Self-Organizing Man

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time thinking about publishing and marketing my-anthology-in-the-making, Self-Organizing Men.

So I’m up at 2:30 this morning, out of bed at 4:00, sitting on the couch, with my cat Mr. Jack purring away on my lap, when I’m felled by an epiphany ~ getting published is easy.  It’s the marketing that’s hard and costs the most money.

So this get’s me to thinking and thinking and thinking and then I’m reading my bloglines subs and I find that the incomparable Seth Godin blogs about his advice for authors wanting to publish their first non-fiction book.

Seth Godin is the marketing genius, guru of the blogosphere.  He has published several books in an e-format and made them available for free. 

Yes, at no charge to you the reader, Seth has made a singular name for himself.  His book Unleashing the Ideavirus has been downloaded and passed more than 2,000,000 times. His blog is one of the most popular around.

Of his 5 big ideas number 3 resonated with me:

There is no such thing as effective book promotion by a book publisher.
This isn’t true, of course. Harry Potter gets promoted. So did Freakonomics. But out of the 75,000 titles published last year in the US alone, I figure 100 were effectively promoted by the publishers. This leaves a pretty big gap.

This gap is either unfilled, in which case the book fails, or it is filled by the author. Here’s the thing: publishing a book is really nothing but a socially acceptable opportunity to promote yourself and your ideas far and wide and often.

If you don’t promote it, no one will. If you don’t have a better strategy than, "Let’s get on Oprah" you should stop now. If you don’t have an asset already–a permission base of thousands or tens of thousands of people, a popular blog, thousands of employees, a personal relationship with Willard Scott… then it’s too late to start building that asset once you start working on a book.

I have quite a bit of work to do, and may be turning to the inimitable Authentic Eccentric with her fab marketing ideas and clients like Transcending Gender and Wil Dunham.

Good stuff, and very exciting!