Why Similarities Are Important In Book Marketing

We’re new to the publishing industry and so we have been, for the last year or more, eagerly devouring articles from industry notables in an attempt to “school” ourselves in the language and practice of publishing. We have, in particular, learned quite a bit from Peter McCarthy and Mike Shatzkin, founders of Logical Marketing. Their posts have not only enlightened us but have reassured us that we are heading down the right road in the development of our Audience Management Platform for Writers.

A recent presentation by McCarthy entitled The Big Ideas in Big (or Small) Marketing Data reinforced for us the critical role that “similarities” play in book marketing. The sweet spot, as McCarthy notes, is to use similarities to find the audience that is “unaware [of my book] and just might [buy)” it. These adjacent  or “look-alike” audiences are comprised of people who are similar to our own followers or to a specific profile. They share the same demographic characteristics, use the same hashtags, etc. They may, in fact, like the same books.

We have trod down the same path as McCarthy in searching for those look-alike audiences – though we may use different terms and perhaps have received different inspiration for doing so. We are inspired by the philosopher Wittgenstein’s meditations on how “language” means (through “family resemblances”) and also from the linguist de Saussure, who posited that language was comprised of similarities and differences between words or signs.

This is not a leap, of course, for most writers – or readers. Amazon, Netflix and other companies have fashioned their recommendation engines so that we are constantly reading or viewing or listening to “similar” things (fortunately we can be a fan of many genres!). And many social media users are experts at finding similar hashtags through the use of www.hashtagify.me and other tools.

So we have been, instinctively, using similarities (or analogies) all along in our search for an audience (and for meaning in general). And this makes sense – as Douglas Hofstadter writes in Surfaces and Essences, “analogy is the fuel and fire of thinking.” It also drives what we are doing at Find My Audience. We are trying to automate that process, however. Take, for example, the screen presented below.

 

 

This is our Profile Screen. Here we ask writers to tell us what genre(s) their book fits into, similar books, and keywords or phrases that might describe their book. Later on, the writer will be able to provide a fuller profile, but for now, these inputs are sufficient. We use those inputs to search the social web not only for matches but for similarities to the inputs the writer entered. Below is a sample screen return from our search of Twitter.

 

 

Note that our application returns users who have been “ranked” as being potentially predisposed based on the language they are using. We then enable you to communicate directly with that user. By narrowing down the audience, we save the writer time and we provide a direct-to-consumer marketing vehicle.

There are a lot of neat feat features in our Audience Management Application and in the weeks to come we will start to share them with you. In the meantime, should you want to be on our beta list of users, send us an e-mail at mark@findmyaudience.com.

Reading and Memory

A recent piece by Alison Flood in The Guardian brought up the issue of whether comprehension is lower when reading on a Kindle e-reader. Flood cites the work of researcher Anne Mangen of Stavanger University in Norway, who recently tested 50 people on their comprehension (plot, setting, etc.) of an Elizabeth George short story. Half of those tested read the story on a Kindle and half read it on paper.

Lo and behold, those who read the piece on a Kindle came up short when they were examined on the particulars of George’s story. Does this surprise anyone? I don’t think so.

Truth be told, our memories have, through the centuries, become increasingly downsized and outsourced. It’s true that back in the age of Homer (memory’s halcyon days), traveling bards memorized long epical poems in their entirety – and some mnemonic contortionists could recite epics like the Iliad backwards.

But even those bards used various  “distributed memory sourcing” techniques. In particular they (and their followers in the centuries to come) deployed the mnemonic strategy of loci et imagines. This is a technique where one placed what one wanted to memorize in a familiar place or attached it to a familiar object. That world is far removed from our own, and indeed it must have been a magical place, one that abounded in memories – but it does underline the fact that humans have historically created or found storage devices, both for mental and physical objects.

Scholars have posited that this kind of memory, which characterizes oral cultures, was pre-analytical, pre-logical, that it was external in nature. But that changed when books started to be produced and knowledge dramatically increased; memory migrated from the world to the page. The new “print” paradigm demanded that we only know how books were categorized; of course it helped if we knew what book specific information could be found in – but it wasn’t necessary. Freed from the taxing demands of personal memorization, our minds were able to, as Walter Ong, Robert Logan, and others have argued, to become more logical, more analytical – in short, the rise of books also witnessed the rise of the rational mind.

 

Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

Of course this is all dialectical in the sense that one paradigm – oral, print, digital – doesn’t replace an earlier one but rather subsumes it in itself and resolves the tensions and weaknesses of the previous paradigm. Having a good memory is still important – indeed, just a generation ago reciting long poems by memory was still a staple of high-school English. And recently I heard Peter O’Toole in a Fresh Air interview reciting Shakespeare’s sonnets by memory. A magnificent performance!

So, back to the Kindle and the digital age. I wonder if the Kindle doesn’t suffer from the same cognitive ailments that plague computers: namely, automation complacency and automation bias. The former refers to those moments when a computer lulls us into believing that it has everything “handled” (including memory). The latter refers to the tendency to place too much faith in believing what the computer says or does is accurate. In an article in The Atlantic entitled “All Can Be Lost: The Risk Of Putting Our Knowledge In The Hands Of Machines” Nicholas Carr chillingly points out what can happen when we let the computer do too much for us – quite simply, we forget how to do things. And when it comes to navigation (airlines, trains, ships, cars, etc.) or the operation of large equipment that can have tragic consequences.

But what does this mean for reading – specifically for reading on devices such as the Kindle or the iPad? Do readers subconsciously change their reading habits when reading on a device? Do they not concern themselves with the details per se (since the device supposedly is) but rather with a holistic or even lateral view? Could reading on a device such as the Kindle increase empathy for characters, for the human condition? Could reading on the Kindle be, in fact, a radical act, one that challenges the “dominant” mode of thinking and remembering? Certainly changes are afoot – and in the same manner that the environment worked on and reshaped our genetic map through time, our increasing reliance on devices (and not just the Kindle and iPad but all of the devices that make up the Internet of Things) may well do the same thing to our cognitive capacities.

Of course some people will be upset. Paradigm change always has its naysayers. Think of how many people were burned at the stake or in a barrel by the Church for having a copy of the Bible (or even quoting from it). Learning and thinking for oneself have always threatened those in power – but, as Nietzsche reminded us, now more than ever it’s time to live dangerously!

 

Writers, Here’s What’s Coming!

It’s hard to believe, but the team at Find My Audience is only three to four weeks away from completing the Alpha stage of our Audience Management Platform for writers.

Okay, what is an Audience Management Platform? Quite simply, it is a software platform that will enable writers to search the social web for potential readers – in just seconds – and then communicate with those  readers in a more sophisticated fashion than is currently available. Really.

Our software was borne out of our own frustration at trying to market our writing on the social web. We discovered that the noise-to-signal ratio was daunting — we never knew whether our tweets and posts were getting read by the right people. We figured there had to be a better way.

And there is.

Logical Marketing (founded by publishing industry veterans Peter McCarthy and Mike Shatzkin), for example, offers a wonderful service to help writers get discovered on the web. Their “foundational” approach focuses on the upfront metatagging and SEO so that an author’s work  can be “discovered” by someone searching for a particular type of title. This is an enormously valuable service.

Our approach, while complementary, is different: an analogy for our software would be the Bloomberg Terminal, a computer system that enables financiers to monitor and analyze real-time market data. Our Audience Management platform is constantly searching the web for people who may be interested in your title. It is a direct-to-consumer strategy. It works while you sleep.

 

Now of course we are only arriving at Alpha – which means we are still at the crawling phase. There will be bugs. The algorithm will need improvement. The user interface will need adjusting. But the early results are promising. If you would like to get a sneak preview of what we are doing, we would be happy to do a virtual demo for you. Give us a  shout!

 

Friday Photo

Guess Who?

Dial R for Recoleta

Looking for an exotic place to set your next murder-mystery? Buenos Aires’s La Recoleta Cemetary, set in the swanky neighborhood of Recoleta, is just the place. It’s the resting place of many of Buenos Aires’s notable personages from the past, including Eva Peron.

During the day cats saunter around the tombs enduring the stream of tourists. And at night? Well, then the ghosts come out…
 

Silicon Valley, Beat This!

Finch Lake

We’ve been deep in stealth mode of late designing The Writer’s DashBoard. But lest you think all we do is burn the midnight oil in search of your audience (don’t worry, our beta will be out in September and then you really will be able to find your audience), occasionally we play hookey on a Friday afternoon and head up to the mountains for natural, as opposed to caffeinated, inspiration (“Make me thy lyre,” wrote Shelley of nature – and we second the thought!).

Access to nature is the reason why many of us live and work in Boulder. The natural beauty of the Front Range serves as a source of inspiration and is also a refuge from the daily grind. Whether it be biking, running, rock climbing, kayaking, hiking or yoga, Boulder is an ideal place to blend an active lifestyle with creative endeavors.

Wordsworth wrote in his “Ode on Intimations of Immortality” that

                               There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

                               The earth, and every common sight,

                               To me did seem

                               Apparelled in celestial light,

                               The glory and the freshness of a dream.

One often feels that way in Boulder. Seriously.

Below are a few pictures of our hike up at Wild Basin, about thirty miles north of town.

Shady Mountain Trail

Indian Peaks Wilderness

Mountain Valley

Magical Realism Realized

The Simon Bolivar of the Novel: Julio Cortazar

I received a text today. Or maybe it was yesterday. I can’t be sure…

It was from my youngest daughter, who was attending the Buenos Aires Book Fair. She couldn’t pass up the chance of sending me a photo of Buenos Aires’s own great writer, Julio Cortazar, author (most notably) of Hopscotch, amongst other works. A handsome fellow, that Cortazar, and with that cigarette hanging from his mouth, he reminds me of Camus  (famous picture of whom below) – and there are other similarities, too (the fight against oppression, the fascination with memory, etc.).

Smoking Never Looked So Good

***

I believe that for my daughter Buenos Aires may have a tenuous, albeit unconscious, connection to another city she experienced as a  young girl, a city where the older people carry within them secrets and painful memories, where they walk in a similar manner, still cast furtive glances when out on the streets (J’accuse!).  A city where they give books and roses to a loved one once a year. Barcelona, that is. Like Buenos Aires,  a stylish city, yet one full of ghosts, one that still bears the pall of dictatorship.

Are books always the great foe of dictatorships? Is imagination our last refuge? The only place we can be free?

***

Buenos Aires has been on my mind a lot lately…

Whilst wandering the streets of San Telmo, Buenos Aires’s well-known historic barrio, I was struck by the presentness of its past – different epochs meld into each other, historical figures have a life, are tangible on a daily basis (the Perons, for example – and Evita’s visage is prominently displayed on buildings).

One can see a Porsche plying its way through the streets followed by a horse-drawn cart. On one side of Plazza Dorrego couples will dance the tango, a mating ritual seemingly as old as time – and on the other, kids will be playing techno pop, banging drums. It all works, like some fabulous Magritte painting. Garcia Marquez said of Mexico that “surrealism runs through the streets.” The same can be said of Buenos Aires.

***

At night the streets of San Telmo are crowded with los cartneros searching through the  garbage bins for recyclables Not one or two, mind you. There are families. Gangs. Running mates. Solitaries. People pushing carts. When the sun comes up, they disappear.

I barely know Buenos Aires, but like Cortazar’s Hopscotch, it seems to invite one to play a game with it – to begin where one finds oneself, to be swept up in a postmodern gesture that eschews structural and cultural unity.

Cortazar said, “These days, my notion of the fantastic is closer to what we call reality. Perhaps because reality approaches the fantastic more and more.”

Buenos Aires is a fantastic city. I will be returning soon…

 

2014 ABNA Reviews of The Holding Company Loves You

We’re proud to announce that L.V. Torio’s The Holding Company Loves You has made it through to the ABNA 2014 Quarter Finals! L.V. is not only a wonderful writer but he’s also a phenomenal software developer. When he’s not scribbling away in his garret, he’s in the backroom designing Find My Audience’s Writer’s Dashboard. The software will be out in September. We hope L.V.’s book will be, also. Below are his  reviews!

ABNA Expert Reviewer

What is the strongest aspect of this excerpt?

Love the concept. The best science fiction is that which is close enough to possibility to be really creepy, and this is definitely that. Everyone loves to hate on insurance companies (and let’s face it, they deserve it), so this should strike a chord. It sounds frighteningly similar to the way health insurance companies already behave.

What is your overall opinion of this excerpt?

The thing that really draws me in to this story is the concept of the over-insured world, with insurance companies making all decisions and pulling all strings. That will be a very marketable concept, I think.

ABNA Expert Reviewer

What is the strongest aspect of this excerpt?

The pitch is well done and certainly made me want to read this excerpt. Letting a man who wants to electrocute mice go while tasing an older women who just wants to make pickles for her grandchildren is an ironic and memorable twist. Showing incidents of how WORRIES actually works (and doesn’t work) to start the excerpt rather than just explaining it is a smart move on the author’s part. For the most part the author is consistent with a tone of dark humor and irony. The character A.W. is introduced well in Chapter 2 with both action and dialogue as is LuAnne and the green fuzz in the next chapter. I like the Rembrandt and Van Gogh metaphors in Chapter 4 to describe Stan Burton.

What is your overall opinion of this excerpt?

In a world of seemingly ever increasing government control and surveillance this excerpt has a very contemporary theme which should appeal to many. The premise reminded me a bit of MINORITY REPORT though that is not a bad thing as I presume this work has many original ideas and twists of its own. The first four chapters are all well executed, readable and quickly get the reader’s attention. The fifth chapter needs more work. I think the excerpt is a good one and it makes me optimistic about what the rest of the book contains.

Interview With Susan Hughes: Editor Par Excellence

Susan Hughes

Hi Susan, can you describe for us what an “ideal” editor does?
An ideal editor is one who forms a bond and a level of trust with the writer, enabling the writer to have the confidence to hand over his/her precious words—to an absolute stranger!  That trust is built through prompt, friendly communication. Writers have lots of questions about editing, and an ideal editor will be there daily to answer those questions, even before the edit begins.  Then comes the edit itself, and if the bond has been formed, it will be a positive, rewarding, and successful experience for both writer and editor and will hopefully lead to a long working relationship and friendship between the two parties.

 What constitutes a successful edit?
Great question! I feel an edit is a success if the writer is satisfied with the end product. The icing on the cake, however, is when the writer sends me a second editing job—a sequel, perhaps—and I can see that my instruction and suggestions have been taken to heart and incorporated in the next manuscript. Then I know I did my job!

What is the editor’s relationship to the writer?
It’s very important for the editor and the writer to become a team in order for the edit to be successful.  As an editor, however, I accept the fact that I’m not the captain of the team.  I’m not the one who wrote the words or spent hours enveloped in the creative process.  The editor begins with a secondary role and then works to build that trust with the writer that will eventually level the playing field a bit.  

Writers come to you at different stages in their career, with different talents, writing in different genres, and so on. Do you have to customize your editing for each writer?
I edit in the same manner for each writer, regardless of writing skill level or genre.  I use MS Word Track Changes to allow the writer to accept or reject my suggestions.  Writers who have come to know and trust me often ask me to make the changes directly to their manuscript, saving them precious time as they head toward publication.  All edits are customized according to the type of edit the writer requests—whether it’s a basic proofread, a line edit, a developmental edit, or a combination of these.

Self-publishing has exploded in the last few years. Has this resulted in an increase of writers reaching out to you?
Absolutely!  Anyone can be a “published  author” today, thanks to the availability and ease of self-publishing.   I’ve done free edits for many people who think they can just put words on paper and someone will buy their book. Sadly, many people are putting their writing out there without going through the painstaking (and expensive!) process of editing.  It’s those people who have given self-publishing a bad name.

I think I’ve veered from your question; obviously this topic is one about which I have much to say!

But yes, I have seen an increase in the number of writers seeking editing, thanks in large part to the availability of self-publishing.

 You were an educator for 29 years. Do you see editing as an extension of what you did as an educator?
Yes, I do! As an editor I’m still an educator and see the writer as my student, to some extent.  My job is not only to make the words shine and the sentences flow more smoothly, but to actually teach the writer how to make this happen on their own. My edits contain lots of tips and suggestions that, if incorporated, will result in the writer being much better at his/her craft.  Once a teacher, always a teacher.

You offer a free edit to writers so they can see what you offer. Has this been an effective marketing technique for you?
Offering the free edit was by far the smartest thing I did when getting started as an independent editor.  I didn’t really see it as a marketing tool at first, though. My original focus was on finding a way to gauge a writer’s ability level before offering a quote for services.  The free edit was perfect for that. But then I began to notice that this free edit was drawing writers to me—writers who wanted to see what I could do for them. So the free edit turned into a win-win for both writer and editor. I get a good look at the writer’s skill level, enabling me to determine how long an edit will take and offer a fair quote for my services, and the writer gets to see firsthand what a professional editor can do for them.  It’s my chance to shine, to strut my stuff! If I can impress a writer through that free edit, I’ve got one foot in the door!

After all the editing you do, do you still feel like reading for pleasure?
Reading is my favorite pastime. I still try to save time for pleasure reading every evening, and it’s nice to be able to just enjoy a good story without trying to pinpoint errors and “fix” things. I do notice mistakes though, even when reading for pleasure. It can put a damper on things if I let it, but I try not to do that.

You have a new web site going up. When does that go live and why did you redesign it?
I’m actually going to be doing some revamping of the old site, at the suggestion of my wonderful tech guy.  I’m not sure exactly what he has in mind, but I know it will be wonderful.  I recently had a new PR photo taken to replace the one of me in the rocking chair.  While I am a proud grandma, I certainly don’t need to look like one! I also have some new testimonials and links that need to be added, so we’ll be doing some basic updating.  I expect it will be all polished and up by late next week.

 Lastly, how can writers get in touch with you?
I can be reached by email at myindependenteditor@gmail.com.  I also can be found on Twitter, promoting  my clients and marketing my business @hughesedits4u.

I encourage all writers who would like more information about me and my services to visit my website at www.myindependenteditor.com .  To take advantage of my free edit, 1000 words can be submitted directly from the website, using the link provided there.

In conclusion, I want to thank you for conducting this interview with me and giving me the opportunity to share a little bit about myself with your readers.  I’m honored to have been asked to do so.

Disclosure from FindMy Audience: We are, of course, biased in Susan’s favor, as one of our colleagues, Mark, had his work edited by Susan, and is encouraging the rest of us to do likewise!

Wittgenstein & Book Marketing

Ludwig Wittgenstein

My propositions serve as elucidations in this way: he who understands me eventually recognises them as nonsensical, when he has used them – as steps – to climb up over them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must overcome these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Writers, perhaps this should be our writerly goal for 2014: to use our words as if they were hammers, chisels, pitching tools, as well as primary material (clay, wood, marble, etc.), to build temporary verbal edifices that lead our readers to new perspectives, new insights, to a glimpse of the nature, and importance of, silence itself. That, of course, was Wittgenstein’s last injunction, Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Silence. To have your reader end in that state. That would be something.

* * *

Of course to lead our readers to silence (a stunned silence at that!) we must first find them. And that is no easy feat to do in the social media echo chamber.

At first glance, one would think that the larger one’s following (on Twitter, Facebook, etc.) the better positioned one is to find the elusive reader. The presumption is that someone out there must surely be paying attention to my verbal blitzkreigs and, impressed by my pithy tweets, scintillating quotes, and bargain price (99 cents), buy my book. If only it were so easy.

Dan Blank, founder of  We Grow Media, notes that “…most people, whether it’s a brand or an individual, do very little research to really understand their audience. They like it to be as broad as possible instead of narrowing it down. So I always ask authors, “who’s your audience?” and I get these vague answers back…And it really illustrates to me that they haven’t done the research to find out who specifically their audience is.”

The problem, of course, is one of intention — more precisely, how can you measure someone’s intention to read a work based solely on their use of language (and a multi-faceted, multi-intended language at that)? Think of the difference between the intention (and reception) of a tweet and  a Facebook post. The former encourages a a carney-like atmosphere where everyone is a literary barker; the latter, on the other hand, discourages overt commercialization, a delicious irony of sorts.

* * *

For those of you unfamiliar with Ludwig Wittgenstein, he was, I believe, the only philosopher who was ever responsible for creating, or at least shaping, two different schools of philosophical thought: the Logical-Positivist and the Language School of Philosophy.

Wittgenstein’s life is the stuff of legend: born into a rich, turn-of-the-century Vienese family; three brothers committed suicide; one brother, Paul, lost his arm in World War I and went on to become famous for his one-arm compositions for piano; stints at Cambridge where he shocked the English with his genius, his teutonic disposition, and his depression; bisexuality; self-imposed exiles to Norway and Ireland where he pondered epistemological problems while walking the coasts; and early death from prostate cancer. Many novels have been written about Wittgenstein and Derek Jarman has done a film. The novelist Frank Tallis does a fine job of depicting the heady atmosphere of early twentieth-century Vienna, should you want  a fictional account of the time.

Wittgenstein’s later work, his work on the nature of language, consists of a series of questions, experiments, sorties that often ended up in a linguistic maze — without a thread to rescue him. What, he asked, are the rules of language? How can we mean what we mean? How does someone understand our intended meaning? Is language similar to a game? Are there many “games” within the language game?

* * *

What we find interesting for our purposes, which is to help writers find their readers, is his concept of family resemblances. This is the idea that “things” thought to be connected by one idea (“one essence”) are, rather, connected by similarities and traits, such as one might find in a family (you and your sister have similar noses and chins, but different eyes).

In his Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein analyzes games in a number of very famous propositions. Here is a sampling:

And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way; we can see how similarities crop up and disappear.

…And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities. I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than “family resemblances“; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way. – And I shall say: “games” form a family.

And, we might add, books form a family — as do readers. Some are close, like a brother, sister, mother, father; some are distant relatives. Our job is to ferret out the “overlapping” and “criss-crossing” between the language used to describe “a work” and that used by one’s potential readers. This enables us to construct a “proximal-distal” model, one that measures resemblance to a specific work from closest to most distant. In the process, we are able to make some educated guesses about whether someone is “predisposed” or has a higher degree of probability of reading your work.

This is fundamentally different from what Amazon, for example, does with its recommendation engine. Amazon recommends books based on the buying patterns of its customers. This is a great service, one we use all the time, but what we are interested in doing is finding, not books, but readers — your readers. And the way we are doing it is by looking at the language they use on the social web. Game on!