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.

The recent news that John Edgar Wideman is self-publishing his latest book, Briefs, Stories for the Palm of the Mind, is just the latest in a developing trend that is seeing the stigma associated with self-publishing going away. As today’s LA Times puts it, “self-publishing tends to be seen as the final recourse for those whose work isn’t good enough for a regular publisher.” Wideman’s decision, along with similar recent decisions by other authors, signals a possible change in the way self-publishing is viewed.

Wideman lists, among his reasons for deciding to self-publish his latest book with lulu.com, a desire for increased creative control over his final work. Per a recent Publisher’s Weekly piece, he wants to be more “in charge.” Wideman was also driven to self-publishing by what he typifies as the “blockbuster syndrome,” a syndrome affecting publishing and, arguably, all media industries. There is considerable pressure on publishers and other media industry players to concentrate financial and marketing resources on projects with the highest potential for a substantial payoff. As a result, smaller projects and works with less apparent commercial viability suffer from reduced attention and support. “The publishers  weren’t the bad guys,” the LA Times quotes Wideman saying, “it was just the kind of nature of things. But I felt frustrated by that.”

The self-publishing phenomenon is mirrored in most other commercial media industries. The music industry has seen the rise of low- and no-budget recording artists, making use of inexpensive and/or free tools such as Apple’s Garage Band to produce original work. Similarly, the film industry has been greatly impacted by the advent of cheap digital video and digital editing products. The phenomenal success of films such as 2007’s Paranormal Activity, which was produced for an estimated $15,000 and ended up grossing over $190 million, would not have been possible without modern production tools (and it’s a legitimately excellent horror movie to boot!).

The similarities with the publishing industry are clear. While the tools used to create an original work are and have always been inexpensive (one needs only a typewriter and an idea, in theory), the means by which one can deliver work to the masses have, for the better part of history, represented a significant barrier to entry. And while publishers will likely always play an important role in the marketing and distribution of a printed work, the advent of services such as lulu.com, eBooks and other digital distribution paradigms greatly reduces the barrier to entry for anyone wishing to publish a given work.

That said, self-publishing remains something more viable for established authors such as Wideman – just as inexpensive digital distribution of music represents a much greater retail boon to established music artists such as U2 than it does for your friend playing around with Garageband. Anybody can self-publish a book, but it still almost always requires the experience and resources of a publisher to help develop an audience and deliver that book to that audience. However, the fact that the barrier to entry for someone wishing to publish and distribute a given work has lowered is a significant development, and if recent history in other media industries holds true in publishing, this could prove to be an interesting and potentially profitable time to be an undiscovered author.

The Anne Frank Museum has posted video of 13-year-old Anne on YouTube. The 20-second clip features the young girl for only 5 seconds or so, but it is the only existing film footage known of the diarist.