Read This: BookExpo America’s Buzz Authors

I was delighted by the invitation to moderate the “Adult Buzz Authors” panel at the 2012 BookExpo America. During this short presentation, I introduced the audience to three novelists and one memoirist publishers will be showing particular promotional attention in the months ahead. The folks at BEA livestreamed the conversation out to the world at large, and have preserved the video file—so you can watch me do my Phil Donahue thing with the handheld mic, and of course more importantly learn about these four authors for yourself.

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11 June 2012 | read this |

An Update on the Beatrice Project

As I write this, I’ve just put together my notes for what I’m going to say at the Book Bloggers Conference panel on… let’s check the program here… “syndication, monetization and affiliate programs for your blog.” To some extent, I’ll be talking about the limitations I’ve seen in revenue-generating strategies for blogs such as affiliate relationships with online retailers or ad sales. For websites with the highest traffic in their category, these can be very successful, but for the majority of blogs below that popularity threshold, they’re much more likely to simply be a source of what I’ve called “beer money” or what Paul Graham has called “ramen profitability.”

(Now that I think about it, those are two distinct categories. “Ramen profitability,” in the context of a business startup, implies that you’ve poured everything into this project and it’s making just enough to sustain itself while you continue to search for the financial breakthrough. “Beer money,” on the other hand, suggests that you already have a primary income source to cover your sustenance needs, and what you’re making on this project is a little bit extra—not enough to go wild, but enough to occasionally treat yourself.)

From that not-so-exuberant starting point, though, I’m going to ask the audience members to think about what else they can offer their readers, focusing on things that (a) those readers would value enough to buy, and (b) those readers can’t easily find anywhere else, at least not at the level of quality they can provide. When I took stock of my situation, I came up with an app version of Beatrice that would combine feature-length Q&A transcripts of conversations with writers and video extracts from those conversations. Since the successful Kickstarter campaign earlier this spring, I’ve been focused on making this a reality.

There’ve been a few changes to the game plan along the way. After talking things over with a developer, I felt that it could be more feasible to start out with enhanced e-books rather than a standalone app; I asked my Kickstarter backers (and a few other people on- and offline whose judgment I value) what they thought, and the consensus seemed to be that as long as I was staying true to the fundamental concept of using video and interviews to introduce readers to great writers, I was good to go. So I downloaded Apple’s iBooks Author software and started building my first issue.

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4 June 2012 | uncategorized |