The 1000-Fan Meme as Book Marketing Strategy
The 1000-fan meme was all the rage a month or so ago. Then it seemingly went away. I think it still is powerful. I think it is applicable to book publishing and I think it can be applied from the top down — i.e., it can be used by publishers not just by authors.
I was introduced to the meme when I first heard of the musician Jonathan Coulton. Coulton basically survives by cultivating a grass roots following of fans. He doesn’t have a label. He does distribution himself. He is an internet superstar.
The idea in a nut shell is if an artist has 1000 fans that pay him say $100 dollars a year then he/she is making a pretty good living without major label support.
Not many people in publishing have likely heard of Coulton but surely they have heard of Nine Inch Nails. NIN applied the 1000-fan principle to a boxset release they(he) did a couple of months ago. The hardcore fans paid a premium for the boxset. The casual fans were allowed to experience the band’s music for free. Everyone is happy.
Why this Idea is Perfect for Book Publishing
I know a couple of companies where the Online Marketing department is seen as a Project Blue Book. A lot of money goes in and very little comes out. The sales people grumble about the lack of integration. The other marketing people grumble about resources and ROI. Unless there is great leadership at the executive level in such a company, online marketing is essentially at sea.
This reality isn’t true everywhere and it is not long term. I see online marketers in this awkward teenage-like stage — trying things for the first time, just to try them. That won’t last. But still — having a fragmented strategy makes little sense.
The fact is digital isn’t a boutique part of your business and it shouldn’t be a boutique part of the marketing department. That is why the 1000-fan idea is so powerful.
- It is parseable. Publishers market individual books. They don’t market themselves. This fits our piece-meal offering.
- It is measurable. If you set out to gather a finite community of ‘true’ fans around authors your progress is transparent.
- It is simple. If you put ‘1000 Fans’ on a t-shirt and walked around BEA, you could explain the idea to anyone that asked.
- It is elastic. The concept fits with any author and any budget. Your community building efforts progress at the comfort level of your author and their momentum in the marketplace.
- It is technology-agnostic. Grass-roots marketing is as old as the hills. Employ direct mail or employ Twitter. Use what works. Then iterate.
- It spans across channels. If the singular goal is to build a dedicated fan base, everyone in marketing can contribute and theoretically get behind the effort.
- It supports the sales team. If you were able to say to an account “author x has 3000 followers” that would be a powerful sales tool.
- It allows for free flowing content. Giving away content (and piracy) is a fact of life in the websphere. This does an end run around DRM FUD.
- It supports new revenue. You could tap the author’s fan base for smaller projects between books — like chapter or essay downloads.
The one challenge I see with the approach is that it is slow and does not conform to the way publishers traditionally budget marketing efforts on the catalog cycle. You would need to put money in escrow to support the author’s community between books.
The word is Kevin Kelly — the first to formalize the idea — is going to write a book on the topic. Here is to hoping the meme, at that point, will get ‘longtail’ style traction in the book publishing community.
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