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Using Kickstarter to battle tired tropes: An interview with Monica Valentinelli

March 15, 2016 by Andrew Leave a Comment

Monica Valentinelli is one of the two editors of Apex Publications’ proposed project “Upside Down: Inverted Tropes in Storytelling”. It’s a proposed project because the publishers have turned to Kickstarter to raise the funding. At the time of writing the project will be a success; over 800 backers have pledged contributions worth over $13,000 which beats the $10,000 funding goal. There are nearly two weeks left to support the project and you can follow progress here.


[Back this Project]

We asked Monica about the Kickstarter. Zebra Eclipse’s focus is very much on the evolution of marketing and publishing (they’re merging as they evolve) but commercial model in this instance is just as exciting.

What’s wrong with tropes?

Tropes and cliches, by themselves, are powerful because they are omnipresent and resonate throughout our media. Over the years, however, as we continue to produce and enjoy more stories, games, comics, television shows, and films these same devices need to be examined for many reasons. Overused tropes regarding gender and race, for example, perpetuate stereotypes that have been around for decades and feed into the popular narrative. By ignoring tropes and cliches, writers run the risk of boring or alienating readers who are sensitive and aware of the tropes rampant in many genres. And, even more so, works presented may be considered poorly researched or written–simply because the writer defaulted to a crutch without considering it further. Thus, tropes and cliches tend to generate a lot of discussion when they don’t work–and we hope to do exactly the opposite, to show what happens when they’re used as the basis for a story in new and interesting ways.

You have a stretch goal at $15,000 which is of interest because it offers backers nothing new. Instead you’ll be paying contributing authors more. What helped influence that decision?

We’ve already achieved our first stretch goal, which was to add critical non-fiction essays to the collection. Our stretch goals include two pay bumps; one for our authors and the other for our essayists, editors, and marketing folks. We felt that these stretch goals would be a show of support on our part for the work our authors have done to think about and research various aspects of their stories as well as market themselves and their stories. After all, six cents a word may be the industry standard, but that is a base amount that doesn’t cover marketing or research costs.

Is a Kickstarter needed for a trope-busting collection because the anthology wouldn’t be commercially successful otherwise?

Most anthologies are, quite frankly, not commercially viable for small press publishers for a number of reasons ranging from the need to produce significant up front costs to building enough marketing buzz to cover the number of copies sold before turning a profit. There are also logistical concerns, too, which can effect an anthology’s efficacy. With a novel or short story collection, a small press publisher works out a deal with a single author as opposed to making arrangements with the many people involved in an anthology. So, in many cases, anthologies aren’t smart to pursue without a mechanism in place, like Kickstarter, to make it worth a publisher’s while. Kickstarter allows us to pay writers professional rates and cover the costs of printing, layout, marketing, and distribution that a publisher would normally have to pay up front and out-of-pocket.

How does running a Kickstarter to fund and launch the anthology affect the marketing of the book?

I’m of the mind that Kickstarter is marketing, because it brings awareness to a project and encourages backers (800+ and counting!) to financially invest in the idea in order to bring the project to life. This tool allows us to reach out to backers, to communicate directly with them, to get them excited about an anthology that couldn’t be possible without their help–both during the Kickstarter and afterward.

Regardless, successful Kickstarters tend to be at the center of a marketing plan before, during, and after release, for the backers need to be notified and taken care of before sales are opened up to the general public. Since the Kickstarter still lives on the site long after the campaign ends, many readers discover the campaign at a later date and anticipate the upcoming release, with the understanding that the core audience (e.g. backers) do come first. In this way, Kickstarter serves as the center of a book launch, and that success/enthusiasm helps fuel a launch.

How does a publisher’s commitment to promote a book differ from when dealing with an anthology rather than an author’s own title?

I’m sure the amount of attention to marketing books vs. anthologies is often contingent based on the people and marketing knowledge/experiences involved. In our case, Apex Publications is an established small press publisher that has produced novels, non-fiction books, and anthologies. We view Apex Publications as a partner as opposed to a mere client, and that furthers our ability to remain visible and connected to their future plans for marketing the anthology once it’s been released.

Upside Down

The Guardian’s Key Publishing trends

February 12, 2016 by Andrew Leave a Comment

This is well worth your time; 51 slides that you can whisk through in a few minutes.

Guardian publishing trends 2016 from Jess Morton

The takeaways;

The adblockalypse – no answers yet, but all newspapers will be impacted.
My thoughts – this has already changed the internet, the value exchange of “I read this for free as you included an ad” is no longer understood or accepted.

Planet of the apps – a new channel that’ll get audiences more engaged.
My thoughts – apps are a challenge to smaller publishers, like bloggers, who don’t have the sources to custom build their own one. Off the shelf solutions aren’t yet good enough/worth it for them.

Continuous partial attention – those times where you have someone’s full attention are rare and precious.
My thoughts – one of the attributes of the connected era is that marcoms has become a “many to one” relationship; flipped from the original “one to many”.

Curation vs Creation – original quality content is needed for engagement.
My thoughts – very true. Curation has its place, but that’s limited and still needs to be supported by creation.

New business models for news – destination vs distribution; open vs walled gardens.
My thoughts – newspapers should look at the 0/1/100 model that works for many game publishers.

Minillennials – mobile, will create a band relationship if they want.
My thoughts – not fond of brands at all.

Podcasting – a return for podcasting; popular again.
My thoughts – has the power to connect in the same way as radio does; feels more personal.

The pwoer of visual language – emotions and visual associations with brands.
My thoughts – The west catching up with established eastern language constructs.

VR – the next tech revolution?.
My thoughts – VR / AR the terms are blurring already but the potential is huge.

This week’s link herd February 8, 2016

February 8, 2016 by Andrew Leave a Comment

What’s a link herd?

Here at Zebra Eclipse Studios a link herd is triggered when there’s enough interesting stories about the common evolution of marketing and publishing to share in a roundup. Sometimes link herds are short and snappy. Not today, today’s link herd is a catch-up that stretches back a few weeks.

Enjoy!

herd-8-2-16

  • WSJ drops publisher frenemy LinkedIn’s share button
    LinkedIn has been something of a frenemy. But now, The Wall Street Journal has gone full-on hostile by dropping its LinkedIn sharing button from its article pages.
  • In search of Facebook love, publishers form link-sharing pacts with each other
    The site works with around 35 publishers, including Mental Floss, Maxim and Wired. Seven of those sites have agreed in turn to post Daily Dot stories on their own Facebook pages.
  • Google News Publishers Don’t Get A Ranking Boost
    Shouldn’t be a huge surprise but John Mueller, one of Google’s most vocal engineers, has confirmed that publishers approved for Google News don’t get a ranking boost in web search.
  • Meet the Instagram gallery entrepreneurs
    Since they are doing a good job of dragging the fine art world into in the 21st century, Business Insider decided it was time to interview them, while having a look round their Soho gallery.
  • Three YouTube influencers give their views on brand partnerships
    What demands do vloggers make of brands wanting to work with them? They need clarity, control and plenty of time.
  • Now That The FTC Has Spoken On Native Advertising, What’s Next?
    The days of playing fast and easy in native advertising are over.
  • PewDiePie to Launch His Own Content Network
    pewdiepie, youtube, disney, felixkjellberg
  • Slant News Growing, With 70% Of Revenue Going To Writers
    Slant News is growing and it pays its crowdsourced content creators up with 70% of the ad revenue their stories earn.
  • Curve Digital and Kuju merge to form ‘major new British publisher’
    New British computer game publisher and developer created as The Catalis Group merges acquisitions and ditches old brands.
  • What were the biggest stories on Facebook in 2015?
    NewsWhip’s 2015 roundup shows just how important and huge a viral success can be – but also how rare and hard it is.
  • Digital publishers face a winter of discontent
    Many venture-backed publishers are coming up to the limits of scale. Their models were based on eye-popping audience-growth figures and the presumption that business would follow. That’s not always the case. And traffic growth inevitably hits a ceiling.
  • Ziff Davis tries middle ground between free and paywall – Digiday
    Trying quizzes instead of paywalls. Will it work?
  • Dennis Publishing outlines 2016 ad blocking plans
    Testing the new future where ad blocking is common and alternative approaches scarce.
  • Medium is now hosting publisher sites, starting with The Awl’s Billfold – Digiday
    Medium offering itself up to professional publishers as a platform. Who’s in control?
  • Are publishers in a losing battle with content distribution platforms?
    Third-party distribution channels are increasingly prominent part of the digital publishing landscape, but instead of rejecting channels that don’t offer full ownership and control, many publishers are embracing them.
  • Lad Bible Ogles Stake Sale As Mags Fade Away
    The King is Dead, long live the King. Just weeks after Zoo and FHM close the Lad Bibe is said to be raising £20M. It employs 70 people, his highly profitable and has 10.5m fans.
  • The Six Biggest Mistakes In Corporate Blogging
    Spoilers: SEO, lack of promotion, length/interest. community, involvement and giving up too soon.
  • Business Bloggers Lead the Pack As Personal Blogs Decline
    More bloggers are now client focused; spending up to 6 hours on a post, producing more long form content and 64% write more than one blog.
  • WordPress.com Goes Open Source And Gets A Desktop App
    The easy, free but ad supported version of WordPress is now fully separated from WordPress core, is available as open source on GitHub, has a desktop app and has moved away from LAMP to favour JavaScript and API calls.
  • Do you agree with Mike Butcher: Is the press release dead?
    Article discusses whether there’s a role for the humble press release in today’s digital landscape. From Zebra Eclipse’s point of view it writes, as a given, that publishers and marketers are on a common evolutionary path. We’re all publishers now.
  • Google Launches Live Label In Carousel For Live Blog Publishers
    A new set of search results for publishers right at the top of Google. There’s likely more involved than setting the right schema markup on your posts; the publisher will also be ona whitelist (as with Google News) to qualify in the first place.
  • Life After Content Blocking
    Ad blocking started as an initiative by independent developers who wanted to improve our browsing experience. Now that at least one company, Apple, has made Content Blocking “official”, ad-supported publishing business models are in trouble.
  • The Journalists Who Refuse To Admit They’re Actually Content Marketers
    What is the difference between a paid-for article praising a product and an article praising the exact same product in which no money has changed hands?
  • Why Web Pages Suck
    If anything this puts Facebook’s Instant Articles initiative in a far more positive light: the social network is offering to not only improve the user experience by displaying articles instantly — thanks, primarily, to the lack of programmatic advertising cruft — but also to help monetize said content by selling ads against it and sharing 70%, backed by profile data that is far superior to even the ad networks. Indeed, arguably the biggest takeaway should be that the chief objection to Facebook’s offer — that publishers are giving up their independence — is a red herring. Publishers are already slaves to the ad networks, and their primary decision at this point is which master — ad networks or Facebook — is more preferable
  • How 98-year-old Forbes Media generates 70% of its revenues from digital
    An interesting story of a media company that put SEO before pageviews which resulted in better loyalty, improved SEO and more pageviews.
  • WPP, Snapchat And DailyMail Launch A Content Agency
    Publishers, platforms and agencies – launching agencies. In this case all three have created a 12-person agency called Truffle Pig.
  • About.com Launches Sponsored Content Studio For Native Ads
    What’s this? A publisher creating an agency to help with content publishing? We’re all publishers now.

What could publishers offer? An interview with T Q Chant

February 5, 2016 by Andrew Leave a Comment

Sam Cane
Sam Cane: Hard Setdown

Tim Chant self-published Sam Cane: Hard Setdown and the ebook is now available on Amazon. Tim kindly gave me time to talk about the book, about self-publishing and what he might be missing by not having a publisher.

Tell us about Sam Cane: Hard Setdown

It’s a tense and at times horrifying SF survival adventure (or so I’ve been told…). It follows Sam, a newly minted security specialist with a shady past, as she arrives on a far-flung colony world only to find the settlement deserted. Stranded by a callous corporation lightyears from help, what follows is a desperate struggle to survive, stay sane and work out what happened. These are the opening shots of a saga that will pit Sam against a ruthless enemy and that will range across the early stages of human interstellar colonisation.

Sam Cane is available on Amazon for Kindle. There’s no publisher listed. Why go it alone?

Going straight to self-publication became the plan fairly early on in writing this. The SF market is pretty crowded right now, and there’re also some issues in it that I wanted to keep a handle on. The story
was in my head, though, and writing it gave me a break from redrafting a much larger work, so self-publication made sense. It’s also done me a power of good just to publish something after years of scribbling – I’ve been far more productive since taking the leap.

What do you think a publisher could offer that you or a boutique PR agency couldn’t?

Reach. There’s a lot of good fiction out there and people only have so much time to put into reading, so any help getting noticed would be a massive boost. I’ve been really lucky in knowing some very talented people who have provided editorial input, done the cover art and the proof reading, so yep, marketing is the key thing a publisher could bring.

Talking to authors you’ll sometimes hear Amazon described as the huge villain and sometimes as the saviour of the industry. What are your views on the behemoth?

I don’t do absolutes – I’d hesitate to describe anything as being absolutely good or evil. I think we have to accept that technology has changed the way we shop for and own everything, and you can’t deny Amazon has been very clever in taking ownership of this change. At a time where publishers are (perhaps understandably) focused on hanging on to their big earners, Amazon has made it possible for writers like me to get our work out there and maybe get noticed – and while other companies offer similar services, I don’t think they’ve got the same market as Amazon. I think this has driven a trend for publishers to consider work that’s been self-published, which I think is a healthy thing.

What tips and tricks have you picked up?

In terms of writing? I’ve been given all sorts of good advice, some of which rings true (no such thing as a magic bullet, it’s all about hard work etc). The thing I found most useful when writing Sam was to be transgressive. This started life as a fairly straight-up Mil-SF with a fairly standard main protagonist – what really brought it to life for me was when I decided the main character should be a woman from a multilcultural background (I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that Sam is my first female protagonist) – from there flowed a far more interesting background that has been really helpful in planning out how she reacts to things and what will happen next for her.

Tips for self-publishing? Plan ahead and do your research – I maybe leapt before I’d looked properly, and while I don’t regret it for a second I could have made some steps of the process a little less stressful for myself.

What are writer groups and are they important?

I’d go as far to say absolutely vital, particularly when starting out. Working at its best, a writer’s group is a collection of people who may not be like-minded but are all going through the same process, where everyone puts forward their work for constructive criticism. As long as you’ve got a thick enough skin to take it, rigorous criticism can be very important in tightening and polishing work, getting you to realise that a passage you’re maybe overly proud of doesn’t work, and helping to crystallise your thinking. It’s more than just being critted – reading and commenting on other people’s work and listening to other people comment can be just as helpful in honing your own work, and honestly just chatting over lunch

I’ve been lucky enough to be a member of the Edinburgh Science Fiction and Fantasy writer’s group for years now (big shout out to M Harold Page for the initial invite) and have been critted by both established authors like Caroline Dunford and those like me who are just starting out. It’s been hard, sometimes, and I haven’t always taken on board all the criticism, but it’s been worth it.

Which books from indie or small press authors would you recommend to readers who enjoyed Sam Cane?

With a certain amount of chagrin, I must admit that I don’t really pay much attention to who publishes the books I read. I’ve been enjoying the Daniel Leary series by David Drake (Baen), sort of Patrick O’Brian in space, and I’m currently working through the first volume of James S.A. Corey’s ‘Expanse’ which has a similar slightly lower-tech horror feel to it. I’m a slow reader and alternate factual and non-factual books so my recommendations may be a bit lame…

What can we expect next from Tim Chant?

I plan (hope?) to release Sam Cane in 30,000 word or so novellas (in a way, Amazon has allowed a look back at the original SF serial publishing) so keep an eye out for ‘Sam Cane: Hard Lessons’ in four or five months. I’m also finishing a ‘Steamquill’ work which I’m soon going to be sending to agents and publishers, and starting to plot out a turn of the 20th Century naval adventure.

Next Page »

Recent ZEST posts

  • Using Kickstarter to battle tired tropes: An interview with Monica Valentinelli
  • The Guardian’s Key Publishing trends
  • This week’s link herd February 8, 2016
  • What could publishers offer? An interview with T Q Chant
  • Does The Society of Authors’ open letter to the Publishers Association miss a trick?

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