I’m Out!

We’re enjoying Electric Alphabet, too, and are adding it to our list of links. Thanks again!

- The Abbeville Manual of Style Team

It’s a really interesting question about why more publishers don’t get it right. I’m sure if we look at other industries we’ll see similiar patterns. I’d guess it’s more to do with organisational culture. The three positive examples I mentioned above are smaller, more independent teams with smaller resources. They need to reach out to the community at large, so they understand the opportunities inherent in social media. (HarperStudio is part of a multinational company, but is operating under a newer entrpreneurial model) Perhaps large corporations aren’t as capable of understanding how to act within an online community, and how this changes a company’s thinking about interacting with customers.

Also, any company that thinks of a blog purely as a marketing function is doomed to failure. Not because marketing execs can’t be successul at multi-threaded conversation with their markets. It’s because marketing is not often part of the production chain until the vey end, especially in publishing companies. It’s too late to think about the implications for your company of blogging and participating in social media only after you’ve produced a book.

Oh, and thanks for mentioning The Digitalist, you’ve absolutely right! I’ve stayed subbed to The Penguin Blog too, they do manage an authentic voice and, overall, I remain impressed by Penguin’s ability to leverage it’s own brand.

I by no means coined this expression, but the easy distinction to make is between a blog – and a “flog”. Most publisher blogs don’t graduate beyond flogging, and often suffer from the self-conscious “hello world” tone of voice that accompanies someone (perhaps a young, “savvy” intern) being pushed out into centre stage (or at least – feeling like they have!) responsible for creating a valuable community of user generated content. And then the bosses wonder why their web strategy didn’t “work” and go back to spending cash on print ads…

There are pockets of non-failure tho – I was very impressed (and again, not alone) by the unexpectedly human and non-corporate Little Brown twitter:
https://twitter.com/littlebrown
although I hope they were recommending / match-making books that weren’t – just – their own.

I also stay subscribed to the UK Penguin blog:
http://thepenguinblog.typepad.com/
although they do do a fair amount of flogging, they also seem to feel just a bit guilty about it.

And the digitalist is less of a flog or a blog than a set of links punctuated by the odd really rather good post:
http://thedigitalist.net/
and I used to enjoy the CharkinBlog by their former CEO, Richard Charkin.

We (my company, Apt) have also built blogs for publishers, usually because we recommend this as a cheap entry point for the web; the reasoning being that if you can’t get a blog right after 6-12 months, better to know that (and change it) than to have spent a load of cash on a more complex site that you can’t handle either. Fail cheaply etc.

But I do wonder what it is about publishers that mans they don’t get it right that often. (Clearly I agree with you about Soft Skull and 26th Floor, who I am happy to see are delighted to stick their necks out) Do other industries? Or is it the fact that “blogging” falls to busy marketing/PR bodies who are culturally tuned to sending out press releases and moving to the next item in the publishing schedule?