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’ online activities:

Publishers, like many organizations, want to control the conversation, want to own the web page, want to be sure that people come to them, as opposed to going where people are. The irony here is that bookstores are precisely the opposite of this. There’s no Knopf bookstore, no Random House store. Bookstores, unlike the current conception of car dealers, work best when they are agnostic about what’s for sale.

Authors are brands. Some are billion-dollar brands, some are tiny ones. The web is custom made for authors, but so far, it’s largely going unused.

… Books aren’t the universal medium they used to be, but the industry still ought to be selling more books than we are today. I’m afraid that publishers and authors have embraced a broken system, even though there are tools out there ready to help.

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Traditional book retailers’ dominance of the market is breaking. The internet provides publishers with more branding opportunities, as Dominic Proctor points out. ‘Whether through embedded content, webasodes or blogs, there is so much need for content out there, and publishers should take advantage of that for their authors.’

Steve Hatch, joint m.d. of media giant Mediaedge;cia and author of Rigorous Magic: Communication Ideas and their Application (John Wiley), agrees. He believes publishers should use authors as community brands.

‘The strongest driver of book sales is word-of-mouth, and publishers should be thinking of their books and authors as communities rather than things that sit on shelves,’ he says. ‘A book is a living thing, and readers love that sense of engagement. But when you look at what publishers are doing from an online point-of view, there is nothing there.’

An effective online strategy building these communities need not be expensive, he adds. ‘It’s not money that is the problem. It’s the mentality,’ he observes. ‘It’s not like trying to sell toothpaste.’

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