One aspect of all of my blogs (there are 20 of them)
is that some of my own activity uncovers problems, especially in the free
speech and “personal autonomy” areas that amount to news that often gets
overlooked, even by other independent video channels and blogs that I follow as
well as mainstream. Some of these issues have the somewhat unpredictable risk
of blowing up and becoming important for a lot of speakers.
Recently, I’ve gotten some marketing calls from my POD
publisher for my books. I’ve gone into
more detail in a Wordpress post last Saturday, which leads to another legacy
post of mine on the Trademark blog here (on Blogger).
I’ve gotten some calls, ever since 2012, asking me why
the older books are not selling. A
couple of them have sounded a little threatening, as if I were doing something
wrong by migrating to my own format of online blogging and not being totally
100% dedicated to wholesaling and retailing hardcopy books as a consumer-oriented
business laced with offers and volume-oriented deals. OK, there would be benefits, like literacy
programs. Community engagement through
local bookstores, and the like. I’ve
talked about some of those on the Book Reviews blog here.
I had a long conversation Monday evening, and I won’t
go into sensitive details, but I did manage to convince the caller that “cookie
cutter” marketing assistance packages from publicity films don’t work equally for
all kinds of books (here's a perspective). It is normally a lot
easier to sell a children’s book or a recipe cookbook (as a consumer “commodity”
in volumes of “instances”) or perhaps any “how to” book (like in tech) than
political non-fiction laced with personal accounts.
Fiction is a little different: if an author has become
known, he/she can make the consumer angle work.
When I first published my DADT-1 book as a print-run
in 1997, the novelty of my individualistic arguments regarding gays in the military
(I talked a lot about my own experience with conscription, especially) did
catch on by word-of-mouth and for eighteen months or so (my having moved to
Minneapolis to do a corporate transfer to avoid a conflict of interest), and my
first printing of a few hundred did sell out, more or less before 9/11.
Since then, as I’ve often explained, I’ve depended on
search engines to remain known. That has
worked relatively well in terms of influencing policy (yup, some politicians,
judges, and various media figures do know me) but in a way that is probably not
very transparent to the public. And I
agree that my Internet presence, which added components as technology changed,
is not very transparent to the “average consumer”, the way many book marketing
sites are supposed to be. And I have
indeed promised to simplify all of this by the end of 2021 (after the next
election).
I do get the idea that many people see a problem with
an operation that offers most stuff “free” without asking for anything. This is different from the algorithm-clickbait
problem which, we have seen in the past two years, seems to contribute, however
unintentionally, a lot to radicalization (especially on the “alt-right”). Free content (even if not radical by itself)
from someone who doesn’t seem to have other people to be responsible for (“skin
in the game” -- and the "upward affiliation problem") could also be seen as a radicalization ploy or an unpredictable
security risk for others. A bigger practical concern is that my style of self-publication dilutes conventional group or "identity centered" activism with "solidarity". I could arguably be "doing something else" that helps "my own oppressed peoples" more than I do now.
Soon, I’ll give more specifics on just how these blogs
do benefit users. I owe it.
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