There can't be many industries that have been decimated as much by the sociodigital age that we are living in than the publishing industry. Conversely, there can't be many industries that have benefited as much from it, as, wait for it, yes, the self-publishing industry! A great deal of power was taken out of the hands of the previously esteemed literary agents and their big-time fat cat publisher pals, and handed over into the hands of the people. Quite right too! The agents in particular had become a dangerous mix of too much arrogance sloshed in with an increasing laziness to hunt for new talent, and the big publishers foolishly allowed them to install themselves as the gatekeepers to the private club. What resulted was an industry only interested in what agents told them was good for them, even when rejected blockbusters like Harry Potter were staring them in the face. There are many, many other examples, but we won't go into them here. What is more important is that it is now by and large you and I, the public, who decide on the fate of a certain author and their book. We, the people, decide, not some literary snob with their head stuck up in some ivory tower of so-called "knowledge", who rejects 99% of all manuscripts they receive with no comment whatsoever.
We are Evergreen Umbrella, so no points for realizing which side of the fence we are on: we think that what has happened in publishing was an inevitable kicking down of the walls, by sheer force, and we all emerged on the other side to a new dawn and a new day. It's called progress, people, and even if there are now millions more unedited, uncensored, and unapproved books out there, it's not a problem. Why? Again, because the people decide, and if some very average author cranks out a book that the people simply adore then that alone justifies the need for such authors to have a legitimate outlet. Even better that it is one that tramples over the old gatekeepers on their way off the premises and out to retirement. They, like the big fat cats, had their day when the cream was thick and sweet, but power was being transferred, they didn't see it coming or were in denial, and they got theirs. The very way it should be!
We are Evergreen Umbrella, so no points for realizing which side of the fence we are on: we think that what has happened in publishing was an inevitable kicking down of the walls, by sheer force, and we all emerged on the other side to a new dawn and a new day. It's called progress, people, and even if there are now millions more unedited, uncensored, and unapproved books out there, it's not a problem. Why? Again, because the people decide, and if some very average author cranks out a book that the people simply adore then that alone justifies the need for such authors to have a legitimate outlet. Even better that it is one that tramples over the old gatekeepers on their way off the premises and out to retirement. They, like the big fat cats, had their day when the cream was thick and sweet, but power was being transferred, they didn't see it coming or were in denial, and they got theirs. The very way it should be!
Of course, progress rarely comes without new challenges. Perhaps the biggest one is now that authors have been given an outlet to publish their work, how the hell are they supposed to market it? It's one thing for an amateur to believe in themselves sufficiently to work on a book, but even successful authors were not the marketing force behind that success; so what to do? For the perspicacious, it was not hard to predict the arrival of a new breed: so-called self-publishing marketing "gurus" who were more than willing to offer help with preparing you a cover for your book, and a shopping list of items that must be ticked to have a chance of making it. Just like marketing of anything else, a lot of the items remain the same, and the usual acronyms and must-haves are wheeled out. Pay me to do the things that a marketing department used to take care of, and you will be a success! But like anything else, the first thing one should do is examine that person, who they are, what they have done, and how much of a marketing "guru" they truly are, in their own professional area.
The thing that always sort of surprises me is the fact that marketers and communications types are often sheep: they follow, they don't lead. It's not marketers who introduce rabid new trends and exciting tools to communicate: it's others! Marketers then slowly react, and under pressure or due to lack of oxygen even, reluctantly concede and start lecturing their clients on the power of say, social media, even when they are useless at it, or worse, have not used it at all for their own marketing. My golden rule for taking anyone seriously as a social media insider or wannabe "guru"? It's a little ageist, but nevertheless accurate. "If the hair is grey or white, it ain't trained for the fight!" Like it or not, social media is a creation of the young. The hip. The real outside-of-the-box thinkers.
The aging marketing executives who push it to your company today are doing so only because they know they have to, and many don't have the first idea of how it is supposed to be effectively and correctly utilized, and feel and look awkward using it. In fact, most resort to doing what I suppose many do when facing the need to produce but with no insight or talent to do so: they copy! It is social media after all, it's in the public domain already, so I can just steal ideas of one or two people who do it very well, and I am home free! Right? For today's needs, maybe, but beyond that, wrong! It can be spotted really easily, and by so doing, all they really are doing is advertising how good the other people are, while splashing in the water, struggling, in copycat mode, making the others look even hotter.
The thing that always sort of surprises me is the fact that marketers and communications types are often sheep: they follow, they don't lead. It's not marketers who introduce rabid new trends and exciting tools to communicate: it's others! Marketers then slowly react, and under pressure or due to lack of oxygen even, reluctantly concede and start lecturing their clients on the power of say, social media, even when they are useless at it, or worse, have not used it at all for their own marketing. My golden rule for taking anyone seriously as a social media insider or wannabe "guru"? It's a little ageist, but nevertheless accurate. "If the hair is grey or white, it ain't trained for the fight!" Like it or not, social media is a creation of the young. The hip. The real outside-of-the-box thinkers.
The aging marketing executives who push it to your company today are doing so only because they know they have to, and many don't have the first idea of how it is supposed to be effectively and correctly utilized, and feel and look awkward using it. In fact, most resort to doing what I suppose many do when facing the need to produce but with no insight or talent to do so: they copy! It is social media after all, it's in the public domain already, so I can just steal ideas of one or two people who do it very well, and I am home free! Right? For today's needs, maybe, but beyond that, wrong! It can be spotted really easily, and by so doing, all they really are doing is advertising how good the other people are, while splashing in the water, struggling, in copycat mode, making the others look even hotter.
But just as Amazon and other self-publishing portals have saved us from the ineptness of the literary agent and their rich pals, I really feel that we are often saved at the marketing end by those lovely folks at Google. I am today referencing a currently hot topic, which is: "to SEO or use Social Media"? So many folks got fooled by marketing people yelling S-E-O at them, and demanding a price for installing it onto their websites, when it was way less complicated than the person selling it to them even knew it was! We at EU did our own "SEO-light", for free, and did see the impact of having a keen eye on it, tweaking our metadata and keywords and page indexing etc. At the same time, and this is harder to fake, we focused way more heavily on that dreaded lovely word: CONTENT. It was and is our belief that the Google spiders reward great content more than good SEO! Of course they should! SEO only came into vogue anyway, due to the fact that Google started detecting people injecting unnatural keyword-laden content onto sites to improve indexing and referencing, so then SEO became the new way to load your site for better results on search. But Google is always a step ahead, and Panda/Penguin have made content more vital than ever, and unquestionably, stellar social media content makes a huge contribution to your overall ratings and impact. Evergreen Umbrella has made huge progress by combining SEO-light, for free, instigating a strong social media presence, for free, and by caring for and taking the time to produce solid, intellectually-stimulating yet fun and lively content, which also came for free. It's a dream come true for those starting out!
To all of our self-publishing colleagues, and also to those working in different business areas, think long and hard before believing any nonsense from the "gurus" about SEO, today. All they are doing is trying to squeeze some last juice out of the can, and exploiting your apparent "ignorance". In many ways, in my opinion, social media activity IS the new SEO, especially in a B2C environment. I am not saying that SEO might not still have a place for B2B, but even then, social media can still be more effective if used well. Using just social media, Evergreen Umbrella went from being barely detectable on Google search to being listed as the top eight results on the first page of a Google search today. For free. You just gotta love those Penguins, and their hardworking content-devouring little spiders! Rave on, Google, rave on!
Do it yourself, people, and reap the rewards. The tools are all out there! You can produce your own website for next-to-nothing, tweak it, maintain it, inject new content and do a little "SEO-light" on it. Get onto Facebook and Twitter and your blog. Communicate! The spiders will do the rest, honest! Stay one step ahead of the marketers, who are marketing to you, when they try to persuade you with this acronym or that one. They had little choice, because most of them knew precious little about how to use social media, so they had to market SEO as their "insight". After being told that they had to use it by others, I might add! If their marketing or communications degrees did not come in the last ten years or so, you can be certain that you are looking at an old school "outbound marketer" who has little-to-no experience using social media. Just remember that staying one step ahead of marketers is not as hard as it may seem, because they are often two steps behind. They copy, they don't lead. They are a huge bunch of sheep who follow each other around, needing some outsider to tell them that this is going to be huge, or the new way, and rarely show any innovation whatsoever. But in general, they are so far behind in social media, that I wouldn't trust any of them (at a significant cost to boot!) to handle it for me, especially when we can do it better than they do, free. Additionally, we can honestly say that we don't copy anyone, either. Why pay for some sheep to lead us around in a merry dance, when we are original enough and creative enough to do it for (free) ourselves, and live large as the sheepdog instead?!
Remember, dear friends: if the hair is grey or white, it ain't ready for no social media fight! Famous last words from Kevin Mc, perhaps , though he can honestly claim to have only two grey hairs and those are on his chest, so they aren't visible in the office, thus for today, he passes the test! - Kevin Mc
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