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Every now and then I get the urge to speak my mind. Those of you who read my various columns and blogs across the net are probably aware of this. I’ve talked about books and publishing before, but looking back I think a lot has changed since the last time I did so, so I believe I’ll take a stab at the state of things, as I see it . . .

The economy is in the crapper. There’s no doubt of this, and while it doesn’t seem to stem the flow of Blackberry Storms, iPods, and Macbooks, it has certainly put a crimp in the traditional publishing world. As usual, when things take a nosedive, about a million gurus have popped up with "the solution" and "the revolution," and—also as usual—most of this had led down short roads to nowhere. I am all for innovation, and I can see as well as the next person that publishing is evolving. What irritates me is how most of the "solutions" are just attempts to reinvent the original model in a new format. Instead of finding ways to spread words far and wide, people are still trying to attach the same levels of insular control to the new formats and venues as they did to the old. "E-zines"—rather than having constantly dynamic content that gives people a reason to visit daily try to emulate the monthly and quarterly models of print—while interactive sites that change daily, like some of the top blogs, get thousands of legitimate hits daily and are great venues for actual advertising dollars.

Devices like the Sony E-reader and The Kindle are revolutionizing digital content. They’ve come a long way from the downloadable e-book. People are buying them and using them. These new devices and formats are, in other words, not going away. This doesn’t mean, however, that non-traditional publishing will suddenly rule the day. If you look at what is, and what is not selling in significant numbers digitally, you will find that the professionally bought, edited, and produced books in Kindle format by the popular authors, titles, and publishing houses that topped the charts in print are still making most of the money. No one is any more likely now to buy your self-produced product than they were before. The new format, in other words, doesn’t mean people are willing to shift the entire paradigm of buying and reading books. It just means readers want the convenience, and in many cases the savings, of the digital format for books they would have read a few years ago in print.

There are a lot of ideas floating about on marketing, as well. Social Media Marketing, online community building, e-mail lists, etc. Here’s the thing. It all starts with the quality. If you don’t have a product that people already want, you have to find a way to make them understand that they want it—and then you have to deliver on whatever promise you are making. Seth Goden, who is widely considered an expert on Internet and social media marketing, said that if you can convince one person to buy your book, AND THEY LIKE IT, then you can sell a million. That person tells friends, who tell friends, etc. This is how it works on the greater Internet. You can’t ignore that middle statement and make it work. If the book is poorly written, edited, produced, or in any way more irritating to a reader than the more professional books in the same genre, it’s going to lose out every time.

What I see more and more is insular communities trying to sell their books to one another, to other writers, and to a steadily shrinking audience of readers. Advertisements are taken in the same group of periodicals, whose readership is also shrinking. In a world where everything has grown smaller, and where unique and innovative methods of reaching thousands, possibly millions of new customers are at your fingertips, roping yourself off and trying to create a walled-in environment where your product is available is just asking for the greater mass of consumers to wash over and around you without notice.

I’ve written a lot of words about how I believe one should go about building a web presence. I’m in the midst of some larger-scale experimentation of my own, and I will certainly get back to all of you on it, but I’d also like to point you to some articles I’ve been writing. If you are a writer, they might be helpful. See the links at the bottom of this column. If you are a reader, I want to encourage you to take advantage of the opportunities this modern world presents. In many cases you can interact directly with authors that at one time in the past you had to send letters to through their publisher. Everything is new, but everything has not changed.

What I mean by that is that writing has not changed. It is still an art form. It is still not easy. It still doesn’t work unless you dedicate yourself to it, learn the craft and admit that you aren’t the best thing to come along since Shirley Jackson. You have to constantly work to improve your skills. When the music industry started to crumble, a few folks did really well recording in home studios, and everyone said . . . w00t! This is it! In a way, it is the thing, and it did revolutionize a lot of the world of music, but here’s the thing. Those people who pioneered it were good. They were talented musicians using a new format to reach a larger audience, and it worked for them. Subsequent attempts by half-assed garage bands and lesser talents have proven just as ineffectual on the Internet as they were in trying to land recording contracts with traditional recording companies.

Quality is the one factor you can never count out. Anything you think you can just flip over in a week and make a million bucks on—particularly if you base that assumption on the fact someone else made a million in a similar fashion and you think you can discount disparities in fame, talent, and hard work—is going to get you just as much nothing now as it would have before the Internet and digital content became a factor.

Here’s a fact for you. Take a social media platform like Twitter. Potentially you can reach out to over a million people, and so, potentially, you have a pretty large market there. Here’s the truth of it. Will Wheaton, actor and now author, advertised in his blog, and on Twitter, when his book came out recently from Subterranean Press. It did very, very well. Other authors I know have tried similar campaigns and flopped. Why is that?

Because those people are not Will Wheaton. He’s popular. He has a following of fans. The huge number of people who read his blog and his updates on Twitter are people he’s entertained, interacted with, and won over. They were a ready-made audience before he made use of the modern methods of reaching out to them, and when his book was ready to be sold in a variety of formats, it (not surprisingly) sold well. Not only that, but he is a talented writer with a unique voice, and when people DID buy the book, they talked about it, and they told other, like minded readers about it. The lesson learned is, just because you now have access to all of the same fans as many famous authors, it doesn’t mean that they will listen to you, read your work, or buy your books. You still have to earn that.

Doing things the way successful people have done them before doesn’t give you an edge. The famous person always has the edge. Instead of trying to emulate their methods and then standing around looking hurt when the reaction you receive isn’t what you expected, work on building the type of following that will stick with you and support you. Talk to them. Interact with them. Work hard at providing nothing but quality work for them to base their decisions on, and work on getting them to spread the word. When I say spread the word, I don’t mean just to others in the same little community that you already interact with, but to new people.

I have a good sized following on Twitter myself, and I’m working on not only building it in numbers, but in quality. I have plans to use all of this to enhance my career as a writer. I am doing the same on my web page and blog. I’m doing it by being as real as I can, by not proclaiming myself the next anyone—by not trying to reinvent things others have already done. In other words, I’m not interested in being another nameless, faceless blob on MySpace or Facebook—I’m not interested in 10,000 friends who are mostly my friends in the hopes I’ll buy their books and who have no intention of buying mine. I’m interested in creating a network of folks excited by what I write and ready to help pass those words on to others.

This is not a particularly a new concept, but it’s one that is largely ignored as people flock like lemmings to "promote" by the same old methods, taking advice from "gurus" and websites and organizations built on a backbone of only moderately successful authors promising to help you achieve their level of success if you do exactly what they did—and charging you for the advice. Those folks make more teaching you how to market your books than they do on their books. Count on it.

Anyway . . . below are some articles you might want to check out. My advice is that you begin building YOUR space. Don’t become part of a community that requires a sign-in and account for full access and use that as your web site. Don’t tie all of your ropes to any particular social media ship. Don’t pepper mindless "numbers" with e-mail newsletters proclaiming your work and failing in any way to personally connect with those you hope will become new readers. Create a presence that will draw people in. It won’t work for everyone. Not everyone can be a successful writer—if they could, what would be special about it? But if you do have that talent, and that desire, then you need to get to work.

Your Space, Your Tribe: Control and Quality

Traffic - Billboards - A Content-Based Viewpoint

Being Popular, or Selling Books?

There are a lot of other articles under the Writing and Web 2.0 links on the site. Check them out—comment. I’d love to hear from you, and I’d love to have you discover my work. I’m fairly certain that even the Chi-zine readership isn’t particularly aware of it, other than these ranting editorial jaunts. Let me entertain you.