Vertical Marketing, Online Presence, and Dino-Erotica

Featuring Nathan Farrugia, author of The Chimera Vector & Anne Treasure, The Civic Group

Writing isn’t what it once was, with writers expected to move faster than ever before, needing to keep up with bandwidth speeds and with brand new skills. The role of ebooks, social media, websites and more will be explored in this new masterclass to show you how to best launch your work into this brave new world of words.

The digital space allows publishers to identify niche audiences and target work to established communities of readers. How can writers engage with these groups in genuine, non-spammy ways? How important is a great author website to a writer’s online presence? Join Anne Treasure, recent survivor of the publishing industry, for a discussion with genre fiction author Nathan Farrugia (The Chimera Vector), as they work their way through a brave new world of ‘molecular specialisation’, metadata obsession, fan fic, and bestselling self-published dinosaur erotica.

We’re post-digital: the Kindle, which sparked the avalanche of digital reading, was first released in 2007. It’s been 7 years since digital reading and publishing went mainstream.

People used to refer to ebooks, but that feels clunky now – we just call them books, and it’s how you interact with the books that is defined – reading in digital or reading in print.

Readers now place a premium on convenience. All publishers should be focused on making books available when and where readers want them – with global availability, low cost and free of constraints.

But the big traditional publishers operate like ocean liners, and their course is set years ahead – they take a while to turn. Although, if Tor can do it…

There are huge opportunities now for individual authors and start-ups to establish a presence by doing things more effectively, using reader-led decision making.

Infrastructure is important: making sure that the right infrastructure is there is more than half the battle for publishers – this can mean establishing platforms and communities and setting up all the framework required for readers to serendipitously find a book.

But most often it should mean publishers identifying segments of the market that already have this framework and then accommodating them.