In case you missed my previous post on the wealth of analytics and marketing tools available for free online, this post covers my recommendations for an author with a book who would like to use this intelligence—and the complete palette of modern marketing tools—to improve their chances of success.

“Wait a minute,” someone might say. “Aren’t you an author?”

Well, yes. But I don’t currently have a book to shill. If I did, I’d be taking my own advice.

Okay, </commercial.>

Here’s the setup: Let’s assume our hypothetical author doesn’t have a household name. Nor do they control a web property with millions of visitors a month. They also don’t have a lot of money to spend on, say, full-page ads in the Wall Street Journal. And they don’t have infinite time—their family wouldn’t be pleased with recommendations that include a list of 89 social networks to visit every single day.

So, in this case, the question is: What can I do that provides the maximum result for minimum cost (both in terms of time and dollars)?

Let’s start with a change of mindset. Today, you need to change your point of view on what writing is. The lonely writer, hidden away behind closed doors, does not work in a world of constantly-connected electronic media. Your fans expect to see you. To know a bit about you. They’re looking for a personal connection. You need to think of yourself as an actor, looking for superstardom. You need to stand out. You need to be memorable. And you’ll need to do this all the time. Yes, it’s unfair. Yes, the best work should speak for itself. Unfortunately, it usually doesn’t. So . . . what makes you different? What makes you unique? What makes people want to be around you? Find it. Cultivate it.

Let’s turn it up a bit: get good at public speaking. And I’m not talking about a paragraph from your latest story, told in front of your local sci-fi club. I’m talking about being good at getting up in front of a lot of people and holding their attention for ten minutes, twenty minues, or an hour. Spend some time as a guest lecturer in your local college. Get on panels at conventions. Better yet, get speaking gigs on things you’re interested in anywhere you can. Having the guts to get up in front of a crowd separates you from . . . well, a whole lot of people. And it’s the best chance you’ll have to get someone’s attention.

“Wait a minute,” you’re probably saying. “What about all these online metrics and such?”

We’re getting to that. I’m looking at this from a holistic marketing standpoint. The preceding two steps can be considered “personal brand building,” if you’re in to buzzwords. If you aren’t, think of it as having something ready to deliver when you do get someone’s attention.

Then, let’s look local. Your best chance for exposure–and sales–will be through your local press, radio, television, and bookstores. Because, in this day and age of multinational conglomerates and faceless brands, there’s a real value in being local. And your local readers have friends—friends all over the world. Yeah, I know, you can’t keep this at arms’ length like a blog, and you may have to speak to some reporters . . . but you shouldn’t underestimate the power of “local dood makes good” stories. If you don’t know your local media, take a trip over to Mondo Times and make a list. Send letters. Learn how to write a press release. Call and introduce yourself.

Yeah, I know, online, online. Here you go.

Blog–but not just any blog. Here’s where Quantcast comes in. The first thing you’re going to do is compile a list of strategic tags. These strategic tags will include: your name, your genre, your publisher, the name of your book, the names of your awards . . . and tags taken from the keywords listed under high-traffic science fiction interest sites like BoingBoing, SciFi Channel, and io9. You’ll find these keywords at the Quantcast profiles for these sites, and for their affinity sites. The reason you’re picking these tags is because you want to be found when people are looking for science fiction-related content–and you have a good chance of being found if you maintain a good blog on a solid platform. You’ll apply these strategic tags to relevant posts (not all tags to all posts). For example, if you have a post about how terrible last night’s Battlestar Galactica episode was, and how you Twittered to all your friends using your iPhone, you’d be using popular strategic tags like “Battlestar Galactica,” “Twitter,” and “iPhone.”

Twitter–at least for now. Google is paying a lot of attention to Twitter posts at the moment. Use the same strategic tags (and tinyurl links to your longer content) and it will pay off in terms of search. Will this change in the future? Maybe. But for now, it makes a lot of sense.

Be visible on all the big SF outlets–and more. Have you responded to a post on BoingBoing, io9, or SciFi Channel? If not, why not? Identify yourself, use your strategic tags, and link back to your site. It may be the cheapest exposure you’ll get. Beyond the big guys, though, have you looked at forums such as Something Awful or Gaia Online? Yeah, I know. But–guess what? They are huge sources of traffic, and at least the former is self-selecting due to its paid nature. You’d be surprised how many science fiction fans and writers there are out there. Greg Bear’s son recently posted on SomethingAwful, and received a very warm reception. Threads that cover wacky science and new discoveries and supernatural are evergreen. These are communities you can reach out to. Finally, sign up for a full Quantcast account and use their Media Planner tool to look for demographics and site category to uncover places where you may want to be visible. For example, a search for males, 45+, caucasian, with a site category of “science and technology” could help you find where a “typical” science fiction-friendly audience might hang out. Or you can look for a younger audience. There’s a lot of data here to craft targets from.

“Wow, that’s a lot to do,” you say.

And yes, I hear you. Nobody said this is going to be easy. And, depending on the amount of time and money you have, you can go much, much, much farther. Here are a couple of things to think about if you’ve gotten some traction, and want to do more.

Consider SEO. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of creating content that’s designed to be indexed highly in Google and other search engines. For example, if you were to create a “Ultimate Battlestar Galactica Resource Site,” with 45,000 total words spread over 1500 pages, and solicited 60,000 links in from other fansites, you have a site full of content that will appear very, very high in the Google listings. It may also lead people to your book. The time an energy required to do this can be very large, however.

Consider AdWords and BlogAds. If you have to advertise, Google AdWords and BlogAds are two of the most cost-effective ways to do it. Create a campaign around your book, buying low-cost, high-popularity tags taken from Quantcast, and you may be able to sell at a profit. Maybe. If you are very lucky.

Consider building your own world. If you have a very patient family, you may consider treating the world of your novel as real and building out an alternate reality site for, say, the town that it is set in. Or a site for a research company that features prominently in your book. Or even start your own Ning social network, and allow your fans to interact with your characters on the network. But, to be fair, these tactics take time, and are far more speculative than the rest. If you engage in them, good luck!

Up next: What’s a Small Publisher To Do? Look for this next week.

September 1st, 2008 / 1,553 Comments »

It’s a great time for internet analytics. What used to cost tens of thousands of dollars a year is now free, thanks to a new-ish service called Quantcast.

Some visitors may remember my Alexa-based comparisons of what I call “Popular Metafiction” and traditional science fiction outlets. Well, Quantcast makes Alexa look about as sleek and modern as a Ford Model T. Quantcast is a professional competitive analytics and online ad-planning platform—for anyone to use, for free. The data is also (typically) more accurate than Alexa and Compete.com, since Quantcast makes an effort for sites to quantify their traffic. Does it mean it is perfect? No, especially for smaller sites. But it is a very good tool.

Yeah, I know, I know: so what the heck does this have to do with science fiction?

Quite a bit, actually—provided you are interested in discovering what the real differences are between sites that get 2-3 million visitors a month and sites that get 5-50 thousand visitors per month—and then using that intelligence to market your work.

Let’s take a look at a few examples. I’m providing the screen caps here to freeze this instant in time, but it’s much more interesting to click through the live links (below the gallery)

BoingBoing

io9

SciFi Channel

Strange Horizons

Futurismic

F&SF

Asimovs

Analog

“But wait!” some authors will cry. “Tor.com just launched its shiny new socialated website and Baen has been offering free stuff and forums and other argly-bargly internetish bits since, like, the earth cooled!”

That’s cool. Here you go:

Tor

Baen

Neither is exactly setting the world on fire—though, to be fair, it’s impossible to say what the Tor traffic will look like in a few months. If they do their job well, it should grow significantly.

But it’s the demographics, “audience also visits” and “audience also searches for” results that are most telling. And again, we get a very clean separation between the popular metascience sites, the entertainment sites, and the more traditional science fiction sites. Which means that the traditional sites are simply not reaching the audience that might be most interested in its content.

And that’s what we should be focusing on: how to effectively reach new audiences. What keywords are they using? What other sites are they visiting? What else are they interested in? Because even if they’re only interested in Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who right now, who knows what they might get into next?

“Okay, okay,” long-time readers of this blog will say. “I get it. So what do we do?”

And that’s a great question. In the next three posts, I’ll put on my marketing hat and take a look at how I’d use this data, and the complete suite of modern marketing tools, to help:

1. An author with a book to promote.

2. A small publisher looking to expand their reach.

3. A big publisher looking towards the future.

Now, remember: this will be coming from the point of view of a marketing professional. This is my day job. Companies like Memorex, Princess Cruises, Warner Brothers, Epson, and Cotton, Inc. pay me and the company I founded to do this. I have some credibility in this space.

But if you think marketing is beneath you, and that the best authors and the best publishers always rise to the surface and win automatically, that’s fine. You can skip the next few posts.

But remember—your competition may be taking notes.

August 23rd, 2008 / 1,790 Comments »

Here’s an argument I use in my day job: It ain’t about getting people to your site anymore—its about getting your site out where the people are.

For years, we’ve focused on “drive traffic, drive traffic, gotta drive traffic.” In marketing, this means “doing search engine optimization, buying keywords, placing banners, doing contests, putting together strategic partnerships” or, more simply, “anything we can do to get people to our site.”

But times are changing. We just did a little promo for the new Batman Gotham Knight movie that brought in two million pageviews—without driving a single person to the site.

“Wait, what?” you might be saying. “Does this have anything to do with writing?”

Yes. It does. It has everything to do with writing. It’s something that science fiction writers—and publishers, especially publishers—should take to heart. It’s not about getting people to your site anymore. It’s about getting your content out to where the people are.

Where are the people? Increasingly, they’re on social networks like MySpace or Facebook. Or on social media like YouTube and Flickr. Or they’re reading some of the 100MM blogs out there. They’re interacting with friends, and with people they respect.They’re building their own profiles on the social networks. They’re writing their own blogs.

Is it any wonder they don’t react well when you pop in like a carnival shill, screaming, “Come to my site, come to my site NOWWWW?”

(Now, cue the people who will say, “But that social stuff, that there’s for kids, it ain’t for the mature and sophisticated audiences that loves that there science fiction stuff!”)

In short: you’re wrong.

37% of adult American internet users participated in social networks last year. This excludes teens, where the number was 70%. 6 of the top 10 global websites are social sites. This is not a flash in the pan. This is not a fad. This is a serious, long-term shift that every marketer (and that means you, science fiction writers and publishers) needs to look at.

We need to change our thinking from, “How do I get people to my site?” to “How do I get out to where the people are?”

Well, you’ve probably already started with a MySpace or Facebook presence. If not, shame on you. You’re turning your back on free outposts in places where, statistically, almost 4 out of 10 of your prospects are. But a presence isn’t enough. Think of your presence on the social networks as your home. You still need to invite people to your home. Which takes us back to the same old game of driving traffic, driving traffic. Which is really silly. Because, unless you have a really, really cool home, people would rather stay at their own.

No. The new goal is to bring your content into other people’s homes—their own social network profiles. Here’s how you do it.

Make friends. Without friends, you’re not going to be able to do much of anything. Search the social networks for people who are science fiction fans and reach out to them. But be respectful. Spamming thousands of people a day randomly doesn’t help anyone. Reaching out to people who have listed authors similar to yourself–and maybe offering them a free story as a token of friendship–is cool. Or, if you’re a publisher, how about a free ebook? But this is how you start: by making friends.

Be active. Everything you do is reflected in your friends’ feeds. Just sold a book? Let everyone know. Bringing out a new book? Ditto. Awards won, releases made, parties thrown–you get the picture. Every time you make an announcement, this is shown on your friends’ feeds for their friends to see. And the next time they are at the bookstore, they might think, “Oh yeah, that was the guy who . . .” or “I remember that small press . . .”

Give them your stuff. People like to customize their home–that is, their social network profile. They change colors, add backgrounds, restyle, put in music and photos, throw in YouTube videos. They’re very open to adding content that they like–and that includes yours. Do you have a widget that gives them access to excerpts from new releases, selected stories, or (better yet) complete ebooks? Do you have a widget that allows them to play audio podcasts of your work? Do you have a widget that can be updated on the fly with new information, new content, and kept perpetually fresh? If not, you should look into it, pronto. Widgets are small applications that people use to decorate their social network profiles. A widget is how we created all those extra views for Batman.

“Oh, you mean I have to make another thing–a widget–to promote my stuff?”

Well, no. I didn’t say you had to do anything. But you may want to pay attention to this big, big market, because there isn’t a lot of activity on the author or publishing side here yet. And it really isn’t that hard to get in the game. There are a lot of easy-to-use widget platforms out there, from Clearspring to YourMinis to WidgetBox. You can put together a simple RSS widget in a couple of minutes.

But you may want to think bigger. Widgets can be deleted as easily as they are installed. You want to provide good, compelling, ongoing content to earn your place on a friend’s page. And widgets can be very full-featured. The Batman widget we did included video, production stills, text, and an interactive feature that made the Batsignal brighter for the more widgets that were installed.

But, no matter how small you start, it’s time to start. The time of “get people to your site” is coming to a close. It’s time to move to where the people are.

June 27th, 2008 / 1,433 Comments »

You may have noticed that the base URL of the site has changed from xcentric.com to strangeandhappy.com. Hey, why not? What is eccentricity, after all, other than being strange and happy? And, given my battle cry for more positively-oriented science fiction

(and, before the naysayers jump in here, I’m not talking about happy-sappy lighthearted stuff, but work in which yeah, there may be big and scary changes, but there is still humanity, there is still hope)

the site name change makes sense.

It’s kinda funny to look back on the xcentric.com domain–the first domain I ever registered, way back in 1995. The irony is that my company name, Centric, had already been registered by a small engineering firm in 1990, so I had to pick an alternate name: xcentric.com. And this is a time when domain names like mcdonalds.com and chevrolet.com were not yet registered . . .

In fact, it might be interesting to take a look back at that time. In 1995, if you said you were an internet user, you were a bit strange, right out of the gate. After all, there were only about 10 million internet users in the world at the time I registered xcentric.com–less total accounts than there are in Second Life today.

And, in 1995, if you said, “The internet will change everything we know, it will eat every medium we have, it will grow and eat newspapers and radio and television,” you were a bit of a nutter.

But that is exactly what I said. In fact, I have documents from 1995 saying, “It will eat television in 10 years.” Well, YouTube was a year late, but fact is, YouTube now has greater reach and engagement than all the television networks put together.

Since 1995, I’ve built a decent-sized business helping companies take advantage of these ongoing changes in the online space. From websites to social network marketing to metaverse development, this is what I do on a daily basis. And I have to tell you: the changes you’ve seen to date are only a tiny, tiny fraction of what is to come.

The mobile revolution will dwarf the computing revolution, the internet revolution, and the social media revolution put together. Augmented reality will be the de facto standard for business in well under 10 years, despite how Bruce Sterling makes fun of his spex these days. And virtual realities are awaiting only a simple, in-browser experience to become mainstream–which we have today, at Maid Marian.

It’s gonna be a neat ride, a fun ride, and its going to change everything, all over again. And the opportunities will be simply stunning. If we can look forward–truly look forward–the future is as bright as it has ever been.

June 15th, 2008 / 1,359 Comments »