The Smirnoff effect – coming to a magazine near you

By Philip Goldberg in The Huffington Post:
Recently, Newsweek ran an article about the brave new world of self-publishing. Its title asked the question “Who Needs a Publisher?” Well, the short answer is, I do. The bigger answer is: we all do.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad that self-publishing has evolved from stigma to respectability. I [...]

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By Seth Godin on Seth Godin’s Blog:
Authors need publishers because they need a customer. Readers have been separated from authors by many levels–stores, distributors, media outlets, printers, publishers–there were lots of layers for many generations, and the editor with a checkbook made the process palatable to the writer. For ten years, I had a publisher [...]

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You know those Smirnoff ads where people look through the lens of a bottle and see strange wonders? I’ve never quite understood what the marketing message there was supposed to be – “get off your face on vodka until you hallucinate”? Well, you can now have that experience with a magazine and an iPhone. So long as the magazine is Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, the first magazine to use augmented reality browser Junaio.

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Über-agent Andrew “the Jackal” Wylie has hatched an audacious plot. Or maybe he has just seen the future. Either way, he has disintermediated the publishers he works with – for ebooks at least. With last week’s launch of Odyssey Editions, his Kindle-only ebook imprint, a range of his authors are now available digitally for the first time. To me, this seems inevitable. Many authors and their agents get the new digital realities – and, more importantly, the opportunities – while too many publishing discussions still focus on a protectionist response to the ‘threat’ of digital. If publishers won’t grasp digital, authors and agents will.

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Should authors and publishers publish for the Kindle, the iPad, or something else? Some of the current options are:

- Print – not going away in a hurry
- Publish for the Kindle and iPad via the Amazon Digital Text Platform
- Publish for the iPad via the iBookstore
- Publish via a third party ebook app like Stanza
- Publish via an aggregator like Smashwords, Lulu, Myebook, Issuu

If you are an author, my advice is to write, create accompanying audio and video assets and by the time you are ready to publish, there will be more than one route open to you.

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Is Second Life still useful for authors and publishers? It depends how you use it, argues Adele Ward – who has recently used virtual contacts to make her new business, Ward Wood Publishing, a reality.

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