A thought occurs to me about publishing in general. Not the current business model, but just the idea of selling books to people. As I said earlier, books are not mass media. Even a best-seller is a more of a niche than the most nichey of cable TV shows. This is why you very rarely see a TV add for a book, and if you do it’s only for Steven King, Nora Roberts or someone else who doesn’t need the publicity and it has the production values of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.
So, the publising industry doesn’t scale up well.
However, marketing itself is scaling down. Where a TV ad for a SF novel is kind of pointless, demonstrated by the lack of such an animal, ads on the web are ubiquitous. Buying ad space, even on a really popular website, is cheep as dirt in comparison to TV or even radio, and arguably much more effective. Think about this, you’re a neo-pro SF author with an ad budget. (We can dream.) Which would move more books per dollar, you think? A thirty second spot on an episode of BSG, (remembering to throw in cost of production so the add doesn’t suck too much) or some Google Ads that pop up when people search for science fiction conventions?
2 Comments
steve buchheit · January 13, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Or, say, a side bar ad on Locus Online.
S Andrew Swann · January 15, 2009 at 2:14 pm
Any time you can grab an audience that’s filtered for those predisposed to your subject matter, it’s a marketing win. This is why the only really successful self-publishing efforts are heavily tied to the author holding seminars where you can (*ahem*) just happen to buy a copy. The same model that indie bands use to sell CDs. Pitch to a small captive audience that’s already shown an interest.
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