Did it take Seth Godin to tell you that? (You must be slower than I am if it did!)
There are more than 100,000 published authors in the US. Most of them have publishing houses (and at least a tenuous connection to a publicist). What a great marketing problem. The long tail of authors meets the long tail of public interest. How do they intersect?
Publishers, like many organizations, want to control the conversation, want to own the web page, want to be sure that people come to them, as opposed to going where people are. The irony here is that bookstores are precisely the opposite of this. There’s no Knopf bookstore, no Random House store. Bookstores, unlike the current conception of car dealers, work best when they are agnostic about what’s for sale.
Authors are brands. Some are billion-dollar brands, some are tiny ones. The web is custom made for authors, but so far, it’s largely going unused….
Seth even has a website in mind for those vanity websites… his own SquidWho! There are just 7,000 lenses there (compared to 250,000 on Squidoo.com so far) so it’s wide open in many ways.
Here’s one sample page created for an author, Philip Roth.
If you want to be famous, just put your own vanity page there!
Image courtesy Seth Godin
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