Friday, November 1, 2013

Book PR Trends


There are always trends that emerge in book publicity. The key is to keep up with them and to know when there’s a tipping point that demands something move from merely being on your radar to being your bullseye.

Book PR trends come from a few areas. Certainly, a book promoter needs to be aware of changes and trends in book publishing, book marketing, the news media, and technology.

The trends that stick out to me are the following:

·         More books are self-published then traditionally published.

·         More books are being published today than yesterday.

·         Book prices have been falling.

·         EBooks are growing at a slower pace than in recent years.

·         The U.S. population continues to grow and even with declining test scores, colleges continue to turn out record numbers of graduates each year.

·         There is more free content available today than ever before -- but less than tomorrow.

·         More content is re-circulating and competing with new content.

·         The viewership, readership, and listenership are down at every single media outlet from three years ago with the exception of a few outlets in radio, TV, or print.

·         The words included in Webster’s Dictionary grow every time the editors publish a new edition, so our language is growing along with our inventions.

·         More things compete with book readers for their attention from TV, music, and movies, to on-demand videos, webinars, seminars, podcasts, streaming video, chat rooms, Skype, email, and social media networking.

·         Here’s one trend that won’t change: We only have 24 hours in a day to read, write, promote, consume, experiment, sleep, eat, work, and do everything else humans tend to do. Soon we will run out of time to do all of the things we used to do.

·        The pre-launch is probably the biggest trend these days. Months and months before a book comes out, the author has to already have planted seeds for growth. For instance, your platform has to be running- Web site, blog, social media, and networking, contacting certain media, researching groups, list-building, and positioning yourself so that come publication date, you have thousands of sales already lined up.

·         Lastly, don’t follow every trend. Who knows how long they will last. Jump into what’s established, then fast-growing, and then what’s experimental. For instance, don’t dismiss Twitter as a fad, but don’t worry if you are not as active on Google as you are on Facebook.

Trends develop based on a need for something and then some entity comes up with a solution and people gravitate towards it, so what will trend next? My guess is technology will still drive the many trends influencing book publicity, but I think it’s safe to say the trend that people will continue to buy, sell, and write books looks strong for years to come.

THE CHOICES WE MAKE


A few years  ago I read 54 pages into a book called Choices: Manage Your Choices and You Will Manage Your Life!-Discover Your 100 Most Important Life Choices.

“Even school children who have reached the age of reason seem to know the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, and what works and what doesn’t. And it also seems that even when they should be able to exercise free will. They-just as we did when we were their age- make choice after choice that is wrong, even when they clearly know better.

“We all suffer from the same dilemma. Think of some of the things that you have done against your better judgment-when you knew better. Why do we do it?

“Why do we argue when we shouldn’t, show up late for work morning after morning, eat or drink too much of the wrong thing, smoke, fail to exercise, drive too fast, put things off even when we know they have to be done, spend too much, marry the wrong mate, knowingly hurt someone else when we could avoid it, and put up with a bad job instead of making a change? Often we ignore responsibilities, fail to spend enough time with our kids, tell lies, get out of school and never go back, let the car run out of gas, let someone bother us daily at work, let ourselves get depressed when we don’t have to, not study for tests, or a thousand or so other things that we do or do not do even when we know better.

“If we have free will, why aren’t we using it?! After years of pondering this important question- a question that even philosophers have argued about through the ages- the answer finally became unquestionably clear to me: the free will we are given is stopped by the programs we receive.

“What we suspected is true. Everyone does have free will. Most of us do know right from wrong. But it is our past programming, both from others and from our own harmful Self-Talk, that stops us from exercising our free will.”


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Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer, the nation’s largest book promoter. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2013

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