Archive for October, 2007

50% of top sites are social media

E-marketer reported this week on the most popular websites in the world, ranked by page views. Half of the most popular websites are social media. The other half are search-centric. Leaving aside the four search sites (Yahoo!, Google, Live.com and MSN) – how can publishers – and authors – best tap into the top four [...]

eBooks: end of the page-turner?

Jon Reed | 4:45 pm 24 Oct 07 Comments 1

Interesting article in today’s Independent about eBooks – including plenty of quotes from Jeff ‘Print is Dead‘ Gomez:
In just a few short years, MP3 downloads and the iPod changed the face of the music industry. CDs are going the way of the dodo, and high-street music stores fear for their future. Now there’s a [...]

Seth Godin on author branding

Jon Reed | 1:40 am 10 Oct 07 Comments 1

More on authors, branding and online marketing today, this time from a recent post by Seth Godin, who’s always worth reading. Seth’s post highlights the problems with publisher branding of promotional sites – when most people don’t care who the publisher is – and the need to focus more on facilitation than control of authors’ [...]

authors, brands and communities

Jon Reed | 10:27 am 09 Oct 07 Comments Off

Following on from my previous comment that the author is the brand, here’s an extract from an interesting article by Danuta Kean, from the latest edition of The Deal (the official magazine of the London Book Fair):
Traditional book retailers’ dominance of the market is breaking. The internet provides publishers with more branding opportunities, as Dominic [...]

using blogs to promote books

Jon Reed | 2:39 am 07 Oct 07 Comments Off

Blog consultant Mark White has written a recent post on the benefits of blogging as a means of promoting books. While you may be tripping over Nigella, Jamie and Michael Palin in Waterstones, the number of titles with the PR benefit of TV behind them is tiny.
But one medium easily available to all authors and [...]

a storm brewing?

Jon Reed | 10:19 pm 05 Oct 07 Comments Off

You know, for those who want to stick with the old media, the old top-down content distribution models, and cultural gatekeeping duties, the scary thing is: that’s not your decision to make.
Publisher, web producer and friend of the show, Rich Holman, has written a very interesting post about the implications of digital media for the [...]

authors are doing it for themselves

Jon Reed | 10:40 pm 03 Oct 07 Comments 4

Our Facebook Group is now approaching 250 members. Many thanks to everyone who has joined, contributed, posted links, images, and discussions. It’s come as no surprise to me that the most active members of this group are authors. This supports a little theory I’ve had for a while:
Authors are doing more with social media than [...]

social media press release

Jon Reed | 11:48 pm 01 Oct 07 Comments 2

I want to share with you something I just came across: the social media press release.
I’ve been thinking about press releases since publishing commentator and friend of the show, Danuta Kean, wrote about the publicity campaign for a nice little book called Birds in Your Garden. Which I also give a quick shout-out to on [...]