There has (always) been a lot of attention paid to categorizing authors under a variety of adjectives: aspiring, published, self-published, bestseller, genre, literary, hack, famous, unknown, and so on. Of late, the distinction between the traditionally-published and the self-published author has been at the fore. I wrote about that particular distinction a while back… But from a marketer’s […]
Publisher Strategies and Devastating Opportunity Costs
I was never much of an economics student. In truth, I was pretty bad. I did, however, grasp the idea of opportunity cost. The first sentence of Wikipedia’s definition sums it up wonderfully for me: Opportunity cost is the cost of any activity measured in terms of the value of the next best alternative forgone […]
Why Authors Are More Snowflakes Than Salmon
Two news items about authors caught my eye this week. First, that Penelope Trunk, a syndicated columnist, blogger, entrepreneur and career guru, had angrily walked away from her traditional publisher to go the self-publishing route with Hyperink. Secondly, that Neil Gaiman had signed a multi-book deal with traditional publisher HarperCollins. In heated moments like this […]