Novice Authors Must Promote Themselves, Since Publishers Won't - washingtonpost.com

With Promotion Money Tight, Authors Take to Online Sites To Toot Their Own Horns

By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 24, 2009

Poor Kelly Corrigan, first-time author, didn't get invited to this weekend's National Book Festival on the Mall to plug her 2008 memoir, "The Middle Place." She won't be rubbing shoulders with heavyweight authors such as Sue Monk Kidd, John Grisham or Pulitzer winner Junot Diaz. No major newspaper bothered to review the California mom's tale about cancer and family and recovery when it was released. Her publisher didn't send her on tour. All the old-school staples of book promotion -- the book festival, the tour, the glowing newspaper review -- Corrigan got none of them.

What was a newbie author to do?

She cobbled together a trailer for her book on her home computer, using iMovie software, downloading a free tune off the Web for background music, and stuck it on her Web site. Her agent helped get her on one network television morning show. About 20 friends hosted book parties, which she hit on a self-funded three-week blitz, selling books out of the trunk of her car. A guy shot video of her reading an essay at one of these parties, and she posted it on YouTube when the paperback came out.

A year later, the book has sold about 80,000 copies in hardcover and another 260,000 in paperback, according to Nielsen BookScan data. It sat on the New York Times bestseller list for 20 weeks, peaking at No. 2. That homemade trailer has been viewed more than 100,000 times. The video of her reading has drawn 4.5 million hits. She's in Washington on Thursday, speaking at the Congressional Families Cancer Prevention Award luncheon. Then she will plow into more than a dozen paid speaking gigs across the country in the next six weeks.

"I hand-sold at least 2,000 to 3,000 copies," the 42-year-old said in an interview this week from her home in Oakland. "And while the hardcover was doing well, everything changed with that video from the reading."

Corrigan, spending $3,700 for the Web site and her tour, figured out a path through the weird new-media maze of authors overseeing their own marketing and promotion, using the Internet and networks of friends to get their little-known works off the ground.

Book publishers actively market and promote authors, of course, particularly the big names, but for thousands of writers it's a figure-it-out-yourself world of creating book trailers, Web sites and blogs, social networking and crashing on friends' couches during a tour you arrange.

"Being an author has become much more of an ongoing relationship with your audience through the Web, rather than just writing a book and disappearing while you write the next one," says Liate Stehlik, publisher of William Morrow and Avon Books. "You have to be out there in the online world, talking and participating."

Authors are expected to behave like mini-entrepreneurs, says Kamy Wicoff, founder and CEO of She Writes, a Web site devoted to helping women writers promote their books. She started the site in June. More than 4,000 writers have joined.

"The landscape has altered so fundamentally and irrevocably that almost no one is immune from finding ways to participate in the promotion of their books," Wicoff says. "Writers with small advances and limited resources are expected to treat their book as a new company, with marketing and promotion and PR."

This trend is driven by the availability and ease of Internet marketing, the expense (and diminishing use) of author tours and the need to keep up with the competition. More than 560,000 books were published in the United States last year, a $25 billion pie of which everyone wants a slice.

"The fragmentation of the market is staggering," says Peter Hildick-Smith, president of the Codex Group, a book audience research firm in New York. "Authors walk into bookstores and think they're cluttered, and wonder how browsers could find their book in there. The problem is, the Web is giga-cluttered by comparison."

For some established icons such as E.L. Doctorow, John Irving or Toni Morrison, the established round of reviews and readings at major festivals is promotion enough. For pop-culture mainstays like Grisham, Stephen King or J.K. Rowling, fans are primed and waiting for their next efforts.

Many other authors -- the media personalities, the pundits, the politicians, the self-help gurus -- "are actually selling their book long before they sell the book," says Richard Pine, a literary agent for three decades and co-founder of InkWell Management. These people, he says, are establishing who they are and what they have to say and are building an audience years before they actually have a book on the shelves.

This reader familiarity is the biggest factor in sales, according to repeated studies carried out by Hildick-Smith's firm. About 60 percent of respondents in surveys say the decisive factor in their decision to purchase a book is that they are already fans of the author.

But most authors are much more like Corrigan. Or, say, Monica Holloway.

The Los Angeles-based mom got good reviews for her first book, a 2007 memoir called "Driving With Dead People." Her second, "Cowboy and Wills," about her autistic son and his dog, is coming out this month. She's hired a consultant to help with Internet publicity. She's got her own Web site (which she pays for), hired a company to put together a trailer for the book, and commissioned someone to write background music for it. She's worked hard to make sure the red on the Web site matches the red on the book cover, ensuring a professional appearance. She's started blogging on the Web site of her publisher, Simon and Schuster, and is networking to set up book club appearances.

"It's all Internet, Internet, Internet," she says of the promotional process. "It's crazy, you emerge from this place of solitude in writing and then switch into the hot glare of 'market yourself now!' It's very uncomfortable, and you try to get past it with some sort of sophistication."

Book trailers are one of the newest promotional outlets. Everybody's got them, little video commercials for their books, something like movie trailers. Grisham's are 20 seconds; Corrigan's is about two minutes.

John McQueeny, chief operating officer at TurnHere Inc., a media production company based in San Francisco, has seen his company make "hundreds and hundreds" of these videos since it got into the business in 2006. He's hired mostly by publishing companies, he says, but a bargain-basement video for a writer working solo would cost about $2,000.

"We're not shooting talking heads in studios," he says. "We're capturing a story about the author, often on a location relevant to the content of the book. It's a way to convey the meaning of the book in moving images and sound . . . and relative to the cost of a tour, it's extremely inexpensive."

So all these shiny things that go fast are really fun to produce, and some are even fun to watch. But do they move units any better than the old-fashioned author signings in a local bookstore? Do they help a book sell more copies, or merely keep pace with others in the marketplace?

Nobody really knows, a range of publishers and industry watchers say. There is not a clear-cut means of connecting Web site traffic, say, to results in sales, and some experts warn new authors not to go overboard.

"There's so much you can do for free in Web promotion that it's just crazy," says Christopher Jackson, executive editor at Spiegel and Grau. "There's been a lot of money wasted in publishing on slickly produced author Web sites that, in the end, really didn't lead anywhere."

Annik LaFarge, a prominent Web site designer based in New York, works with high-profile authors such as Mitch "Tuesdays With Morrie" Albom to help them stay in touch with their fans.

"I get calls several times a week from writers asking me to help them with their projects, but I encourage a lot of them not to do that much," she says. "Unless you have the time and money to invest in it and do new things with the site and keep filing new content, it may not be worth it. . . . The main problem is the cacophony of the Internet. It's difficult to make any sort of impression at all."

Pine, the literary agent, says his best advice to authors is still "write the best book you possibly can." After that, he says, put your name and face out there, no matter the odds. He names Stephen King as "the king of taking a chance on things digital," and salutes Corrigan's seat-of-the-pants success story.

"If you don't try it, you don't know if it will work," he says. "Her videos could have not worked just as easily as it turned out they did. But she got out there, threw herself in the game and look what happened."

Ads Follow Web Users, and Get Deeply Personal

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

For all the concern and uproar over online privacy, marketers and data companies have always known much more about consumers’ offline lives, like income, credit score, home ownership, even what car they drive and whether they have a hunting license. Recently, some of these companies have started connecting this mountain of information to consumers’ browsers.

The result is a sea change in the way consumers encounter the Web. Not only will people see customized advertising, they will see different versions of Web sites from other consumers and even receive different discount offers while shopping — all based on information from their offline history. Two women in adjoining offices could go to the same cosmetic site, but one might see a $300 Missoni perfume, the other the house-brand lipstick on sale for $2.

The technology that makes the connection is nothing new — it is a tiny piece of code called a cookie that is placed on a hard drive. But the information it holds is. And it is all done invisibly.

“Now, you’re traveling the Internet with a cookie that indicates you’re this type of consumer: age group X, income level, urban versus rural, presence of children in the household,” said Trey Barrett, a product leader at Acxiom, one of the companies offering this linking to marketers.

Advertisers and marketers say this specificity is useful, taking out the guesswork involved in online-only profiling, and showing products to the people most likely to be interested. Retailers including Gap and Victoria’s Secret are using this tactic.

But consumer advocates say such unseen tracking is troubling. On the old Internet, nobody knew you were a dog. On the new targeted Internet, they now know what kind of dog you are, your favorite leash color, the last time you had fleas and the date you were neutered.

“The industry’s love affair with persistent cookies has made it virtually impossible for users to go online without being tracked and profiled,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, in an e-mail message.

While Congress has been holding hearings on online privacy lately, the sessions have focused on online behavioral targeting. The industry has argued that no government intervention is needed, an argument that the Federal Trade Commission has so far accepted.

Consumers can avoid cookie-based tracking by deleting cookies from their computers or setting their browsers not to accept cookies. But few do, and privacy advocates say it is easy for companies to add cookies without users noticing.

For decades, data companies like Experian and Acxiom have compiled reams of information on every American: Acxiom estimates it has 1,500 pieces of data on every American, based on information from warranty cards, bridal and birth registries, magazine subscriptions, public records and even dog registrations with the American Kennel Club.

Patrick Williams, the publisher of the personal finance magazine Worth, recently asked Acxiom to find the names and addresses of 10,000 Americans from each of 11 cities who had houses worth more than $1 million, net worth of over $2 million, lived within a few miles of other rich people and subscribed to business publications.

“They are the scariest data research company around — they know far too much,” said Mr. Williams, who said he was very happy with the amount of information it gave him.

Companies like Acxiom and a competitor, Datran Media, make the connection between online and offline data when a person registers on a Web site or clicks through on an e-mail message from a marketer.

Datran’s cookies include 50 to 100 pieces of information. Both companies say cookie data is anonymous and generalized. Datran and Acxiom then sell advertising on Web sites like NBC.com, Facebook and Yahoo to companies that use their data.

For marketers, all this data is a boon. Beltone New England, a hearing-aid company, asked Datran to find people online who were 65 and over, owned a house, were head of a household, made more than $35,000 a year and lived in New England so it could show them ads. Datran also tested the same ads with a wider group of people.

“What was surprising was we found the majority of responders turned out to be women 35 to 40 who had elderly parents at home,” said Perry Ebel, Beltone’s director of marketing and business development. He said he was changing his offline marketing to include that group.

By using real-world data online, marketers can customize messages even further — showing different products to people with different shopping habits, whether it is in ads, an e-mail message or in semipersonalized Web pages.

Rodale, which publishes books along with magazines like Men’s Health and Prevention, uses Acxiom data to help determine which promotional e-mails to send to which customers. Offers aimed at women might be accompanied by an e-mail message offering a Father’s Day subscription to Men’s Health for him and a free book on losing belly fat for her. Young men might get another offer — a book on sex positions. Some marketers are using offline data more subtly — for example, showing a budget shopper a discount offer and a regular shopper a full-price section.

“The people who buy less frequently and are most price-conscious may get a better deal than someone who buys more frequently, who would buy anyway,” said Christopher S. Marriott, global managing director of Acxiom Digital, a division of Acxiom.

Of course, shoppers would have little reason to think their experience or their ads are being personalized based on their home value or Volvo ownership.

“It is a little Big Brother-ish,” said Betsy Coggswell, 49, a social worker in Fullerton, Calif., who shops online regularly. Still, she said, she wasn’t shocked. “Every time you put out information about yourself — people have got to understand — it’s going to be collected by somebody.”

Some online companies avoid matching online and offline profiles. In 2000, DoubleClick abandoned plans to connect online and offline data after a huge outcry. Google, which later acquired DoubleClick, has been conducting studies that connect the two areas, but it does not currently collect or serve ads based on such personal information without user permission, Sandra Heikkinen, a Google spokeswoman, said.

While Acxiom, Datran and some of their partners address their use of tracking in their privacy policies, such policies have become worthless, Mr. Rotenberg said. “Real transparency means that the user gets access to the information, not to a policy about the information,” he said.

Paul M. Schwartz, a law professor and privacy expert at the law school of the University of California, Berkeley, said the unwitting participation by consumers makes online marketing different from offline.

“Interactive media really gets into this creepy Orwellian thing, where it’s a record of our thoughts on the way to decision-making,” he said. “We’re like the data-input clerks now for the industry.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/business/media/31privacy.html?ref=todayspaper

Unpopular, Unfamiliar Fish Species Suffer From Become Seafood

By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 31, 2009

If the slimehead were still a slimehead, it wouldn't be in this kind of trouble.

An arm-long fish with the look of a prehistoric fossil, the slimehead lived in obscurity a quarter-mile deep in the ocean. The fish was known mainly to scientists, who named it for its distinctive mucus canals.

But then, in the 1970s, seafood dealers came up with a name that no longer tickled the gag reflex. This was the beginning of the "orange roughy."

And, very nearly, the end. With this tasty-sounding name, the slimehead was widely overfished.

On Thursday, a long-awaited report on the world's seafood stocks declared that 63 percent of these species are below healthy levels.

The seafood study, released online Thursday in the journal Science, is one of the most comprehensive looks at the contents of the world's seas. An international group of scientists examined an unprecedented amount of data about harvests and fish populations from the Bering Sea to the Antarctic, and they studied thousands of species from the Atlantic cod to the Australian jackass morwong.

Some of those worst-hit were fish that have been renamed to make them more marketable. For threatened animals on land, a more attractive name might be a blessing. But for these creatures -- slimeheads, goosefish, rock crabs, Patagonian toothfish, whore's eggs -- it was a curse.

That fishermen have turned to them shows what's left in the ocean. Today's seafood is often yesterday's trash fish and monsters.

"People never thought they would be eaten," said Jennifer Jacquet, a biologist at the University of British Columbia. "And as we fish out the world's oceans, we're coming across these species and wondering, 'Can we give them a makeover?' "

The study's lead author, Boris Worm, was following up on a study that predicted that if fishing continued at the same rate, all the world's seafood stocks would collapse by 2048. He said the latest study actually revealed something surprising: a reason for optimism.

About half of the depleted species might actually have a chance to recover, the scientists found, if given enough protection.

But, Worm said, species such as slimehead still illustrate what's gone deeply wrong.

As the world's catch has grown more than fivefold since 1950, he said, overfishing has spread from "rivers to coastal areas to the [continental] shelf to the deep sea." As they went farther and deeper, fishermen have brought back fish that people didn't have recipes -- or even words -- for.

"We didn't even consider fishing [for] these things 15, 20 years ago," said Worm, a professor at Dalhousie University in Canada. Today, he said, "we have another choice. And that is rebuilding what we've lost off our doorstep."

The depleted stocks include familiar fish such as the Atlantic cod, which has been fished so heavily that the Georges Bank population off New England is at 12 percent of healthy levels. The Gulf of Mexico's red snapper stocks are at 6 percent of what scientists say they should be.

To fill the void, some seafood vendors have fraudulently sold cheaper fish as grouper or snapper.

But in other cases, they have given the fish a more palatable name -- preying, environmentalists say, on the arm's-length relationship Americans have with their seafood.

The most famous case involves the Patagonian toothfish and the Antarctic toothfish -- drab, yard-long creatures from the cold waters near the South Pole. In the 1970s, they were rechristened "Chilean sea bass," although they are not, biologically speaking, sea bass.

The toothfish's new name and the firm, oily meat found a huge market. In recent years, environmentalists have said both toothfish are now threatened with heavy fishing, including by "pirate" fishing boats that ignore conservation laws.

The slimehead had similar troubles. Environmentalists say they live long -- 100 years or more -- and reproduce slowly, so it takes a long time to replace fish that are caught.

And along the U.S. Atlantic Coast, fishermen used to toss back a toad-colored fish that looked like it was 30 percent mouth and 50 percent stomach: the goosefish. Then somebody noticed that the tail meat could be cut into tasty fillets. Then, someone thought of "monkfish." Harvests jumped five times from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, and the fish's numbers dropped.

"You went from unexploited, discarded fish -- bycatch, essentially -- to a targeted species that became overfished," said Thomas Munroe, a zoologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "The fish was the same as it was as a goosefish."

Federal officials say Chilean sea bass imports are now certified to make sure they came from sustainable operations, that orange roughy are better protected and that monkfish have recovered to safe levels.

But Seafood Watch, a guide produced by the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, still recommends that consumers avoid Chilean sea bass, orange roughy and monkfish.

Other names have been invented more recently. A few years ago, a Maine seafood dealer renamed the Atlantic rock crab the "peekytoe crab." He's sold hundreds of thousands of pounds since then. A species of sea urchin -- a ball of green spines that Maine lobstermen used to call a whore's egg -- have found a niche in U.S. sushi restaurants under its Japanese name, uni.

Early next year, look for what might be the biggest test yet of the seafoood market's response to a new name. Catfish farmers are going to introduce especially large, thick fillets to white-table restaurants under the name "delacata."

The naming of seafood is policed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which keeps a Seafood List of acceptable market names. One of the more recent additions: snakehead can now be sold as "channa."

But FDA officials said that, in practice, they don't punish many restaurants for calling fish by unsanctioned names. "It is not a high priority . . . unless it involves a food-safety hazard," said Spring Randolph, a consumer safety officer.

At the National Fisheries Institute, a trade group, President John Connelly said the seafood industry works to police itself -- recently going after a California restaurant that was selling a Vietnamese cousin of the catfish as "white roughy." But he said there's nothing wrong with giving new names to unfamiliar creatures.

"A company is always going to find a name that customers are comfortable with," Connelly said. "A cattleman, for instance, doesn't sell 'bull testicles.' They sell 'Rocky Mountain oysters.' "

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/30/AR2009073002478.html

Marketing Small Businesses With Twitter

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

SAN FRANCISCO — Three weeks after Curtis Kimball opened his crème brûlée cart in San Francisco, he noticed a stranger among the friends in line for his desserts. How had the man discovered the cart? He had read about it on Twitter.

For Mr. Kimball, who conceded that he “hadn’t really understood the purpose of Twitter,” the beauty of digital word-of-mouth marketing was immediately clear. He signed up for an account and has more than 5,400 followers who wait for him to post the current location of his itinerant cart and list the flavors of the day, like lavender and orange creamsicle.

“I would love to say that I just had a really good idea and strategy, but Twitter has been pretty essential to my success,” he said. He has quit his day job as a carpenter to keep up with the demand.

Much has been made of how big companies like Dell, Starbucks and Comcast use Twitter to promote their products and answer customers’ questions. But today, small businesses outnumber the big ones on the free microblogging service, and in many ways, Twitter is an even more useful tool for them.

For many mom-and-pop shops with no ad budget, Twitter has become their sole means of marketing. It is far easier to set up and update a Twitter account than to maintain a Web page. And because small-business owners tend to work at the cash register, not in a cubicle in the marketing department, Twitter’s intimacy suits them well.

“We think of these social media tools as being in the realm of the sophisticated, multiplatform marketers like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, but a lot of these supersmall businesses are gravitating toward them because they are accessible, free and very simple,” said Greg Sterling, an analyst who studies the Internet’s influence on shopping and local businesses.

Small businesses typically get more than half of their customers through word of mouth, he said, and Twitter is the digital manifestation of that. Twitter users broadcast messages of up to 140 characters in length, and the culture of the service encourages people to spread news to friends in their own network.

Umi, a sushi restaurant in San Francisco, sometimes gets five new customers a night who learned about it on Twitter, said Shamus Booth, a co-owner.

He twitters about the fresh fish of the night — “The O-Toro (bluefin tuna belly) tonight is some of the most rich and buttery tuna I’ve had,” he recently wrote — and offers free seaweed salads to people who mention Twitter.

Twitter is not just for businesses that want to lure customers with mouth-watering descriptions of food. For Cynthia Sutton-Stolle, the co-owner of Silver Barn Antiques in tiny Columbus, Tex., Twitter has been a way to find both suppliers and customers nationwide.

Since she joined Twitter in February, she has connected with people making lamps and candles that she subsequently ordered for her shop and has sold a few thousand dollars of merchandise to people outside Columbus, including to a woman in New Jersey shopping for graduation gifts.

“We don’t even have our Web site done, and we weren’t even trying to start an e-commerce business,” Ms. Sutton-Stolle said. “Twitter has been a real valuable tool because it’s made us national instead of a little-bitty store in a little-bitty town.”

Scott Seaman of Blowing Rock, N.C., also uses Twitter to expand his customer base beyond his town of about 1,500 residents. Mr. Seaman is a partner at Christopher’s Wine and Cheese shop and owns a bed and breakfast in town. He sets up searches on TweetDeck, a Web application that helps people manage their Twitter messages, to start conversations with people talking about his town or the mountain nearby. One person he met on Twitter booked a room at his inn, and a woman in Dallas ordered sake from his shop.

The extra traffic has come despite his rarely pitching his own businesses on Twitter. “To me, that’s a turn-off,” he said. Instead of marketing to customers, small-business owners should use the same persona they have offline, he advised. “Be the small shopkeeper down the street that everyone knows by name.”

Chris Mann, the owner of Woodhouse Day Spa in Cincinnati, twitters about discounts for massages and manicures every Tuesday. Twitter beats e-mail promotions because he can send tweets from his phone in a meeting and “every single business sends out an e-mail,” he said.

Even if a shop’s customers are not on Twitter, the service can be useful for entrepreneurs, said Becky McCray, who runs a liquor store and cattle ranch in Oklahoma and publishes a blog called Small Biz Survival.

In towns like hers, with only 5,000 people, small-business owners can feel isolated, she said. But on Twitter, she has learned business tax tips from an accountant, marketing tips from a consultant in Tennessee and start-up tips from the founder of several tech companies.

Anamitra Banerji, who manages commercial products at Twitter, said that when he joined the company from Yahoo in March, “I thought this was a place where large businesses were. What I’m finding more and more, to my surprise every single day, is business of all kinds.”

Twitter, which does not yet make money, is now concentrating on teaching businesses how they can join and use it, Mr. Banerji said, and the company plans to publish case studies. He is also developing products that Twitter can sell to businesses of all sizes this year, including features to verify businesses’ accounts and analyze traffic to their Twitter profiles.

According to Mr. Banerji, small-business owners like Twitter because they can talk directly to customers in a way that they were able to do only in person before. “We’re finding the emotional distance between businesses and their customers is shortening quite a bit,” he said.