Authorpreneurship
Feb 14th 2015
In 2013 some 1.4m print books were published in America, over five
times as many as a decade earlier. Publishers are increasingly focusing
their efforts on a few titles they think will make a splash, neglecting
less well-known authors and less popular themes.
--
Even the most successful writers need to invest large amounts of time and resources in promoting themselves.
--
Authors must court an expanding variety of “influencers”—people whose
opinions can determine a book’s success. Once a select group of
newspaper reviewers were the principal arbiters of literary taste. Now,
as the amount of newsprint devoted to reviews keeps shrinking, a host of
bloggers and social-media pundits fill the gap. The most important are
the celebrity endorsers. Oprah Winfrey used to help books soar up the
charts by discussing them on her television show.
--
Entrepreneurial authors find it more effective to devote themselves to a
more achievable aim: getting onto the bestseller lists. The secret of
such lists, the most prominent of which are those in the New York Times,
is that they do not measure total sales, but their velocity. Books that
fly off the shelves in their first week make the lists, and that in
turn boosts their subsequent sales. Pre-orders of books all count toward
the first week’s sales figures, so canny authors try to get people to
buy copies in advance of publication. Eric Ries, a lecturer on
entrepreneurship and innovation, went on a “pre-book” book tour to drum
up interest before his work, “The Lean Startup”.
Inga kommentarer:
Skicka en kommentar