Embracing Change

An article by Stuart Elliott (@stuartenyt) in The New York Times (@NYTimesAd) explains another facet of the revolutionary change occurring in society because of the Internet:

The language of social media — “fans,” “friend request,” “like,” “social network,” and, yes, “status update” — is increasingly appearing in advertising, whether or not those ads are running in social media like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Such ads are also increasingly being aimed at mainstream consumers, not just the younger consumers who were the early adopters of social media.

The appropriation of the trappings of social media for marketing purposes is an example of a tactic known as borrowed interest, by which brands seek to associate themselves with elements of popular culture that are pervasive enough to be familiar to the proverbial everybody. Social media’s new starring role in product pitches signals that agencies and advertisers believe they are sufficiently prevalent to refer to without producing puzzled reactions.

Read this in full.

Another article says “every business should embrace change.” Kevin Chou, CEO and co-founder of Kabam, writes on his LinkedIn blog about counsel he received from a colleague, who said, “Business change is never popular, and it's a messy affair, but survival depends upon it."

"It's tough to put difficult advice into action, and harder still to have the conviction to see necessary changes through. For one thing, you need a thread-the-needle combination of self-confidence that you've made the right decision, and humility, so that you and your team learn quickly to fix the inevitable mistakes in the messy road ahead. For anyone facing a dreaded but necessary change process, I give the same advice – you likely won’t be popular, and will make inevitable mistakes – but standing still is certainly not an option."

Read this in full.

We at Somersault believe the unprecedented changes occurring in the publishing world aren’t a crisis to avoid; they’re a playground of possibilities. We’re here to help you embrace change and leverage it to fulfill your mission. We like to say we’re flipping the publishing world right-side up!

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

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Bookstore Browsing Vital for Publishing; Bookstore Chain Offers Exclusive Bonus Material

A report in the The Bookseller (@thebookseller) says “the crucial role of physical bookshops to a healthy publishing industry” is evident “by findings from both Bowker Market Research UK (@Bowker) and research company Enders Analysis.”

“We estimate that when a bookshop closes, about a third of its sales transfer to another bookshop,” says Enders analyst Douglas McCabe. This means as much as two-thirds of sales disappear. Some of this spend doubtless migrates online, but much of it vanishes from the book sector entirely.”

Both McCabe and BMR director Jo Henry agree on the crucial role of bookshop browsing. Discovery still does not work online, McCabe asserted. “Consumers do not browse the Internet as is often suggested,” he said. Enders Analysis estimates that serendipity and discovery generate as much as two-thirds of UK general book sales, much of this down to bookshops. “There is almost nothing that can be done to sustain the health of the network of bookshops that should be collectively considered too extravagant,” McCabe said. “Without bookshops, publishing would have to rethink its model at every level.”

Read this in full.

The UK bookstore chain Waterstones (@Waterstones) is now “stocking special limited edition books with exclusive extra material to try to give it the edge in the competitive book-selling market. The book retailer has signed contracts with publishers to sell unique versions of their books, only available in Waterstones stores” to lure buyers away from Amazon and other online outlets.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN)

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The People's E-Book Democratizes Ebook Publishing

The People’s E-Book (@peoples_e) is a new epublishing service being built by Greg Albers, the founder and publisher of Hol Art Books (@holartbooks) with funds from 920 investors through Kickstarter. It will be a DIY tool anyone can use for free.

The People's E-Book seeks to be a lab, an incubator, an e-book creation platform for artists, authors, and alternative presses who want to try new things, publish new books, and push into new territories. The People's E-Book will handle ebooks of all sizes and scope, but it will excel in areas that no one else has cared to consider — the very small, the quick and dirty, the simple and the experimental.

The People’s E-book is a super-simple online tool with an intuitive visual interface to allow anyone to make e-books quickly and for free. This is barebones ebook publishing. What the photocopier was to zines, we hope The People’s E-book will be to digital books.

Read this in full.

Also see our previous blogpost, "Guy Kawasaki's New Self-Publishing Instruction Book."

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN)

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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

Gesture-Control Gadget For Your Laptop to be Released

New technology scheduled to be released in May has possibilities to facilitate new ways of creating and displaying content.

The Leap Motion (@LeapMotion) controller plugs into almost any newer laptop and allows you to manipulate the screen via a series of hand and finger movements in the air. It's like having a touchscreen computer, but without actually touching the screen.

Watch the above video.

Read this in full.

How will this transforming device contribute to the content you’re publishing?

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN)

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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

Papercasting: Literary Trailers for the iPhone Generation

Alexander Mayor, digital producer at Papercasting (@papercasting), explains his new book service in this article for The Literary Platform (@TheLitPlatform). He says ‘papercasting’ aims to create new hybrid media trailers for books that people can consume on their smartphones, tablets, laptops, or desktops.

For a new generation of readers, music fans, and film lovers, the initial experience of these cultural works is increasingly not a retail space or publishing house but a piece of personal technology – the shop is in your pocket or inside your laptop. Our time is increasingly spent in the company of devices, not books and records. Thus the competition for the reader’s attention is intensified; the opportunity cost of one form of media choice weighs heavily on all the other present options.

The idea at the heart of papercasting is simple: bring to life the premise of books in as imaginative and entertaining way possible and you establish the value of the book and close the sale. Create something for writers and readers to share. Recreate a little of the magic of an in-store event but for a potentially far bigger audience. Make the trailer available from the back of the book jacket. Make it come alive in the shop by harnessing the DIY-media advantages of the digital era – the fact that with the right skills we can now create our own compelling, high-quality media at low-cost and high speed.

Here’s an example of papercasting:

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to produce audio and video book trailers that strategically promote your content and brand.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN)

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Video: I, Pencil

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (@ceidotorg), a non-profit public policy organization dedicated to advancing the principles of limited government, free enterprise, and individual liberty, produced the above video I, Pencil, a new short film adapted from the 1958 essay by Leonard E. Read, founder of the Foundation for Economic Freedom.

The essay, under its full title, I, Pencil: My Family Tree as Told to Leonard E. Read, had a simple goal: "to show that economics cannot be 'planned' since no one, no matter how smart, can create something as incredibly ordinary as a pencil." Instead, its creation requires a highly complex global industrial network organized not by a master planner but by the spontaneous supply-and-demand workings of the "invisible hand" in the peaceful, voluntary, libertarian, laissez-faire free market.

We include the video here on the Somersault blog only to showcase its creative and fun use of animation in a video (based on what might be a solemn essay) intended to go viral. That, and because authors, perhaps less often these days, have written their bestsellers using only a simple pencil!

Also see our previous blogpost, “The 3 Qualities That Make a YouTube Video Go Viral.”

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN)

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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

Dr. Seuss Titles as Interpreted by Intellectuals

The website BuzzFeed (@BuzzFeed) offers to re-title a few Dr. Seuss books based on their possible underlying meanings. Perhaps the exercise shows how important the correct title is to the success of a book ☺

The Butter Battle BookThe Tragic Futility of the Nuclear Arms Race!

The Sneetches and Other StoriesRacists and Other Stories

The Cat in the HatThe Virtues of Autonomy, Efficiency, and Skepticism

The LoraxThe Importance of Environmental Awareness in Industrialized Society

Yertle the TurtleWhy Hitler is Dangerous and Other Stories

How the Grinch Stole ChristmasThe Psychological Implications of Holiday-Motivated Materialism

Green Eggs and HamHow Fear of the Unknown Hinders the Developmnet of Informed Opinions

Horton Hears a WhoThe Inherent Ethical Issues of Isolationism!

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN)

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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

Speech Analysis: 'So God Made a Farmer'

Last year this blog highlighted a roundup of the Super Bowl (#superbowl) television ads from a marketing perspective; discerning which hit the mark and which didn’t.

This year, we want to feature only one spot, and that from a speech-making point of view.

Dodge Ram’s 2-minute “So God Made a Farmer” commercial (#keepplowing), which aired in the fourth quarter, featured nothing more than a slideshow of stunning still images accompanied by a 1978 Future Farmers of America (@nationalffa) convention speech by the late newscaster and supreme rhetorician Paul Harvey, in which the radio personality paid tribute to America’s farmers.

Among Harvey’s considerable voice talents was his focused attention on the dramatic use of silence. He knew how to time and maximize pauses in his speaking to keep the audience on the edge of its seat and follow his every word. He also was an expert in pacing: knowing when to slow his delivery and when to speed it up. Even Harvey’s simple signature sign-on, “Good Morning, America,” was mesmerizing.

The above video draws its strength and effectiveness from Harvey’s striking delivery. Listen to it while paying attention to his cadence and rhythm, and the emphasis he gives words and phrases. That’s how to give a speech!

See the article “'So God made a farmer' Super Bowl ad inspires” by Erin Roach, assistant editor of Baptist Press (@baptistpress).

See Paul Harvey Archives.

See Paul Harvey Jr.’s website.

See Ram’s Year of the Farmer website.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN)

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

HarperCollins Christian Publishing to Join the Espresso Book Machine Network

HarperCollinsChristianPublishing, comprised of both Thomas Nelson, Inc. (@ThomasNelson) and Zondervan (@Zondervan), is now making its titles available through On Demand Books’ (@espressobook) growing Espresso Book Machine (EBM) “digital-to-print at retail” sales channel.

Tom Knight, HarperCollinsChristianPublishing senior vice president of sales, says, “The Espresso Book Machine will significantly enhance a customer’s in-store experience by giving bricks-and-mortar retailers the ability to offer an almost endless supply of books.”

The EBM is the only digital-to-print at-retail solution on the market today. With the push of a button, a title can be printed with a full-color cover, bound, and trimmed to any standard size. In a matter of minutes, it emerges from the EBM as a bookstore-quality paperback book, which the customer can pay for and carry out the store immediately.

Content from publishers is fed to the EBM via EspressNet, On Demand Books’ growing digital network of titles (currently numbering over 7 million). Much like an iTunes for books, EspressNet retrieves, encrypts, transmits, and catalogs books from a multitude of English and foreign language content providers, including public domain, in-copyright, and self-published titles. Through the SelfServe software, writers can format, design, edit, and upload their books for printing through the EBM, and for inclusion in EspressNet. SelfServe will soon also be able to convert print files to the ePub format suitable for ereaders.

Read this in full.

See the pdf news release.

See the pdf news release, “Penguin Titles Coming to an Espresso Book Machine Near You.”

Also see our blogposts tagged “Print on Demand” and “A New Publishing Ecosystem Emerges.”

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN)

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

Seth Godin on the Art of Noticing, and Then Creating

On the APM radio program On Being (@Beingtweets), host  Krista Tippett (@kristatippett) interviewed author, speaker, and marketing leader Seth Godin (@ThisIsSethsBlog). Tippet says Godin is “an original and helpful voice on this landscape of digital connection for which there are no maps. He is a singular thought leader and innovator in what he describes as our post-industrial, post-geography ‘connection economy.’ Rather than merely tolerate change, he says, we are all called now to rise to it. We are invited and stretched in whatever we do to be artists — to create in ways that matter to other people.”

In the interview, Godin says, “Marketing is the life we live. The question is, will we choose ethical marketing: weaving a story, weaving a tribe, and weaving a network that mean something?” ...

Read this in full.

Listen to the interview.

Read Godin’s blogpost about his On Being interview, “Slow media.”

Also see our blogpost, "Seth Godin Ends Domino Project with Lessons Learned."

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.