Read, Eat, Drink: How ClickHole Became the Best Thing on the Internet & a Rhubarb Gin Cocktail Recipe

June 11, 2015 by Maria

Read:

60+ Fantastic Email Newsletters to Read and Share (Courtney Seiter for Buffer): I love email newsletters because they’re such an effortless and fun way to learn new things. And this list is especially awesome, since it spans so many topics: general news, tech, marketing, design, photography, sports, food and beverage, general interesting-ness, and self-improvement (i.e. a lot of the topics I represent as an agent)! I really do not want to confess how many of these I signed up for. Let’s just say it was more than 2 and less than 20.

How ClickHole Became the Best Thing on the Internet (Dan Kois for Slate): “But the Atlantic reports that [The Onion] plans more independent site launches in the ClickHole mode, and according to Quantcast, the online traffic-measuring tool, ClickHole’s traffic has mostly held steady between 10 million and 15 million page views per month. Like many websites, ClickHole’s had game-changing mammoth viral hits; in November about 7 million people read what I believe to be ClickHole’s masterpiece, “’90s Kids Rejoice! The Spider Eggs They Used to Fill Beanie Babies Are Finally Hatching,” in part because at least a few social-Web visitors worried the threat was real. And as ClickHole has grown, the site’s moved away from being a simple BuzzFeed parody; instead it’s become richer, weirder, a darker reflection of our own dark times.” Did any one else burst out laughing at the thought of spider eggs hatching in Beanie Babies? Way, way too good.

The Quick-and-Simple Guide to Getting Started with Video Content (Matt Aunger for Buffer): Video is a fabulous tool for connecting more deeply with your readers, because it creates an intimate, face-to-face, three-dimensional experience. (Why do you think Food Network stars, John Green, and other TV, YouTube, and movie stars manage to sell so many books?) Here’s the delightfully short guide to layering video into your existing platform without driving yourself nuts.

How to Repurpose Your Book or Blog Content for Profit and Promotion (Nina Amir on JaneFriedman.com): “As an author who has just produced or may be in the process of producing amazing amounts of content, you have a great advantage: You can turn all that content into money-making products. These ‘information products’ can provide you additional income and a business that revolves around your book. This strategy also works for long-time bloggers who are often sitting on as much information as a book would contain.”

Eat & Drink:

Over to Jarrett, for this gloriously delicious drink:

How to Measure Engagement and Why It Matters for Your Platform

May 27, 2015 by Maria

A few weeks ago I was asked about how to measure engagement, and I gave a quick answer in a comment thread. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I spend a lot of time talking about how crucial engagement is, and not enough time talking about how to measure it.

When I was an editor at a New York publisher, I would have anywhere from 7-15 meetings a week. Mostly that was because I had to be at meetings for two different teams, but it still meant anywhere from 1-2 full work days a week spent sitting around a conference room with a group of people.

Some of the meetings were awesome and energizing and full of smart people brainstorming about our books. But some of them were painful. If anyone has ever been in a production meeting where you’re reviewing deadlines title-by-title, you’re probably as accomplished of a doodler as I am. I can now draw quite a menagerie of miniature animals. This is in no way a life skill.

But the point is that it was the content of the meeting that determined whether I was an active or inactive participant. If we were talking about one of my books, or about marketing strategies, or about titles, I was usually giving my full attention and input to the meeting. If we were talking about production dates that had nothing to do with me, it was giraffe-drawing time.

If you had put a two-way mirror in that conference room and placed a randomly selected group of people on the other side, they could have easily told you which people in the meeting were engaged, simply by looking at who was interacting with the meeting content—by offering opinions, asking questions, or expressing emotion.

The meeting of the minds that is your blog/vlog/website is no different. Some people are just popping their head into the room and leaving, some people are present but not engaged, and some people are all in. The people who are all in will be interacting with your content in one way or another. So measuring engagement is really about measuring action.

How, exactly, to measure engagement on different platforms:

Read, Eat, Drink: Link Roundup and a Twenty-Minute Asian Noodle Soup

May 15, 2015 by Maria

Read:

There is so much to read! Here’s the scoop this week on platform-building, publishing, reading, working, and Facebook eating the Internet:

Why The Best Reading App Available Today is Not What You Think (Michael Hyatt): This ties in perfectly to last week’s Read on Why We Can’t Read Anymore. Now that the ebook market has plateaued at about a quarter of the overall book market, we’re starting to see how the gain in efficiency of ebooks can also mean a loss of deep comprehension. The real question is: do we want to read a greater volume of words, or do we want to dive more deeply into those words?

The Future of Remote Work Feels Like Teleportation (Christopher Mims, WSJ): “Given how geographically diffuse our Internet-centric tools have already made many companies, it is hard to see how these technologies won’t someday transform how we work just as thoroughly as email and the telephone did.”

Facebook is Eating the Internet (Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic): “Facebook, it seems, is unstoppable. The social publishing site, just 11 years old, is now the dominant force in American media. It drives a quarter of all web traffic.” More on why a Facebook page is an integral part of a platform.

Twitter vs. Facebook vs. Pinterest vs. Instagram: What’s Right for Authors?

April 28, 2015 by Maria

There is a grand battle royale going down between social media networks, and writers and bloggers are caught in the middle of it. The boundaries are constantly shifting, the pros and cons of each platform are always changing, and no one ever seems to be able to decide where in the heck they should be.

So, which social media networks should you be on? Where can you get the best bang for your social media buck? I get this question all the time, and like the Twitter-specific question from last week, the answer is complicated. Because really, choosing a network depends on what kind of writer or blogger you are and what areas of your author platform you need to bolster.

The one thing that applies to everyone? You can’t (and shouldn’t) build your numbers on all of them. You will drive yourself straight loony-tunes if you try to keep up with all of them, and your social media campaign will be less effective if it’s not focused. It’s worth it to find your social media soulmate–that one platform that will not only grow your platform but also be actually enjoyable!

Ready to choose? Here are the candidates:

Facebook: The big kahuna. I’m still of the belief that every single writer should have a professional Facebook page, and this is for one simple reason: sheer numbers. Facebook has 1.35 billion monthly active users. The other networks lag far behind—Instagram has an estimated 300 million users, Twitter has an estimated 288 million users, and Pinterest has about 70 million users. Facebook is still where everyone and their grandma is, and even though it’s been changing its algorithm to limit the reach of posts (more on the changes to Facebook’s algorithm and what it means for authors here), it’s still the best place to reach the most people. Facebook also allows you to integrate all mediums–text with no character limits, images, videos, GIFS, etc–so it can work for you no matter what your strengths are. I consider a professional Facebook page to be one of the foundational elements of building a platform.

Read:

How, exactly, to measure engagement on different platforms:

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