State of publishing in an interactive world

I attended this year’s South by Southwest Interactive and was surprised to find quite a few panels about publishing content online from people who have done it successfully. To me this shows that one, there are more and more people that are figuring out how to be successful and make a living from publishing and promoting themselves and two, the online market for publishing is gaining ground and getting more attention from traditional publishers.

Below are my notes from three panels that offered some good insights on publishing and promoting independently.

Publishing online

• A new approach to publishing should combine collaborative social media tools
• The web is about talking to people and giving them what they’re looking for, it should be a discussion with readers

Independent content creation

• There’s a low barrier to entry for expressing yourself through blogs or writing a book or even making music or videogames
• It’s still expensive to market content, even though there are sometimes exceptions to the rule with the viral aspect of certain content
• Content now requires thinking about building a community around it
• Make great content, gather a community, curate great content for community, repeat

Promoting yourself

• Fans help spread your work, live events help them gather and talk about it
• Go where your audience is by partnering with related organizations, guest blog/write to similar audiences
• Make sure to get links to your website on related websites
• Ask for reviews
• Make it easy to share content
• Start promoting early, even during development of project

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