PR Cuts Give Authors More Work (and Opportunity)

This week, Rodale, one of the few publishers actually making money, laid off Beth Davey, its vice president of public relations. PR and marketing budgets, tight before the economic downturn, have taken their share of cuts. And yet the industry will still survive. There will still be best sellers and new authors who hit home runs. Increasingly, the winners will be those authors who both write and market well.

If there's bad news about the work authors can expect publishers to do, there's good news about the tools available for authors (or specialists) to do it themselves.

Penny Sansevieri, owner of Author Marketing Experts, provides internet marketing with a heavy dose of blogging, web sites, and social networking. Dani Greer's BlogBookTours guides authors in developing and executing an online book tour using blogs. Book trailers are videos similar to movie trailers that help build buzz for a book. Jodi Picoult's last two releases, Change of Heart and Nineteen Minutes both have compelling book trailers available on YouTube. Mystery author Brian Freeman, whose books are a great read, is active on Facebook.

Authors have never had more tools available to them to market their work. And, as those avenues mature, some will build successful businesses assisting authors in marketing their work. The world of publishing, like a lot of the rest of the economy, is changing. But change need not mean death. It just means different routes to success.

And now the news...
Rodale Eliminates Four, Including Vice President of Publicity -- The publishers says its sales are actually up and the restructuring will help them be more effective in publicizing their work across its platforms.

More bad news from HarperCollins -- Revenues were down 25% for the second quarter of their fiscal year. Earnings are down 75% for the year to date.

Stephen King: Stephanie Meyer Can't Write Worth a Darn -- Master of the craft says the Twilight author pales in comparison to Jo Rowling.

Seven Techniques for a Dynamite Plot -- Not sure I agree with all of them (flashbacks, for instance), but it's worth a look.

Audiobook Publishers Look to Drop DRM -- Following Random House's lead, many publishers intend to remove digital rights management, which restricts the ability to make copies of digital media, from their audio books.