Update: Apparenly I overestimated Walker Lamond’s abilities.

Credit: tripu

You know the Book Deal Blog? You know, the blog that doesn’t just lead to a book deal on the same topic, but a book about the blog. Book blogs like Stuff White People Like and 1001 Rules for My Unborn Son.

Now, did you ever consider that book deal came before the blog? That the blog was just a way to build buzz for the book? Just consider the bio for the author of 1001 Rules on the publisher’s website:

Walker Lamond is a writer and television producer. His documentaries have appeared on the Discovery Channel, National Geographic Channel, TruTV, and HBO, and he has written for numerous publications including Stop Smiling magazine, Valet, Babble, and Asylum. Lamond lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife and their son, who arrived shortly after the completion of this book.

First off, Walker’s timing with book was perfect. Or maybe it was his son’s timing. I don’t know.

But otherwise, Walker is a very established member of the media. He writes for televisions and numerous other publications. He doesn’t need to pull a publicity stunt to get the attention of publihsers. He has access.

Looking at this, it seems a lot more likely that Walker pitched the idea and used the Tumblr blog to build buzz. Who knows, maybe his ideas on how to sell the book before it was even in-print was part of his pitch.

This just might be the magic formula for marketing books online. Forget putting out wannabe-viral-promo-videos or building a book-signing-tour-blog for the author. Create a demand for the product before it’s even made. That’s some smart media marketing.

What this constitutes is an evolution in how media-makers think. They’re adapting very quickly to the new media landscape, and a whole new breed of media-makers are emerging.

Content used to come across in one medium, and maybe other media were used to promote it after the fact. But the web has brought all those media so closely together, sometime all on the same page. And now media-makers (writers, producers, broadcaster, etc.) are incorporating other media in from the inception.

They’re thinking of how to build their community before they have something to build it around.

They’re thinking about their congregation before the church is built, and in a lot of ways, that makes a lot more sense. They’re creating the demand and then filling it. And from a marketing perspective, that makes a lot more sense because there’s a lot less risk of sunken costs that way.

Update: BookOven came out of private alpha a couple hours after this was posted.

Meet Hugh McGuire. Hugh is a lot of things. He founded Librivox, the largest online catalogue of audio-books. He also co-founder BookOven, an online community where writers can support one another by editing each others work and providing feedback. He’s also podcaster.

In any case, I recently sat down with Hugh to discuss these different things. In this clip, he covers how BookOven was conceived and how he sees books evolving inthe digital age.

iPhone Version

Credit: drt child

The internet is a distribution channel, not a medium. It’s more of a logistical model than anything else. The internet just happens to be a distribution channel that cannot only distribute a variety of media, but can do so all at once.

The internet is really just a change in logistical technology that happens to threaten several other distinct industrial infrastructures simultaneously. In that respect, it’s more of an economic development than a media one. It’s simply changed the balance of supply and demand for a bunch of other media (print, audio, and video) by making it them all more accessible.

For example, video is a medium, television isn’t. What television is, rather, is a distribution model for video. Television didn’t really do anything to change motion pictures. And neither has the internet. It’s only made content from that medium more accessible — kinda like how cargo planes made fresh produce more accessible without changing it.

The internet is just a change in the accessibility of media – both its consumption and distribution. It’s doing to four different media (text, audio, images, annd motion) what BETA and VHS technology did to video alone. It’s like the printing press, telegraph, telephone, radio, and television all rolled into one.

The only way in which the internet differs is where other developments opened up the way for a new and distinct industrial infrastructures, the internet is challenging each and everyone of those industries all at once. It’s kinda of like an industrial restructuring thats brings a bunch of separate division under one roof.

So the future of industrial media will manifest in terms of media entities: conglomerate media organizations that trade simultaneously in four different media: text, imagery, audio, and motion picture. After all, with this new logistical technology makes certain economies of scope that anyone who doesn’t pursue them will be uncompetitive.

Credit: Gina Argentina

Considering how the New York Times is coping with the the plight of the publishing industry and news media better than most, it’s not surprising to see that they might be pursuing a more symbiotic editorial model. Granted, when it comes to weathering the storm, the NYT is a lot larger in both scope and scale (size, authority, and audience) than many of its contemporaries, so it has a definite edge. But its continual efforts to reinvent its content model are plain.

In addition to everything it’s done with blogs and Times Wire (a real time news feed), it seems to be pursuing all three facets of a symbiotic editorial model. Most recently, not only has it started thinking of its readers as users, but it’s implemented a diversified ad-revenue model to go with it. As Adage reports:

[...] Derek Gottfrid, senior software architect and product technologist at The New York Times, said the company has quit calling online readers “readers,” instead referring to them as users. [...]

“When we think traditionally about creation [at The New York Times] it was limited to people within the Times,” [said Derek Gottfrid, senior software architect and product technologist at NYT]. “We created for readers … [for whom] it was a passive experience. But as we moved online, we wanted to move people from readers to users.”

This shift to users-instead-of-readers is an important part of the transition toward becoming a social news organization. As Alan Rusbridger, the Editor-in-Chief of an equally auhtoritative newspaper, The Guardian, noted in a recent interview, there is a blurring between the reader and the journalist, so it’s become necessary to involve the reader more and create a community around your journalist core.

But more importantly, the NYT’s shift toward users-instead-of-readers is also seen in its integration of apps and what those apps might mean for its revenues. Overall, it looks to be evolving into a veritable social news organization. As the AdAge article elaborates, to coax people from being readers to being users:

[...] the company has opened up its [APIs]. The Times has taken content and data — both internally created material, such as movie reviews and best-seller lists, and external data, such as campaign-finance and legislative information — and opened up the APIs so that outside developers can create tools for its consumers.

Among the results: Instantwatcher mashes up the “Watch Instantly” program from online movie-rental service Netflix with Times movie critics’ top choices. Another app, called NYTExplorer, provides an alternative article-search function to the one that exists on NYTimes.com.

These apps demonstrate how the NYT is diversifying their ad-revenue model. The “Watch Instantly” app, for instance, seems a lot like an affiliate marketing tactic — i.e. a performance-based referral marketing model.

Purusing this kind of ad-revenue diversification and the technology to implement it is 2/3 of the symbiotic editorial equation. The reaming third is integrating a full-sevice marketing agency into your organization (as Vice Magazine has), and as the Nieman Journalism Lab recently documented, the NYT has an advertising R&D lab that seems poised to evolve into just such a full-sevice marketing agency.

Credit: OliverAlex

First, a publication provides two products: content and a medium. The content is for your readers/consumers/users, and the medium is for advertisers looking to reach them.

Your editorial becomes symbiotic when you cross-sell those two products, and you do that by strategically develop content items that complement the offers of advertisers that you proactively scouted. But it’s not about churning out biased content that will help advertisers sell their products. Rather, it’s about having an editorial format, knowing your readers demographics, and understanding what kind of consumers they also happen to be. So a big part of it is making sure that your advertisers actually have product offers that appeal to your readers’ consumer interests.

This, of course, raises the question of how you figure that out. It’s one thing to replace your ad-sales department with a fully integrated marketing agency, like Vice Magazine does, but it’s quite another to analyze your readers in a non-intrusive, non-obstructive way. And that’s where understanding them as users comes in.

Credit: Alex Glickman

But then there’s the technology side to treating your readers as users. Basically, if you’re going to provider your readers with the content that they each find most relevant, you’re going to have to collect data on them. And you do that by becoming a social news organization (or just plain-ol’ social content organization).

By leveraging popular APIs so that your readers can seamlessly aggregate, syndicate, and share your content, you achieve so much more than just increasing page views. You also gain insight into their behavior as users and consumers. Integrated with personal profiles/logins within your portal, this allows you target them with the most relevant content.

More importantly, it allows you to target them with offers that actually appeal to them. And when you do that, you not only increase conversions and value of your ad-space; you also build trust with your readers by demonstrating that you understand and appreciate their interests (as consumers and users). In a word, you use your users to target advertisers.

Of course, doing so effectively require that you (1) have a fully integrated marketing agency in-house (like Vice Magazine) that can (2) help you understand your users, (3) collaborate with your editorial to develop symbiotic content, (4) scout appropriate advertisers, and (5) diversify your ad-revenue stream so that you’re not relying on a single, limited model that might coax you into compromising user-experience. In other words, your in-house marketing agency has to market your editorial product first, and your advertisers second.

Disclosure: this post is the bastard child of a comment on the Nieman Journalism Lab and Nicholas Carr’s Realtime Chronicles.

Image: "Super Target" by jeco

But now content is now dynamic. It exists in “realtime,” in the stream, and that’s killing the real space that was so cumbersome and beyond our control.

Now, if publishers are smart, if they’re really strategic, can actually amass more practical information about their audience than most government agencies. And that means that they can proactively connect their audience with offers that their audience actually care about, is actually interested in. That, after all, is what symbiotic editorial is all about.

I mean, smart publishers, the strategic ones, have so much information that they have to hire database-miners! A job that didn’t even exists all too long ago. So maybe publishers need to stop thinking about how advertisers can target their readers and start thinking about how they can use their readers to target advertisers. Maybe they need to start thinking about a kind of third dimensional advertising.