Thursday, October 31, 2013

10 Ways To Give A Great Media Interview


There are scores of tips I can share with you about giving media interviews that sell books and make an impact, but I believe if you focus on these 10 you will be ready to take on the world.

1.      Don’t mumble, whisper, ramble, go off topic, act crazy, or sound like an infomercial.

2.      Speak with energy, passion, emotion, conviction, awareness, sensitivity, humor, and confidence.

3.      Look to inform, enlighten, entertain and inspire.

4.      Know the media outlet’s demographics and speak to their needs and desires. Be relevant.

5.      Raise an idea, issue or point and back it up with a fact or statistic and a real-life example or analogy.

6.      Practice and have notes to help you get through the interview.

7.      Focus on indentifying your key points and then sharing them at every opportunity.

8.      Ask for an action step, such as giving people a reason to buy your book or go to your Web site.

9.      Go out on a limb -- you have little to lose. You don’t score points for being conservative or reserved. You need to be on the offensive, seizing every opportunity to score a knock out. Act out of a sense of urgency, desperation, and even fear.

10.  Show the benefits of your message. Paint a picture of how you offer a resolution to someone’s problem. You need to create an enemy that only you can defeat.

The media loves a good personality, controversy, news, shock, extremes, oddities and anything that makes you ask questions. Be the guest or interview subject that makes things exciting and amusing.

A media interview is your chance to shine. Say something memorable and people will not only remember it, they will share it, and act on it. Say the norm, the typical, or what everyone else says or expects you to say, and you really say nothing.

An interview with the media is your chance to make an impression, not play it safe. You can’t be defensive or protective. You’ll need to feel the burden of saying something witty, interesting, unusual, or news-worthy, because the truth is you need to move people to buy into your message. You need to tease them into wanting to know more, and to invite them to your world.

Good Luck!

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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

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Is Publishing World Scarier Than Halloween?


Halloween is one of those days where we can step away from who we are—or at least the public persona of who we’ve been—and become who we’d like to be, or perhaps really are.

You don’t have to worry about what people will think of you on this universal dress-up day.  You want to dress like a slut, pimp, or crazed killer?  Be my guest.  Any secret fetish can play itself out.  Boys, strap on your dresses, and girls, put on the football pads.  Unleash your opposite lifestyle.  This is your moment to be whomever you want to be—and not take any responsibility for your actions.

So what would the struggling writer go as, or the overworked publishing editor, or the under-resourced publishing publicist, or the time-challenged literary agent?  No one is wearing costumes to depict the writer, the publishing executive, or the agent.  How come?

And those who wear those costumes on a daily basis want to be someone else, but who or what shall they be?

I guess if you work in an industry of words or ideas the opposite of that is to embrace the physical and brutish side of yourself.  We may feel like the superhero for 364 days of the year.  Time to play the villain and walk on the dark side.

Writers become someone else whenever they write a book.  If they pen fiction, they become their characters and escape to a world of fantasy.  If they bang out non-fiction they take over the persona of being an expert at something. They use their imagination to create something that is not there, spending as much time to see possibilities than they do in living in reality.  For writers, Halloween is just another day to be someone they’re not, only this time they get to manifest their identity into a physical form.

Perhaps this year people should dress up as a thing, rather than a person, for we are fast becoming our things, especially our technology devices.  You might as well go as an ipad, a smartphone, or a DVR, because we spend more time with these things than we do with other people.  Maybe we should attach a screen to our chest and let it play our blog, video, book cover or whatever it is that we spend hours on.  We’ve become a hybrid of human and machine.  We are not vampires and witches or whores and ax murderers—we are streaming bits of data that get pushed from one screen to another.

Maybe our day-to-day costumes are getting harder and harder to separate from our bodies and our souls.  We already don’t know the boundary between work and home or digital and physical.  One day, Halloween will arrive, and we won’t be able to put on another costume because the one we wear all day and night is getting harder to take off.

Authors have great visions and fantasies but only express half of them in their books.  Even those who write of crazy, exciting things only reveal part of who they really are.  We all wear masks and Halloween is no different, except maybe we are truer on October 31 about our base desires than we are on any other day.


I think there should be a day without masks, machines, or clothes.  We should all walk around naked for 24 hours.  Let it all hang out and have nature take its course.  We are animals deep down inside and we can’t dress up who we really are.  Writers try to tear down walls and expose truths, and many succeed in doing so, but we’re still far off from each of us living life the way we really want to.

On this Halloween, don’t pretend to be something you’re not.  Become who you really are.   That might just be the scariest thought of all.

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Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer, Media Connect, 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

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Authors & Publishers Need An Airport Wing


Is a monopoly the only way for a company to succeed at selling its product?

I was at the airport recently. I wanted to buy gum and to my dismay I found there was only one brand available. All the stores sold the same gum. It wasn’t a brand I even recognized. No competition yields no choice. Worse, no competition left them to charge what they wanted -- which was twice the price gum normally goes for. I paid over $3.50 for nine chiclet-sized pieces of no-name gum.

Of course I had the choice of not buying but that wasn’t really an option, given my breath demanded mint gum and my ears for the plane required gum-chewing jaw movement. So I bought it, but I felt angry that an entire airport created a monopoly that doesn’t exist in the real world.

So maybe book publishers and authors need to find such monopolistic situations and exploit them. Where can you be a favored or preferred vendor? How can you get your title sold while the retailer doesn’t offer your competition for sale?

The closest thing to a monopoly in publishing is Amazon but in this case, the process works against authors. Instead of Amazon charging above or at market rates for books it has undercut the market to charge the least, leaving fewer profits for authors and publishers.

Perhaps authors and publishers need to package books with another product, service, event or opportunity so that a more valuable exclusive arrangement exists. For instance, a book on relationships or romance is packaged with lipstick and sold for more, collectively,  than either product would get separately.

We should learn from what happens at airports, concert arenas, sporting events, highway rest stops, and conventions. Whenever you can create an environment of exclusivity you can charge more and give less.

My inferior gum is losing its flavor as I write this. It may have left a bad taste in my mouth, but it opened my eyes to seek out new exclusive arrangements. The only way to charge what you’re worth is to exclude the competition.

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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

Monday, October 28, 2013

A Tale of Two Publishing Worlds



I was asked a question the other day about having advice for those looking to jump from the digital world to the offline world, in terms of creating and marketing a physical book. That question would not have been asked seven or eight years ago, and now it has relevance. Just as some struggle to go from a print book/traditional media approach to e-book/online media, we now have people who find the world of touch to be a challenging one.

There should not be a barrier between the online and physical worlds. We have to work in both and hybridize our efforts. If you don’t have a holistic approach to publishing and publicity you will surely lose out. The key is to find a balance, just as one would diversity their wealth portfolio. No one puts all of their eggs in one basket. Do you?

No doubt, you will be stronger in one area over another. One feels more familiar, more comfortable. One feels like English to you, the other Arabic. It’s only natural that you’ve built up a muscle in one area, and thus have ignored the rest of the body, but you need to improve your weakest parts as much as strengthening your strongest ones.

Life is about balance and finding a way to be inclusive in your approach to it. When it comes to publishing, you can’t dismiss or ignore online or physical, any more than you can have an imbalance between work and play, mind and body, society, and individual, nature and synthetics, people and animals, walking and driving, art and reality, or robots and humanity. Get the idea? 

Even things that seem like opposites -- entertainment vs. reality, dreams vs. living, learning vs. teaching, or love vs. hate need a balance. It’s not 50-50. Maybe it’s 90-10 in certain cases, but you need to strike a balance. 

Dip into other worlds in order to live a full life.

The Internet is the Fifth Estate (traditional news media, legislative, executive branch, judicial, and now digital) or a sixth sense (touch, taste, hear, see, smell, virtual). Online holds a growing number of opportunities to publish, market, advertise, promote, brand, and sell books. One can’t succeed without getting online media coverage, whether it is from bloggers, reviewers, Web sites, or social media such as Twitter and Facebook.

Conversely, those who don’t publish in print, dismiss 86% of the marketplace in terms of the amount of money earned from book sales. Further, to not approach traditional media, such as radio, print, and TV, is to handicap the possibility of breaking through the clutter.

The solution? Play on both campuses -- develop smart, cost-effective tactics to excel in both areas.

We live in a world of collaboration. Though this is a a time and an era where one’s sense of self and ego may be at an all-time high, due to the technological advances that permit one to create and promote a brand, our best chance of success rests on our ability to work with others and to exploit their resources and connections. We are not islands onto ourselves. We are not isolationists. The formula for victory is to give to  others whom you hope will give back to you.

You’ll need all the tools you can get your hands on. The online world is one piece of the puzzle.

The physical world is another. Wed the two and you’ll feel whole.

I can’t imagine a life of voyeurism and zero participation. Nor can I imagine a life of doing without thinking and analyzing. We need to strike a balance between our different worlds and find a path to publishing bliss. There’s no one road that will lead any of us there, but a road that’s not inclusive of our digital and physical worlds is one littered with gaping potholes.

One world, many approaches. Play both sides of the fence, and soon you’ll tear that wall down.

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Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer, Media Connect, 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

Will You Be Responsible for Killing Publishing?


I recently blogged about how the Netflix model will kill book publishing and unfortunately, not enough readers agreed with me.  I must have failed to somehow state what should be obvious: such monthly discount programs are the cheese on a very deadly mouse trap.

When someone says go buy all of the dresses or cups of coffee or bottles of wine that you want for the price equivalency of just one of those items, you’d understand how the industries could survive, right?  Answer: They couldn’t.

Books are no different.

Even Netflix is not a good analogy.  It recycles content for the most part.  For instance, Netflix doesn’t have anything new (except for one or two original series).  It shows a movie that already was shown somewhere else.  Further, that movie got to make money by playing in theaters or being seen on commercial TV.  But when you bundle masses of books and tell readers to go ahead and take all of them for a fraction of their cover price, you create an impoverished industry.

So do I think it’s wrong for competing forces to discount its product or service?  Absolutely not. 

Many businesses will offer deals, such as these:

All-you-can eat breakfast buffets are still popular in Las Vegas.  One may wonder why someone would take a loss on a meal.  Well, it’s simple.  It’s called a loss leader.  They hope their loss will lead you to them.  They hope you’ll end up staying at the hotel housing the restaurant.  Or even better, that you’ll gamble there.  They hope the great lure of a free meal will secure word-of-mouth advertising.  In the end, they make a nice profit.

Amazon will sell e-books for peanuts because it just wants you to buy their e-device/tablet AND to use that to shop for other, higher ticket items.  It also wants to juice its stock price and consumers have a liking towards a company that charges pennies for things others charge the market value for.  Amazon wins.

When restaurants and businesses use Groupon to get new customers, it pays a price for it.  Usually, the business sells a full-price item to Groupon for 75% off and the consumer saves 50%.  The business usually breaks even or maybe takes a small loss-but it uses this to introduce its products, services or food to new customers—or to win back old ones that had not visited in a while.  The business wins in the long run.

So, as you can see, many businesses benefit from their discounted pricing arrangements.  But in the world of book publishing, words by the pound is an industry-destroyer.

Pandora or Spotify or Netflix may or may not pay-off for the music and film industries, but a monthly book-reading fee is a doomsday device for the book world.

Why?

·         Book stores lose business and will then go out of business.
·         Printed books get snubbed for the preferential e-pricing, this speeding up the extinction of print.
·         Publishers lose because their profits become capped—and then they dwindle.
·         Authors lose because their royalties take a hit.

The problem is that consumers feel like they win when a bunch of discounted services fight each other and offer the most books at the lowest price.  And, as readers, they do win—if you judge victory purely by economics.  They lose when the quality of books suffer.  They lose when publishers go under or when authors start writing fewer books.  They lose when they hurt the creative arts industry that they love.

Some may say that the book industry started this model many decades ago when it had Book-of-the-Month Club.  But the comparison falls short.

The club deal was temporary—you get a few books (not all you can eat) for a limited time for a few pennies—but then the full-price kicks in and consumers actually end up overpaying.  The book selection is very limited and often they are not brand new titles.  Today, subscription services are looking to start the show. 

Safari Books Online has been successful for the past dozen years selling business and technology books, a more specialized area, via subscription.  It has a number of tiered plans starting at $28/month.  They have a catalog of 32,000 books.  They may be okay, but what do you do with Oyster and its 100,000 trade books, where users have unlimited access for a paltry $9.95/month—or the equivalent of two trips to Starbucks.

Scribd tops that with a $9/month offering its tens of thousands of books—unlimited access.  The selection, for now, includes Harper Collins' backlist plus indie house titles.

E-Reatah offers 90,000 titles but thankfully limits use to two books per month, depending on the plan.  It has tiered plans starting at $15/month.  They still threaten the written word economy, but offend me the least.

The thing I hate more than these give-it-all-away plans is authors and publishers literally giving books away.  Too many are giving away free downloads of  entire books, desperately hoping they will find new readers who will love a discovered author so much that they will suddenly buy their books.

It works, at times, exactly as they hoped.  But the bigger industry issue is that we are training consumers to look for FREE books or to feed off these minimally-priced monthly plans.  By doing so we have gotten consumers used to paying little or nothing for a book.  The industry is suffering from deflation, and putting itself in line for a book depression.

The library is the great economic equalizer.  If you’re poor or on a limited income, use the library to gain access to books.  I love the library.  But the marketplace mustn’t turn itself into a bazaar or a swapshop flea market.

What it comes down to is this:

1.      The monthly pricing plans take away from individual book sales and instead groups books together—good and bad, old and new.

2.      It takes away from publisher and author identities.

3.      It reduces how we see books -- they will be commoditized.

4.      It will limit price growth for single books.

5.      It will be the final nail to B&N and many bookstores.

6.      It will reduce the quality of books produced. It will lead to a decrease in the number of titles published. It will cause publishers to shut down. It will lead to fewer authors getting published.

7.      These unlimited plans—coupled with free books—will not allow any time for those who may want to buy a book not on the plan.  They simply lack mind capacity or time of day to read any more.

It’s bad enough Amazon undercuts the entire industry but the real bomb would be to allow the Netflixation of the book industry to soar.

Any questions?  Any doubts?  I implore the major publishers to avoid participating in their own demise.  If you truly love books and hold the written word n high regard, you will not support a pricing plan that makes books irrelevant.

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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

Sunday, October 27, 2013

Time, Digital & Money Smack Publishers



USA Today/Bookish recently conducted a survey about America’s reading habits. The big statistic buried in the research is this:

51% said the number one reason they don’t read more books is a lack of time.

The next big stat:
40% of adults own an e-reader or tablet.

Indeed, the biggest influences on the industry are:
1)      Price: Books are so cheap or free, that few have time to buy more books.
2)      Digital: More people have devices and more are buying e-books, which are lower-priced.
3)      Youth: The younger generation doesn’t know what paper is, compared to older generations. 60% of college students surveyed have a tablet/e-reader

However, the good news is that e-reading individuals say they read more books than they used to. Still, they are not spending as much on e-books as they would have for fewer print books.

Perhaps the French have a solution?

France wants to pass a law that would force online booksellers to sell at higher prices than brick and mortar stores. How does it enforce such a law? It would ban any bookseller from applying government-regulated discounts to the prices of books that are shipped to readers. Sellers would only be able to mark down the cost of shipping.

France isn’t doing this because it loves printed books, but because it wants to keep tax-paying stores in business and to keep American-based companies, such as Amazon, from influencing its people.

Politics or tax revenue aside, is such a plan the right thing to do? Does publishing now need the help of government to save it? The opposite has happened in the US, when the government here forced Apple and others not to work with publishers on setting e-book pricing. The result is book prices are plummeting here. Soon, the “free economy” will truly be “free,” as in books will become nearly worthless.

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Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer, Media Connect, 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

Saturday, October 26, 2013

Are You A Media Outlet?


Are you a media outlet if you:

-Buy radio airtime and create a show?
-Write a blog?
-Tweet news reports?
-Publish a newsletter?
-Regularly air podcasts on YouTube?

Maybe

Times have changed.  We tend to think of a media outlet as something traditional:

-A radio news program or talk show
-A TV news program or talk show
-A daily newspaper
-A magazine published weekly or monthly

We also have expanded to online media, including:
-The dot com side of a traditional media outlet
-A high-traffic news site like the Huffington Post
-Influential blogs

But often it’s not the format that is important, but rather the size of the media outlet.  Further, is the outlet unbiased or fair?  Is it reporting news or merely issuing opinions about it? Does it interview experts, report on the news, and practice journalistic standards?

Maybe in today’s ideal world we each act as a news outlet, sharing with tribes of people, who share with their network of connections, who share with others, and so on and so on.

As the old-time media outlets die out, downsize, and dilute their influence, new media outlets rise up.  The world has increased its ability to communicate, even if it seems like it transmits less news.

Are you a media outlet?  What responsibility goes with that?  What are you obligated to do or say—or not do or say?  Can you be seen as a journalist—or are you really not one at all?

It’s hard to find useful, accurate, truthful, and comprehensive information from any one single source.  Due to a lack of training, standards, ethics, resources, and fairness, few can step up to the plate and even do a tenth of what The New York Times or Associated Press does.  Instead, we have a collection of individuals who editorialize the news, commenting only on what others report.  At best, they are giving analysis, but in reality, they are just sharing biased opinions on matters that require an educated journalist to delve into.

But when it comes to promoting your book, see everyone as a media outlet.  Your benchmark can be low.  You just need to reach a certain number of people who in turn can reach and influence a certain number of people.  We want to sell books, brand ourselves, and influence minds with our messages.  No media outlet is too small or too unprofessional to approach.

Because there is so much media out there (it seems like everyone is a blogger), we must work harder and smarter to gather up as many outlets as possible.  The one who gets his message heard by more people wins.

In the end, it doesn’t matter what we define a media outlet to be.  It doesn’t matter if your book is reviewed or you’re interviewed or you write a guest post or an op-ed.  It doesn’t matter if your message is heard, read, or viewed.  It doesn’t matter if it is consumed at home or on the road, day or night, through a device, a piece of paper, or in person.  All that counts is a simple formula:

How many people can you reach and how well did you influence them?

The media marketplace is no longer centralized, no longer restricted to a lively few.  But we didn’t get rid of the gatekeepers.  Every day we need to convince someone to share our message with others.  Maybe one day they’ll come to you, asking for coverage on your Facebook page or blog, for you are the media, too.

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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