Marketing
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The Attention Economy 2020: Social Media, Mobile, Streaming
In Tim Wu’s excellent book, “The Attention Merchants,” Wu paints a grim history of advertising attempting to get attention, especially as technology enters the picture. He is undecided as to whether digital ads are a 99-cent store, a cesspool, or both: “Over the long term [digital ads] would become something of a 99-cent store, if…
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[GUIDE] How to Use a Blog To Show Off Your Creative Work
When it comes to blogging, nothing is ever easy. Creative people who are blogging as a way to show off their work have it even harder. You can upload as many art pieces and short stories as you want, but it seems almost impossible to get the kind of traffic you want. In many cases,…
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How to Market Your Book as a Product Without Feeling Guilty
When it comes to the word “marketing,” writers get squeamish. Call our books a “product,” and you’re likely to catch a fist to the face. Okay, maybe not a fist. But at least a curled nose and some whispered muttering about the evils of capitalism. Well, unfortunately for your sense of social justice, capitalism is…
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Why You Need to Curate Your Own Content
You know the guys in the museum that show people things behind the glass and then tell them why those things are significant? When you post some funny thing on Facebook, that guy in the museum is you. Sure, you may be sharing stuff about a dog wearing a hat instead of showing off a…
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How A Sci-Fi Magazine Uses Facebook to Sell Issues
When authors talk about promoting their books, the “S” word isn’t far behind. Everyone knows social media is important for writers in some abstract context, but they’re not sure how it actually works. That includes me. I’ve tried investigating it all month, first by interviewing author Holly Robinson about how she uses Twitter. Then, by taking…
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What We Can Learn From France and Google’s War Over Free Content
There’s a territorial dispute afoot, have you heard about it? French newspaper publishers have accused Google of deterring would-be readers by displaying the first sentences of an article in “Google News.” The working theory is that, rather than clicking into the website for the full article, readers graze and move on, like information-hungry cows wandering…
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When You Can’t Just Make Art for Art’s Sake
My last blog post, which talked about the merger between Penguin and Random House, reminded me of an important lesson that, as someone who enjoys the notion of “being creative,” I shouldn’t have forgotten. On the internet, you can’t make art for art’s sake. If you do, that’s more or less assuming that your art…
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Why You Should Care About Tumblr (And Why You Shouldn’t)
Tumblr. Heard of it? It’s a nifty, micro-blogging website that takes the best parts of Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook, then mercilessly mashes them altogether. More than anything, it looks like an interactive copyright violation. But this interactive copyright violation has been picking up steam. I’ve wanted to write about it for a month, especially after…
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