Web 2.0 Podcast Transcript #1
Brian DeLaet: Welcome to our podcast. I’m Brian DeLaet, CEO of EduCyber, Inc. Today we’ll be speaking with Mary Walewski of Buy the Book Marketing.
Mary has been helping authors sell their books for several years and has created several different practices designed to meet their specific needs. So, what is the connection between selling books and Web 2.0? Let’s find out from Mary.
Mary Walewski: Thank you.
Brian: Mary, how long have you been in this line of work?
Mary: About four years now. I had a friend who self published a book and she called me up one day and said, “I need some help marketing this. Do you want to do it?”
And I said, OK, but I knew nothing about it. So she gave me a copy of Dan Poynter’s self-publishing guide, which is one of the bibles of the field. I started reading and then I started studying and four years later, I have a business. It’s been a lot of fun.
Brian: And you’ve had this business for the four years.
Mary: For four years.
Brian: OK. Good. And since this Podcast is about Web 2.0 technologies, we’re going to be moving in that direction. But just in general, what are some of the changes that you’ve seen happen in your business over the last year?
Mary: Even going back a little bit further than that, what I have been seeing is a steady change of traditional publicity, which used to be with major newspapers and magazines. From that being the standard that you would get publicity, to getting more and more on the Internet, because not only is the readership getting higher for even regular newspapers who have a web presence, but there are all these social media sites where you can connect directly with your audience and meet people on a very personal level.
Brian: You’re talking about the social media sites. What is a social media site?
Mary: One of the first ones that came on the scene was MySpace, and MySpace originated as a site for garage bands to promote their music. They would be able to upload clips onto their site, they could alert their fans as to when they were touring and make announcements, all sorts of things.
Pretty soon, other people started catching on. Kids started creating their own MySpace page and then their parents joined in. And now the average age of people on MySpace is about 35.
Brian: 35?
Mary: Yes.
Brian: So MySpace is not just for kids in the garage bands.
Mary: It’s not kids. There’s still a very large music presence. I found out when we did a report on MySpace and we created a page for our dog, there are a lot of dogs on MySpace. There are corporations. There are celebrities.
Brian: You created a web page for your dog?
Mary: She has more friends now than we do.
Brian: [laughs] OK.
Mary: All over the world, too.
Brian: All right. I won’t ask how she types because that’s probably a topic for another day.
Mary: Better than I do, actually.
Brian: But thinking about Web2.0, can you tell us what are three specific either technologies or methods that you use in your business to help your clients who are, of course, your authors?
Mary: Yes. Most of my authors are self-published. What that means is they paid for everything, from the cover design to the editing, to actually printing the book. And now they have, chances are, about 500 to 3000 books sitting in their garage waiting to be sold. So the first thing I ask them to do is sit down with me, and we think about what should go on their website.
And that is critical, because it is not only a place where someone interested in buying their book is going to go, it’s also where any media that becomes interested in their topic is going to go to check out and see what their credentials are and what they have written on the subject.
They have to really give some good thought to, what do they want people to do when they get to their site? And how do you get them to stick around, sample some of your writing, and get an idea if it’s something they want to buy?
Secondly, they need to really start connecting with their audience and establish their expertise. So, I usually advise them to think about starting a blog. And if they blog–about two or three times a week would be terrific–they start to gather an audience. They can also tap into what other people are saying on the subject. They can comment on other people’s blogs, they can start getting some traffic to their own sites and they start to establish a little more of a presence up there in their subject.
The third thing is to really use all the tools that Amazon.com has available for authors.
Brian: Let’s back up just a second because you’re talking about the blog. Your first technology website, I think that’s a given to be Web 2.0, but that is a good basis. I’ve heard of the blogosphere, but there’s lots of different sites to put blogs. Where is the best place for an author to have their blog?
Mary: I’ve had authors on Blogger, which is one of the better known sites that Google now owns. It’s a little rigid, you can’t really customize it terribly well, but it’s free so it’s OK.
There are a couple of paid ones out there. TypePad comes to mind and they have a lot of technical support and I think you can pay maybe $5 a month to be up there. They allow you to customize your blog a little bit more.
WordPress has a free site, too, that you can use. These are all different, slightly different blogging software–some you can download, others you can host on somebody else’s site–and there’s probably about a zillion more I don’t even know about.
Brian: Do you have any recommendations or preferences on where or how is the best place for somebody to do a blog?
Mary: I would suggest either TypePad or WordPress, simply because they’re a little more professional looking. Blogger is OK, but it tends to be more for people’s personal blogs.
Brian: So either WordPress or TypePad to host their blog site.
I’m sorry to have interrupted you; you were starting to tell about your third technology, which is using Amazon.
Mary: Yes, Amazon is a little bit more than just a place to sell your books. It’s a really good venue. It’s probably the best-known place in the world to buy books on the Internet. But what a lot of people don’t know is that you have a lot of services available through them, at no charge if you are an author, that allows you to publicize your book.
First of all, you can host a blog on Amazon as an author. You’re given a profile page. In fact, everybody is, but very few people, I think, really use it except authors. And you can create what they call “Listmania!”. Listmania! Is a list of, I’ll say favorite books on your topic.
Of course, you’ll probably include your own book, but you can also include your competitors’ books. It’s another way to allow your readers to get to know you.
You can put up articles and the overall topic is called, “So you’d like to.” So you’d like to know more about Web 2.0, for instance. So, you can put articles up there. A lot of people review books on Amazon. You as an author could also review books on Amazon. If you review your competitors’ books, you get to put after your name “author of…” put your own title in and hopefully, if they like what you have to say, they are going to check out your book.
Brian: OK.
Mary: So, there are a lot of different ways that you can up there and really become very well known on Amazon.
Brian: OK. You’ve given us some really good pictures of broad topics. Can you give us an example of a specific author you’ve helped use one of more of these technologies recently?
Mary: Yes. I have several authors who have been doing that. My first author, Mary Jo Fay, who writes relationship books, has been doing a variety of things like that. Of course, she has a website. We’ve got her books on Amazon.com and she has reviewed books and also put Listmania! Up on various topics in relationship books, things like that.
We have also done–this is totally new for what we’re talking about here–we’ve done a book trailer for her, where we could put that on YouTube. That was for one of her books called, “The Seven Secrets of Love.”
So, from her website you can go to YouTube and see a video that describes her book. And also, it has been very good for driving traffic to both Amazon and to her website. That’s one example.
Another one is a non-profit I’ve been working with called the Legal Center for People with Disabilities. Their specialty is special education law, and they’ve done two guides on special ed law for parents. The author decided to start blogging, and he not only blogged, but he also commented on other people’s blogs.
As soon as he stated doing that, in a very short period of time, they started noticing an increase in sales. So, Randy is living proof that the sort of one-to-one interaction on the Internet does get good results.
Brian: So, are you saying that he noticed the change after he started putting comments on other blogs?
Mary: Both.
Brian: For doing both.
Mary: And he started getting comments on his own articles that he was posting on his blog. The traffic also went up on the website. A lot of times in their case, parents really have no idea. If they have a special needs child, they don’t really know what their rights are. A lot of times the counselors and the teachers at the school really don’t know what the child is entitled to for various reasons.
The law is very complicated. Randy’s book gives parents a very clear interpretation of the law and how it applies to their circumstance. So, anyone who is looking for that kind of information would find a blog like that very illuminating.
Brian: That’s very wonderful. At the beginning of this conversation you were talking about how maybe the traditional methods don’t work. Why is it that the Web technology, Web 2.0, works and works better than traditional, enough that that’s what you’re really marketing right now?
Mary: It’s kind of a sign of the times. They’ve done polls nationwide on where Americans are getting their news from. Over70% are getting most of it from the Internet. So, the influence of traditional newspapers is waning.
Also, the costs are going up. They’re having to pay more to print, to distribute, because of the cost of fuel going up. People are moving around more. They’re not subscribing to newspapers the way they used to. Instead, they’re using the Internet.
So, with the change in circulation, ad revenue is dropping. Reporters are getting laid off. I mean, it’s not really a great state of affairs for a traditional newspaper these days.
Brian: Yes, that’s true.
Mary: And as a result, too, sections like the book review section, which used to be a mainstay for book publicity, are shrinking or being eliminated.
Brian: If you can do it on Amazon for free and in real time, why take the time to do it on a book or paper.
Mary: And also book editors are tending to only review books from very large traditional publishers like Simon & Schuster or Random House, places like that. If you’re self-published you have practically no chance of getting reviewed. So, the Internet has provided a very level playing field.
Brian: That’s that great leveling effect that people like about the Internet.
Mary: It’s a lot of fun up there. You can become a very big fish in a very small pond. So even if your market is people who build guitar amplifiers, for instance, you can find devotees in that very narrow little niche all over the world.
Brian: Uh-huh.
Mary: And you can become the big fish.
Brian: So that that small pond isn’t right here where we are, but that small pond is in that niche, wherever it is in the world.
Mary: It could be in Australia. It could be in New Zealand. It could be in Canada. It doesn’t matter.
Brian: OK. Very good. Well, thank you very much. That’s Mary Walewski from Buy the Book Marketing. And Mary, can you tell us how can we contact you?
Mary: You can go to my website, which is BuytheBookMarketing.com and my email address is Mary@buythebookmarketing.com.
Brian: And that’s Buy the Book Marketing, B-U-Y. Buy the Book Marketing.
Mary: Thank you.
Brian: Thank you, and have a great day.
Transcription by CastingWords
Tags: Internet, Marketing, Social Media, Web 2.0