Publishing and promoting stories in the digital age of storytelling

It shouldn’t be that complicated to find someone who wants to read your book, but because there’s an industry based around the process of finding people to read books they publish, it can seem like a daunting, complicated process. But does the traditional publishing process really work?

The way traditional publishing companies find people to read their books is based on flooding the market for a certain time period. They get the book in a bunch of bookstores and push marketing strategies for it, trying to grab for people’s attention and reach as wide an audience as possible from the get-go. It however depends on the publisher deciding what makes a good book. They have to predict how a book would sell to a certain group of people. Because this is so hard to do with any degree of accuracy, it essentially becomes a guessing game. It also singles out a lot of books that may not fit well into predefined categories.

So how about finding an audience by focusing on one person at a time. The internet is the perfect environment for doing just that. We’ve all heard about viral videos that spread online. The concept of being viral is just passing on something from one person to the next, branching out to a potentially large audience. Let’s take a book you’ve just published as an example. Your initial first few readers like your story, some of them tell someone else about it. Some of them Tweet about it. One of them may be a blogger with their own followers who posts a review of your story. At this point you have people talking about it and more reviews get posted in different forms. Eventually, depending on who it reaches and who the story connects with, who knows where it can go from there.

This may seem like an oversimplified example, but the process is becoming more common. With the internet becoming a bigger part of people’s everyday lives it’s turning into the standard way to decide how people spend their free-time. Which includes what book to read. Is yours available?