Seth Godin posted two typically brief and brilliant updates to his blog this week, one of which explicitly mentions books, while the other seems to continue in a similar vein to the first post. Both posts are recommended reading for anybody involved in attempting to market a product in any space, doubly so for anyone in the digital space, and trebly so for anyone marketing a work of media such as a book.
The gist of the two posts is fairly simple. First, recognize that your book doesn’t appeal to everyone, and leverage that recognition. Unless you are sitting on the next Harry Potter series, you need to know who your reader is, and you need to communicate to that reader in the method and manner that reader is most likely to respond to. Don’t make the mistake of attempting to communicate with an inappropriately broad audience. In the digital realm, and particularly in social media, the quality of your audience is vastly more important than sheer quantity. And second, recognize that quality is important because your core audience is the audience that will coalesce around your message and your work. As Godin puts it “tribes” don’t form around the “status quo.”
Godin’s posts gel well with the Long Tail theory, a statistical theorem given modern business context in Chris Anderson’s excellent The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. The Long Tail theorem posits that the majority of the population isn’t defined by the most popular characteristic of that population. In business terms, this essentially means that while any given Harry Potter book rules the charts on release, the majority of the population is actually not purchasing that Harry Potter book and is, in fact, purchasing an almost infinitely wide variety of other books.
How does this gel with Godin’s posts and with your efforts to engage with readers and sell more of your books? Simple. Regardless of the size of your core audience, those are the people you should be focusing on. Focus on your slice of the long tail. Godin’s second post argues that “people don’t coalesce into active and vibrant tribes based on the status quo,” that the “only vibrant tribes are the ones closer to the edges.” Translation for an author? By focusing on your slice of the long tail, you’ll be reaching the readers who are most likely to respond sharply to your message and your work. These are the readers who can do your marketing for you, by evangelizing your work. These are the readers who can find new readers. They can do more to broaden your slice than almost anything else.
This is, in essence, the power of social media for digital marketers. You should look at your social media communication less as promotion and more as a way to energize your base audience into doing your promotion for you.
Authors… What do Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, FiledBy, Flickr, Ning, Friendster, Flixster, and hi5 have in common? Well, other than the fact that you may not have a clue what they are or how to use them AND that your publicist, agent and publisher are all consistently reminding you that you’re supposed to be using them to “connect,” “promote” and “sell” yourself and your books.
