Best Seller Authors

Book Marketing, Publishing, Author Resources

What Authors Can Learn From An Artist

Talking to thousands of authors, I’ve learned that a primary motivation is to share a message with the world. That is, if you could wave a magic wand, have every person on the planet get the message, the business, marketing, and even wealth would be your second wish.

Most of us don’t have magic wands… So we look for ways to amplify our ability to share a message. We construct a plan to get income, invest in publicity, promotion and marketing to make it happen.

The following video show how one artist did this in a simple form. His creative output was not a message, but his method teach us.

If your goal is bigger than you imagine,  you may just have the right goal.

I don’t know any of the back story on this.. let’s assume that the artist could not have got this done without the backing of DHL. In fact, I suspect he created this with DHL in mind.

Does that make it any less creative?

Think about your own dream project. How might you get it to 100 or 1000 times as many people, help more, change lives and have more fun?

What other ideas did you get from watching?

The Future of All Marketing and Promotion

We had a wonderful discussion last night with a marketer who really gets the philosophy that will make anyone a success in promoting your book online.

You can listen to my interview with Trey Pennington on Social Media Radio

During our conversation, Trey and I traced the roots of what we teach back to one man. The great sales trainer Zig Ziglar. Trey and I both had the honor of speaking at Thom Scott and Bob Burg’s Extreme Business Makeover back in April. I got a photo with Zig. Trey was smarter and brought along a video camera.

You can read Trey’s account here.. and I’ll add the video of the source for our secret to marketing here

Twitter Is the New Search Engine Choice

Reading tweets and stories that @Biz reported that Twitter search is up 33% in a month (and it’s a month old data). So I started exploring related posts.

SearchEngineLand does a great job of analyzing it (using the month older data)

Twitter does 18 billion searches a month, working off the 600 million per day figure? Williams said the monthly figure is closer to 19 billion.

How’s that compare against the major search engines? Working off comScore figures from December 2009 for worldwide search queries, we have:

  • Google: 88 billion per month
  • Twitter: 19 billion per month
  • Yahoo: 9.4 billion per month
  • Bing: 4.1 billion per month

Where do you search?

Where ‘Six Degrees’ is Wrong

It’s fun to play the Kevin Bacon game and explore the connections between movie stars.

The game is based on the idea that you can reach any person on Earth through six other people. Studies and experiments in connectivity and networks are good ways to build the case that the more connected we are, the happier we will be, the more we’ll get done and the world will be a better place.

That’s the good part.

Sunday’s New York Times carried a piece with the headline “Twitter, a Close Knit Network” .. reporting on a study done by Sysomo (read the study to get the real facts.

Problem is, they concluded that

If Kevin Bacon had a Twitter account, he would most likely be within six degrees of separation from nearly everyone else on the site.

On Twitter, movie star numbers don’t count. It’s likely that Kevin Bacon would look much more connected but assuming he doesn’t find the time to have a conversation with millions, it’s not likely those connections would make much of a difference.

A lot of the science, surveys, ratings and calculations we’re seeing in studies about Twitter are using old school broadcast media assumptions on what it takes to spread a meme.

They assume that if someone has a lot of follower, those followers are reading what gets posted and counting it that way.

The calculation of “average number of degrees of separation” is interesting and does point to us getting better at interconnecting through technology, but seems to me to rely too much on the old idea of treating the mass as a group instead of realizing that we each have our own network and belong to many more now.

It’s as if a TV or radio station bragged that were reaching every person in their coverage area.. regardless of whether they ever turned on a set or tuned in

We Are Getting More Connected

Local-ness of the Twitter network

The connections that matter are much closer than the ones the “trace the six degrees” people are counting. We are forming tighter bonds with people in our networks buy communicating more frequently and letting them in on more of our lives.

Add this to the technology that allows each of us to spread or share a meme or message to more connections and you get the most powerful group of interconnected social networks ever.

And some fun.

Do you feel more connected? Will you have more real friends 5 or 10 years from now? Post a comment and let me know how you connect.

Engage Readers Before They Buy

You want a best seller. That’s for sure.

Selling a large number of books is great, but engaging the readers will build a long term relationship that will sell the next book, create leads for your other products and services and give you the basis for an army of friends who will spread your message.

A just watched a fabulous spoof on a TV show.. I will leave off the title of the show and the book. If you don’t know the show, it’s still entertaining.. and by the end of the video, you’ll know the book.