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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