Harnessing the wind
Elsewhere on BVC, Nancy Jane Moore talks hereM about a book called Fans, Friends, and Followers by Scott Kirsner.
Nancy Jane lists his main points, some of which I agree with, some I don't. Like, Sell merchandise. If I wanted to sell merchandise, I would be a store clerk. Just the thought of handling people's money and dealing with tax paperwork and standing in those horrible long lines at the post office is profoundly depressing.
More positively, Create only what you can create in the sense that nobody really knows what the market "wants" matches my experience. It seems to me that nobody has ever predicted with any trustworthy regularity what the market wants, mostly there's been a sort of slow but frantic chase to keep putting out things similar to what's popular until it's no longer popular, at which time the train jumps the tracks and chugs after the new popular thing.
But creating what you love is half the equation, because there's a good chance that someone else has been craving just that thing. The second half is the tough part: figuring out how to make that thing appeal to others.
Embrace conversation makes good sense to me, because that's what I come to the net for. But conversation and selling things seem two different beasties.
The one that seems most useless is Figure out how to bring in audience participation. Judging from my huge flist, and other linked things I see each day, there are very few who've figured out how to bring in audience participation.
Encouraged (or exhorted) to self-publicize, many writers post about their work constantly. Blogs like that begin to feel like commercials to me, though that might be just because I have so many writers on my daily list here. Some writers track and post about every single review (the praise ones usually with some variation on "By Jove they got it!" appended), or offer contests and prizes in the form of books or bookmarks. How is that working for folks--do new readers click those links, or compete for the prizes, or are those participatory events for already existing friends? Because from the distance it looks like the ones for whom that stuff is successful were already popular. I wonder if those things draw new readers.
The one thing that emerges from the chaos that is the net is that word of mouth is extremely powerful, something governments have always known. But how to harness it?
Nancy Jane lists his main points, some of which I agree with, some I don't. Like, Sell merchandise. If I wanted to sell merchandise, I would be a store clerk. Just the thought of handling people's money and dealing with tax paperwork and standing in those horrible long lines at the post office is profoundly depressing.
More positively, Create only what you can create in the sense that nobody really knows what the market "wants" matches my experience. It seems to me that nobody has ever predicted with any trustworthy regularity what the market wants, mostly there's been a sort of slow but frantic chase to keep putting out things similar to what's popular until it's no longer popular, at which time the train jumps the tracks and chugs after the new popular thing.
But creating what you love is half the equation, because there's a good chance that someone else has been craving just that thing. The second half is the tough part: figuring out how to make that thing appeal to others.
Embrace conversation makes good sense to me, because that's what I come to the net for. But conversation and selling things seem two different beasties.
The one that seems most useless is Figure out how to bring in audience participation. Judging from my huge flist, and other linked things I see each day, there are very few who've figured out how to bring in audience participation.
Encouraged (or exhorted) to self-publicize, many writers post about their work constantly. Blogs like that begin to feel like commercials to me, though that might be just because I have so many writers on my daily list here. Some writers track and post about every single review (the praise ones usually with some variation on "By Jove they got it!" appended), or offer contests and prizes in the form of books or bookmarks. How is that working for folks--do new readers click those links, or compete for the prizes, or are those participatory events for already existing friends? Because from the distance it looks like the ones for whom that stuff is successful were already popular. I wonder if those things draw new readers.
The one thing that emerges from the chaos that is the net is that word of mouth is extremely powerful, something governments have always known. But how to harness it?