Yes, I said it. Anyone who knows me knows how far I’ll go to impress upon people the ethical requirement to patronize one’s local independent bookseller (”or they won’t be around any longer,” is my usual tagline here). And I still believe that, with all my heart. And I love love love my local booksellers and can’t imagine life without them.
But as I get older I’m less binary in my thinking, and I don’t believe that the Amazon/local bookseller necessarily has to be an either/or proposition.
Look at it this way. The goal for any published author is to sell thousands and thousands of copies of her books in a very short time, and she needs to be willing to do whatever is necessary to work with her publisher to make that happen.
And there’s no denying that Amazon is an excellent tool. The company actually does the industry a lot of good.
I love independent booksellers, but for economic reasons they are not always able to do what Amazon can and does (giving publishers workable terms and not ship returns, for example); and the reality is that for authors as well as for publishers and independent booksellers, selling books is a business.
The other thing I’m noticing about Amazon is that it is a tremendous marketing tool. Many people search Amazon for books and then buy them from their local independent bookseller. You can’t call a local bookseller or and ask the sales people to read you the blurb, the first chapter, or the reviews; and if you don’t happen to live close to said bookseller, this can be a problem — but you can get that information from Amazon.
Yes, Amazon is an impersonal megalithic corporation, and I don’t believe for a second that corporations are our friends. But that doesn’t mean that we cannot use them to our advantage, because they’re not going away anytime soon. Buy your books whenever possible at your local independent bookseller — I stand by my signature phrase — but don’t dismiss Amazon as a great venue for selling your books, as well.
And less binary thinking would be healthy for everyone … beyond the elements of style!
Many authors quake at the portion of the book proposal that asks for their platform. What’s a platform? Why is it necessary?
The two questions go hand in hand. A platform is perceived by most publishers as being necessary in order to promote and market one’s book; it’s a way of reassuring the reader that you do indeed know what you’re talking about. It’s essential for nonfiction writers, but important also for novelists, especially those whose names are not (yet!) household words.
So what can you do if you don’t currently have a platform? Don’t despair; there are a number of ways of promoting yourself and your expertise in the public eye.
- develop some short how-to articles related to your topic and submit them to local print newspapers as well as to article sites (such as Helium) on the net. Make sure that you’re not submitting the same article everywhere or you’ll run into duplicate content issues; but get a lot of them out there.
- develop and market speaking topics of interest to groups like Women in Communication (AWC), your local Association of Business Communicators (ABC), and National Speakers Association (whose members often develop books to go with their platform message).
- teach a class in your subject area at a local adult education or community college facility.
- give a free presentation at your local public or city library on your topic. Build on this exposure and give more at less-local facilities. Don’t forget schools! High schools in particular are terrific venues for presentations or workshops.
- publicize yourself. Send out press releases whenever you’re involved in anything related to your topic. Send the releases to your local newspaper.
The more your name can be associated with your topic, the more you;ll be building your platform. Make sure that you keep track of all of your articles, speaking engagements, etc. in some sort of database so that the information is at your figertips when it comes time to write about your platform.
For novelists, remember that you can (and should) build your platform on more than just your writing ability. Your books will often center around a place, an activity, an occupation, or an idea; build your platform around that more tangible information and see how it helps sell books!
Building a platform takes hard work, but its rewards are myriad. Try it, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
As NPR today has a show exploring how the art world and artistic expression are dealing with the invasion and occupation of Iraq, I need to report that I’m already ahead of the curve there. Not in anything I’ve published in real life, but in an art installation in the virtual world of Second Life.
I’m already well acquainted with Second Life, as I co-write Second Seeker, a blog that reviews PG-to-R-rated places and activities in Second Life, and also co-authored chapter three of Wiley’s new book, the Official Guide to Second Life. But when my co-author, who is an artist in Second Life, approached me about collaborating on a project there, I was indecisive.
I’m used to having a lot of control in my writing. By its very nature, writing is linear: one reads from front to back, top to bottom, and the author is thus able to control how his or her words appear to the reader. What Paul was asking me to do was allow my words to float in the air as others walked through the installation — including walking through the words themselves! What that meant was that I could group pieces of the words together, but know that some people will start reading in one spot, some in another, and that all will walk through the installation in different ways.
It was one incredible challenge. Yet I was ready to do something. I’d become first tired of and then angry with people telling me to not take politics so personally — the political is always personal. So I wrote something that expressed my pain … and could be read with different starting-points.
And the political is always
personal.
And God bless America
isn’t anywhere in
the Bible.
Paul — or PleaseWakeMeUp Idler, as he is known in Second Life — created an incredible build with my words as a starting-point. In one space, visitors are walking through films of red, causing one reviewer to call them a “fog of blood.” In another, faces of Iraquis follow the visitor along with the plaintive words — “Why am I dying?” Yet another space speaks of and illustrates conspicuous consumption, the energy that drives acquisition and aggression. One illustration shows Americans clutching Bibles and guns; on the flip side is an Iraqui clutching the Koran and a gun. Finally, one section of the installation requires one to confront the names of American military dead — and the names of Iraqui civilians dead.
As one reviewer notes,
I didn’t know what to expect, but the wall of text that greeted me - names, ranks, ages, dates, places of death, sickened me. I could have known these people. Some were so young. Some of the notes left me ill. “body found near…”, “Baghdad?”, “checkpoint on outskirts of…”, “road between…”, “throat slit”, “Mother of”, “Son of”, “Sister of”, “Father of”.
What are these children, mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers doing now? Now that their loved ones have been taken for nothing more than senseless greed?
The installation — called Political is Personal — will be available for viewing in Second Life until the end of March. Come make yourself an avatar in Second Life and visit it. It’s so far beyond the elements of style that I’m not even going to use that catchphrase here today.
