Category: Publishing

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Ethics in Government, Media Ethics, media-general, Politics, propaganda, Psychology, Publishing, Sexuality and Gender Tagged with , , , , ,

I am asking myself two questions in the wake of Tuesday’s election results.

1. Why did so many people stay home? Why, despite a bazillion new registrations, despite enormous enthusiasm at every public appearance, despite a roster of endorsements the like of which I’ve never seen before did 13 million fewer people vote for Harris then did for Biden 4 years ago?

2. And why did 72 million people vote for a convicted felon who tells thousands of demonstrable lies, who based his entire campaign on hatred, othering, retribution, and the promise of fascism, and who was increasingly incoherent, physically exhausted, and obviously mentally unstable as the campaign went on?

I have a ton of respect for journalists. I trained to be one. But under the rubric of “journalistic objectivity” and pressure from owners who are more interested in ratings than reality, they had a lot of constraints covering this election. And thus I think at least part of the answer lies in a third question: why did the mainstream media consistently have a double standard of coverage: refusing to hold Trump accountable as they were doing first with Biden and then with Harris?

First, they went after Biden, even before his disastrous debate with Trump. “Isn’t he too old?” “What about inflation?” I even remember a shockingly biased Washington Post newsletter with a graph comparing Biden’s age at the end of a second term to Trump’s age at the beginning of one. So suddenly the three and a half year age gap looked like seven and a half years. Wtf?

And then after the debate, enormous pressure for Biden to step down. I do think he had become compromised and stepping down was the right decision. It was pretty clear within a couple of weeks that the debate was not a one-off (as it had first appeared) but a pattern that was emerging more frequently. He wasn’t up to the job for another 4 years and to his credit, and unlike his opponent, he stepped away to make room for a younger generation.

But then came the attacks on his replacement. “Why won’t she meet with us?” “How come they aren’t going to run the primaries again?” “Why doesn’t she release policy statements?” “Does she have the gravitas to be president?”

That would have been fine if they were asking the same questions of Trump. Not only were they not pressuring him to go into details on policy, but they accepted his softball interviews in front of Trump-supporting audiences venues like Fox News as an adequate substitute for actual journalistic interviews.

More worrisome was the normalization of Trump as a legitimate candidate. Where were they when it was time to question Trump’s gravitas—or his competence? As Harris herself noted, he is “an unserious man” in a position to do serious damage. The cadre of media that was so quick to jump on every little stammer of Biden’s not only tried to paper over Trump’s increasingly incoherent and delusional speeches, even on several occasions translating the nonsense into what he might have said if he had been talking in comprehensible English. They also papered over the genuine threats to democracy in the vague policy outlines he did provide and the much more detailed proposals from the project 2025 blueprint. His lack of gravitas showed again as he lackadaisically attempted to disavow in the face of evidence that his fingerprints and those of people close to him were all over it. And Vance? Vance has so little gravitas after just two years in the Senate that he whined the one time in his debate that he was fact-checked—after making up completely false and very damaging lies about immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets, as he himself admitted later.

There wasn’t even much hand wringing when Trump skipped out on future debates after Harris wiped the floor with him in their sole formal pairing. And then he skipped out on promised interviews with real media, who acquiesced.

And there was surprisingly little examination of his character until just a few weeks before the election. Where was the focus on his 34 criminal convictions, his liability in civil court for raping and defaming, the other 60 or so criminal felony counts that didn’t get to go to trial and now probably never will, the literally tens of thousands of lies he told before, during, and since his term in office, his authoritarian tendencies, his blatant narcissism and personal cruelty, and his totally transactional view of the world in which everything has to be a way for him to make money, gain status or power, and/or build his personal brand or else he is not interested. That this sociopath was treated as a normal candidate will be a shame on the media for decades to come.

And then there is Fox! I used to be a free speech absolutist. But free speech absolutism only works when there is a common core of decency that everyone respects, some minimum standards for reporting. The filth that was spewed by their commentators, the disgusting and completely false advertisements they were airing, and the way they shielded their audience from any negative news about Trump should disqualify them from any legitimate role as press. This of course is not new and has been going on since it was founded—but it has now reached extremes and probably has a lot to do with why certain sectors of the population voted for Trump against their own interests.

I happened to be at a restaurant one night that was airing a baseball playoff on Fox. They showed one Trump commercial accusing Harris of immigration positions she has never taken and policies that did not exist. I happen to know a thing or two about immigration issues. It has been the focus of my activism since spring 2019. This ad was so blatantly false that it made me wonder why it is even legal to air it. After all, a candidate who is attacked has no way to respond. Those messages go out into the ether unchallenged, whether or not they’re based in fact. Only when the Fairness Doctrine was eliminated in the Reagan era did Fox become even possible. And maybe it’s time for real-time fact checking to be standard operating procedure for any political debate.

We don’t have room in this article to explore WHY this biased coverage happened. But unconscious OR conscious othering (ageism, racism, sexism, bias against physical disabilities such as Biden’s stutter) just might have been a factor, don’tcha think?

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By Posted on Posted in Branding, Business-general, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Networking, Publishing, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , ,

Have you been dithering about starting a blog? Blogging provides several advantages in your marketing, but a lot of people are scared off by the idea.

It’s not that hard. A no-cost tool called WordPress makes it easy.

WordPress dashboard showing the ribbon, file naming, and text-editing window
WordPress dashboard showing the ribbon, file naming, and text-editing window

WordPress is a terrific platform. I have never heard of it not working on a site, though if your host company doesn’t support it, you’d need to do a manual installation (any web designer could help you with that). Most webhosts have one-click WordPress installation in their CPanels.

You do need to know some things about WP before you set up.

  • There is WordPress.com, which is hosted on THEIR servers, and WordPress.org, where your content is hosted on YOUR server (you don’t have to own your server–let your hosting company do that). You want .ORG, so you have full control over the content and cant be held hostage over it. Neither one charges money.
  • WordPress is a very simple shell that uses “themes” to determine the look and feel. There are thousands of themes out there, some at no cost and others for a fee. Find one you like that can incorporate your company branding, but play with it to see how easy it is to work. There are some that nest text inside Java routines as one example) and I have found it’s really tough to find the place I need to be to make minor edits.
  • Editing in WordPress is really easy, assuming you picked a theme that didn’t have the issue I just described. If you turn off the blocks feature, the interface is similar to Microsoft Word or GMail . So you don’t have to learn any HTML. Instead of using angle brackets to e.g. turn your text bold and then back to regular, you just highlight the text and click the B button in the formatting ribbon. You can see that ribbon at the top of the screenshot.
  • Find and install a few key plugins: a backup program so if WP utterly collapses, you still have your content; a file-namer that gives your posts a meaningful name taken from your headline (see where it says “Permalink” on the screenshot?), probably some others.
  • WordPress updates frequently, both to add function and to beef up security. Set yours up to automatically run the updater, but remember to check every now and then to see if you need to update your plugins. Updating is just a few clicks and very intuitive.
  • You have a choice every time you post new content: a post, which goes at the top of your blog (which posts in reverse chronological order so the newest is on top) or a page, which is part of your permanent website structure and can be organized with menus, etc. Posts can also be sorted by category, so your reader can see everything you’ve put in any particular category just by clicking on the category name. I find it very worth the extra few minutes to add categories, keyword tags (which help people find your post), a picture, and an excerpt.
  • Consider having a designer set up the site to begin with, making sure they know you want a theme that’s easy to edit posts, and then posting your own content from there.
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By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, censorship, Customer Service as Marketing, Democracy, Environment, Ethics in Government, language, Media Ethics, Politics, propaganda, Publishing, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“The Post” lives up to the hype. It takes a very cerebral story and builds it into high drama, spurred by strong performances from Meryl Streep as publisher Katharine Graham) and Tom Hanks (editor Ben Bradlee).Trailers for "The Post are widely available

The overall message, about the power of the free press, and the need for the press to defend its Fist Amendment freedom, despite the whims of a paranoid and dictatorial president (Nixon, in this case—a different example today).

It tracks Daniel Ellsberg’s smuggling out massive quantities of classified documents from the Rand Corporation, where he worked, and releasing them first to the New York Times, and then to the Washington Post. The movie also dramatizes the frenetic effort throughout the newsroom to absorb the information and turn it into stories on very tight deadlines, not even knowing if the presses would run, while the Times suffered under the first pre-publication censorship of journalism in the history of the United States. Known as “The Pentagon Papers,” these documents proved that US high officials knew by the early 1960s that the war was unwinnable, and that presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon all lied to the American people about it.

And it covers the legal battle: the government’s attempt to shut them down and the papers going all the way to the Supreme Court to secure their rights. The timing of these events happened to threaten The Post’s long-awaited IPO, which adds to the drama and the sense of what’s at stake for Graham, Bradlee, and their journalists.

BTW, just as the movie gives lessons on how to survive a paranoid, media-hating president facing serious doubts about his honesty, the Nixon link above focuses on some very interesting parallels between his presidency and that of the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC. However, let’s remember the differences. Nixon had a very impressive record on the environment—I describe him as the president with America’s second-most environmentalist track record (behind Obama but ahead of both Jimmy Carter and Teddy Roosevelt) also, despite the Vietnam war, did much to break down the barriers between the US and both the Soviet Union and China.

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By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Ethics in Government, media-general, propaganda, Publishing Tagged with , ,

A reality check for Mr. Trump:

If you have a press conference, you have to let the press in to cover it. Otherwise, it’s not a press conference.

Blocking CNN, the New York Times, Politico and the Los Angeles Times from attending only serves to shred the thin slivers of credibility you have remaining. It gives the mainstream media permission to call you out for your totalitarian tendencies—or to not cover you at all. Oh, and don’t think it’s going to get in any serious reporter’s way of covering the event.

New York Times logo
New York Times logo

Here’s the New York Times article on this action, which cites a younger-and-wiser Sean Spicer last December:

In December, he told Politico that the Trump White House would never ban a news outlet. “Conservative, liberal or otherwise, I think that’s what makes a democracy a democracy versus a dictatorship,” he said.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Branding, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Networking, Publishing, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , ,
interracial couple in US flag regalia

Despite many commitments around the holidays, several client projects, and all the time-consuming organizing work I’ve been putting in since the election, I’ve been constantly, actively promoting, promoting, promoting both my personal brand and my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (published in April).

Learn more about the powerful new book Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World
Learn more about the powerful new book Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World

I will keep promoting it for a long time, but right now as its life as a “new” book (current-year copyright) is ending, I’ve been pushing especially hard. This is some of what I’ve been up to:

  • Wrote and distributed a press release November 9 (as soon as I knew the election results) on how social entrepreneurs can still thrive under a Trump presidency
  • Wrote a letter to his campaign making the business case for keeping the Paris climate accord (no answer from his people, but I modified it slightly and got it published on GreenBiz.com)
  • Arranged to submit a guest blog and started writing it
  • Got myself cited/quoted in at least five other published articles in November and December, including Entrepreneur, Realtor.com, and Huffington Post—most of these because I actively go after journalists looking for story sources; I pitched 32 journalists in December and 20 (a more typical number) in November
  • Secured two new reviews and one minor award (the first for this book—making it the 7th of my 10 books to win at least one award and/or be republished in a foreign country)
  • Scheduled interviews on a telesummit and four more podcasts in the next few weeks
  • Continued fleshing out my role as co-host of a new weekly radio/podcast show, which I expect to get rolling in the spring
  • Applied for several speaking gigs and am on the shortlist for at least two
  • Expanded my personal network with several get-acquainted calls
  • Finished the 3rd (and likely final) draft of a corporate sponsorship proposal I’ve been working on all fall, and began looking for a researcher to generate the email addresses I need to distribute it to about 200 companies mentioned favorably in Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World

 

And how have you been building your career this holiday season?

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By Posted on Posted in Business-general, Customer Service as Marketing, General Commentary, Publishing, Transparency vs. Secrecy, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , ,

Hyperion Contact Us page

Dear Hyperion Books:

All I wanted to do was to send you a review copy request so I could review “Stirring It Up” by Stonyfield Farm founder Gary Hirshberg. I review books on socially and environmentally conscious business.

I went to your contact page expecting to find a press contact. But all that’s there is how to write to you if I want to contact one of your authors directly. There’s no way to contact ANY of your departments, except a few social media links.

Oh yes, and from my desktop computer, your Twitter page link goes to one spammy tweet from last November that I don’t think is yours. Oddly, on my laptop, it goes to a no-such-account page, as does your Facebook link.

I even went to your bookseller page, where I found a link to the Disney media center–which includes media pages for lots of Disney broadcast properties but not Hyperion.

Surely, with all the resources at Disney’s disposal, you could have a person in charge of media contact for Hyperion, and you could list at least one way to contact you that actually works. There’s not even a phone number!

In the 21st century, there’s absolutely no excuse for companies to barricade themselves behind windowless fortress walls. Empowered customers don’t just get mad; they tell their 10,000 closest friends on Facebook or Youtube (“United Breaks Guitars” is up over 14 million Youtube views). If I were a paying customer with a gripe, I’d probably be buying “hyperionsucks.com” right about now.

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By Posted on Posted in Business-general, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Publishing, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , ,

This year, at Book Expo America, I interviewed Enrique Parrilla, co-founder of pentian.com, with offices in Sevilla (Seville), Madrid, and Los Angeles. Pentian marries publishing services with crowdfunding—something I don’t think the publishing world has seen before, and something that to me at least seems more attractive than the typical subsidy publishing model of most publishing services companies (which is not, typically, a good deal for the author). How it works out remains to be seen—and meanwhile, here’s what Parilla had to say about it:

The main difference between Kickstarter etc. and us is that the backers provide the funds. [Kickstarter donors[ may get a signed copy, a named character, but that’s it. We wanted to create a connection between the author and the community. A financial connection. The backers receive a percentage of sales.

Benefits to author:
Every backer becomes invested in success of the book. You get a much more viral connection with the market, you have 20, 40, 50 backers.
You make every backer a publisher, and they obtain profit from the success of the book.

You present the book proposal to us. We own the entire production chain, layout, design, marketing, production, distribution. We’re able to assess the costs of publication, and publish at a substantially lower cost. We are not getting a fee on the production. Once the sales start, we work with the net profit. But the cost of production will change from one continent to another, so it is difficult to come up with percentages on the retail price. So we take all the net profits and put them in a big bag. 50% goes to the backers, proportional to their investment. 40% goes to the author. 10% goes to the publisher.

The model is disruptive in several ways:
The percentage to the publisher is much lower because so much goes to the backers and the authors. This is sufficient, because the cost of production is covered by the fundraising campaign, and we print on demand.

Initially, when we receive a manuscript or proposal, there is an evaluation. If the thing stinks, we will offer to fundraise for professional editing services. We will come up with a budget, custom made for each proposal. If they need an illustrator, we’ll budget for that.

We will accept anything not indecent or violent. We have done fundraising books for charities, novels, children’s books. 70% fiction, 20% nonfiction, and the rest is a hodgepodge.

Unlike Kickstarter, we put a cap on the funds to be raised. We are really striving to be fair and to provide a sense of urgency. If you see a book is doing well, if you do not jump in, you may be left out. We can do additional campaigns for marketing, etc., but once we set the budget, when it’s gone, it’s gone. So you see the funding accelerating rapidly when a book hits 60-70% of its funding goal. The viral concept works really well. People start swarming out, and we don’t always understand why—but when it happens, it happens very quickly. Some books sit at 5% and don’t get funded. The investors get the full amount returned. If the author raises half, we’ll look at options like digital-only format. We’ll look at options to make it work.

Backers do not have the certainty that a book will get funded. As a publishing company, we make sure the publishing happens and the book sees the light of day.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Business-general, Publishing Tagged with , , , , , ,

Book buyers: looks like the party’s winding down. Amazon’s once-generous discounts are slowly going away, as this article in the New York Times reports.

I’ve been expecting this for years. Now that Amazon has kicked so many competitors to the ground through ruthless discounting, the laws of the market decree rising prices. This is what happens when a company gains a market share bordering on monopoly—while establishing a tech and logistics infrastructure that would be very difficult for a new competitor to match, so the likelihood of being undercut on a mass scale as they did to others is slim. Amazon has also, for many years been utterly ruthless in its dealings with other segments of the market (particularly small independent publishers, where years ago it started extracting a 55 percent discount in an industry where the normal bookstore discount had been 40 percent).

Amazon’s history is full of stuff that looks a lot like bullying. I always expected predatory pricing—coming in willing to take a short-term loss through lower prices, in order to drive competitors out of business, and then raising the prices when consumers no longer have alternatives—was part of the strategy. What made it work for them, as the Times article points out, is that…

In its 16 years as a public company, Amazon has received unique permission from Wall Street to concentrate on expanding its infrastructure, increasing revenue at the expense of profit. Stockholders have pushed Amazon shares up to a record level, even though the company makes only pocket change. Profits were always promised tomorrow.

Small publishers wonder if tomorrow is finally here, and they are the ones who will pay for it.

 

 

Publishers accepted the higher discount because:

  • They had no choice
  • Amazon does provide some services that used to require a wholesaler (and wholesalers traditionally buy at 55 percent off)
  • AND the higher discount did translate into a reader benefit: reduced prices

Now that the third reason is being eroded, it will be interesting to see if publishers rebel. However, now it’s probably too late. Amazon is the only mass retail channel that routinely deals with tiny publishers. Barnes & Noble, the last remaining competing megachannel, prefers to buy from wholesalers (yes, I know, there are exceptions). If you say goodbye to Amazon, you’d better have some non-bookstore channels in place.

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By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Entrepreneurship, media-general, Publishing Tagged with , , , ,

He doesn’t just disagree; Warren Buffett just bought 63 newspapers, including 25 daily papers. In his letter to the publishers and editors of his new properties, he lays out a rosy future for papers that focus on local news, and notes his lifelong love of newspapering, which runs in his family. He even delivered papers in Washington, DC for four years.

Like me, he sees a free press as an essential cornerstone of democracy, and he promises editiorial independence from the bean-counters. I personally have my doubts if mainstream media can regain its credibility in a world where so many media properties convey the message of their corporate masters. It will be refreshing if the papers in the Buffett group can really show their independence.

Click the link above to read his letter.

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By Posted on Posted in Blog Tour, Publishing, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , ,

Nina Amir and I have known each other online for a few years now; we finally got to meet at the BEA Bloggers conference last week in New York. But I had the post scheduled long before then, as part of Nina’s blog tour. It’s alo an example of the kind of great material you’ll find in the upcoming series of e-books I intend to pubish as part of a series called Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers.

Yes, I already have a single-volume book by that name. But as I’ve been updating and revising for the new edition, I decided it was a bit overwhelming to be just one book; there’s so much good new cool stuff on book marketing nowadays.

Nina’s expertise is blog-to-book—and interestingly both keynote talks at the BEA Bloggers day were from bloggers who had published books. And with that, I give her the floor.

—Shel


How to Write and Promote Your Book One Post at a Time
By Nina Amir

If you want to create an author’s platform, a fan base, a tribe, a community, even a movement around your book, or around the idea upon which your book is based, the most effective or inexpensive tool you can use to achieve this goal is a blog. And if you want promote that book or idea from the moment you write the first word of your manuscript, you can do this quickly and efficiently by blogging your book. Simply write, publish and promote your book one post at a time on the Internet.

With a blogged book you write your book from scratch in post-sized bits and publish them in cyberspace. In the process, you promote your work and develop a fan base for your book (and for yourself).

To blog a book and create both a successful book, one that sells later to readers and to publishers (if you desire), and successful blog, one with a large or growing blog readership, follow these eight steps.

 

  1. Choose your book topic carefully.  Make sure the topic you plan to write interests you and interests a lot of other people but also is one about which you feel passionate.
  2. Evaluate your book’s success potential. See your book through the eyes of an acquisitions editor. To do this, go through each section of a book proposal and accumulate the necessary information as an evaluation process.
  3. Angle your topic: Consider if you need to angle your book differently to make it unique in both the book store and the blogosphere.
  4. Create a content plan. A table of contents works for nonfiction. For fiction or memoir, map out your story arc or create a timeline. Include material that will not appear on your blog.
  5. Write your book in post-sized bits. Blog posts are short–250-500. Break your nonfiction chapters into many subheadings or sections. For fiction or memoir, divide your story arc and time line into vignettes or scenes.
  6. Blog 2-7 times per week. Write a short bit of your book (a post) in a word processing program to create a manuscript. Then copy and paste this into your blogging program, and publish it.
  7. Share your posts on social networks.  Include a link to your most recent blog post in your status updates on your social networks.
  8. Edit your manuscript. Take the time to revise the first draft you created, and hire a professional editor to give it a final polish.

If your blog and book stem from your sense of passion and purpose, you have the opportunity to build something larger than a blog community. You can create a movement—inspire people not only to gather around your blog and buy your book but to go out into the world and take action. In this way, your fans promote for you by sharing your blog posts and by taking on your cause.

 

About the Author

 Nina Amir, Inspiration-to-Creation Coach, inspires people to combine their purpose and passion so they Achieve More Inspired Results. She motivates both writers and non-writers to create publishable and published products, careers as authors and to achieve their goals and fulfill their purpose. She blogged her book, How to Blog a Book, Write, Publish and Promote Your Work One Post at a Time (Writer’s Digest Books), in five months. Find out more about her at www.ninaamir.com or www.copywrightcommunications.com.

 

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