This year, I was delighted to contribute to a round-up by Carol Tice on what trends to watch (or ignore) in the freelance writing marketplace in 2018. I specifically discuss paid email newsletters and Medium. (Some of the other trends covered include video content, fact checking, content marketing and SEO, and artificial intelligence.)

Tice’s is one of many publishing roundups that survey the coming year in terms of industry change and trends. Over at The Hot Sheet (my paid newsletter written with Porter Anderson), we rounded up some of the more notable pieces authors should look at, including:

read more https://www.janefriedman.com/what-does-2018-hold-for-writers/

Authors have to juggle a lot of balls in today’s book industry. Not only do they have to write that next book, they also have to market it, balance the ledgers, woo their fans on social media, do background research on their next project, and make dinner.

With all this work piling up, everyone is always looking for ways to get more done in less time. The following post details a few tools authors can use on to stay ahead of the game.

read more https://the-digital-reader.com/2017/12/26/tech-tools-authors-2/

Marvel is finally cashing in on fan works, only they’ve put so many restrictions on what fans can make that no one is going to want to bother.

They announced a new platform in a press release yesterday that allows fans to create original comic strips using Marvel characters and stock background illustrations. Marvel gave it the ironic name Create Your Own, and added to the irony with the tagline “Your Own Marvel Universe.”

I cite the irony of the title because while we don’t have access to the platform we do have access to the T&C (PDF). For starters, the terms forbid users from publishing a work elsewhere, or making any commercial art, and Marvel also extracts from users

read more https://the-digital-reader.com/2017/12/29/marvels-new-fan-made-comics-platform-comes-terms-ban-marvel-titles/

Back before Christmas the Harvard Business Review published an article on recent research that showed that people valued physical objects for the act of possession more than for the use of said object.

 Participants valued a physical copy of The Empire Strikes Back more than a digital copy, for instance, only if they considered the Star Wars series to be films with which they strongly identified. Participants who weren’t Star Wars fans valued physical and digital copies similarly.

This is essentially a nonfunctional element of ownership – valuing something just for having it rather than what you can do with it.

Aside from price, that is the only thing keeping people buying print books over ebooks, which makes it all the more amazing when digital copies supplant physical copies in the marketplace as consumers choose to make the switch.

For example, much of non-fiction has been eaten by the web, and several genres (romance, thriller, SF) have gone digital to varying degrees. These are all categories where the use (reading) is valued more than ownership.

The researchers also helped explain why some creators profit off of memorabilia as much as from selling their content; it’s because fans value the physical good more than the digital, while non-fans do not.

read more https://the-digital-reader.com/2018/01/03/customers-wont-pay-much-digital-goods-redux/

There’s a good chance that you’re not investing enough of your marketing budget into live events. And your brand may be missing out on a significant amount of growth because of it.

Let me explain why.

At my company Bizzabo, we recently surveyed over 400 mid-to-senior level marketers about the current state of event marketing and where they see it heading. In the resulting report, Event Marketing 2018: Benchmarks and Trends, we found that the overwhelming majority of marketers (80%) believe that live events are critical to their organization’s success, and that the most successful organizations plan on investing more into live events in the coming years.

I’ve already written about why you should invest in live events on this platform before. In this post, I will outline why you need to be investing more than you think.

Live events are the most effective marketing channel

read more http://www.jeffbullas.com/live-events/

If you want to convince people that they should visit your website and buy your products, it helps to have other consumers raving about you.

That’s why user-generated content is increasingly being used by brands to capture and maintain the interest of their target audience.

In fact, Yotpo studies have found that user-generated content is highly beneficial in helping brands increase organic traffic, time spent on site, customer retention rates, and ultimately, sales.

If you’re trying to work out how to use UGC marketing to increase your website traffic and increase sales, the following five tactics will help.

read more http://www.jeffbullas.com/ugc-marketing/