be a real fun ride making all the changes.
Let me know what you’re doing - or not doing - still waiting for that publisher/agent/magazine to call? Or are you growing beyond that?
Tags: freelance, godin, new marketing, web 2.0, Writing Links
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