Publishing in the Digital Age

At what point should publishers expose the book’s entire content to all the search engines?

In the United States we’ve developed a concept for these books that relies on the subtle interplay between text and art—a trapeze act, as it were, between writer and artist.

I was shocked to see how few picture books made the new hardcover best-seller list, aside from Jane O’Connor’s “Fancy Nancy” books and titles such as Lane Smith’s It’s a Book. Looking at the list, it’s easy to understand the pressures on editors who love to create picture books. Any bottom-line-driven publishing executive looking at what’s selling in America would order them to hunt for more werewolves, zombies, and vampires.

So possibly the problem isn’t with the genre itself, but what’s happened to it.

[We want stories that are] adventure-oriented, certainly, but hopefully with an emphasis on some literary or artistic merit, something to catch the eye and let people know that it’s a little bit different from other genre work they’ve seen.

over time, more and more blog traffic arrives from Search Engines

In order to optimize your post for a particular keyword phrase you can get a free plugin, called WordPress SEO which helps you to use the keywords you’ve found in all the right places.

Book publishers have long attested that short story collections don’t sell; Wolf would respond they’re not trying hard enough. “Traditional publishers don’t do a lot of marketing for the midlist authors today,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s that they’re too busy trying to survive or they don’t have the budget.”

“I’m organizing and coordinating all the different authors and having them all communicate to their specific niches and audiences. I’m driving them to a common landing page and we created a book blog. We’re leveraging social media and talking to the press.”

it’s true that, with limited marketing budgets, publishers often have to focus on the big titles, and smaller authors must pick up a lot of the marketing work themselves for a shot at success.

Not all groups are useful. Group-think can be dangerous. One or two empathy-challenged control freaks can goad a group of mild-mannered scribblers into a verbal Lord of the Flies attack-fest that will stifle the most faithful muse and damage a fragile creative spirit.

“A good writer is not, per se, a good critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.”

"This is a business which has always been driven very much by supply rather than demand factors. Consumer taste doesn't actually change all that much but what does change is the availability of books in different channels. "It is tougher to predict how we will be 12 months from now, as an industry, than pretty much any time that I can remember."

A Behind-the-Scenes Look. Give us a sense of what it is like to be a novelist. How did you feel when you finally landed an agent? What does a typical writing day look like for you? What’s it like to see your book in print and hold a copy in your hand for the first time?

I suggest using a few keywords that represent your brand – i.e., genre, interests, business or service, and using hashtags (#) with them. Why? This makes it a hot link (this one goes to #snark) to Search – important for you to have more visibility in Twitter’s internal search engine.Also, this is how you show up on Google.

If you’re using a header for your Facebook timeline, now you can use the same one for your Twitter header. Very cool.

Although children sometimes read picture books by themselves, most of the dearest picture book experiences arise from an activity shared between parent and child. The parent is an actor, performing for the child; the two are teammates as they jointly explore illustrations.

moving a work that relies heavily on visual and spatial elements from one medium to another is extremely hard to do well.

Publishers must commission some digital-only picture books to explore what the creative possibilities are when print is not the starting point.

I'm not talking about throwing in the towel on writing.

if a writer is pursuing publication with the goal of making money, they're going to find themselves sorely disappointed.

hose who are pursuing publication for the money are probably better off getting a job at Walmart for a much steadier and reliable income.