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August 05, 2005
More on the marketing world is flat
"For almost every writer, the number of sales they lose because people never hear of their book is far larger than the sales they'd lose because people can get it for free online," Doctorow says. "The biggest threat we face isn't piracy, it's obscurity."
-- Author Cory Doctorow, quoted in USA Today
Take the words "writer" and "book" and substitute them with your job and associated product.
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As usual, Cory has it right.
Giving something away seems to be the price of exposure on the net, as Cory points out. Whether the give-away has to be the final product remains to be seen (I don't think it's the answer), but what can be sufficient is a constant flow of quality information, showcasing the final product.
One of the things we've done initially (the real marketing campaign hasn't begun yet) to showcase Warren's 2006 book ("The Best Damn Sales Book Ever: The 16 Rock-Solid Rules of Successful Salespeople") is devote podcasts to it, as well as a range of articles, which will be published in the coming months to showcase "the sixteen rules." In fact our most popular podcast out of 60+ shows is "the sixteen rules," so we've been able to build interest in a subtle, yet effective way.
So what's changed here, and I think everyone is in agreement, is not necessarily book selling or the essence of the format itself, but how the powerful tools of web syndication will prove to be a consistently fruitful COMPLEMENT to conventional book exposure.
What Cory Doctorow and Lawrence Lessig have done, and what Shel Israel and Robert Scoble are currently doing, are bold and calculated bets of quickly feeding all of their content into the fast-moving idea bloodstream of the Internet.
I love the boldness of their bets, which generates word of mouth in and of itself.
