4 Lessons from Amazon Writers Need to Succeed
Amazon revolutionized bookselling by integrating pricing, selection, convenience, innovation, and customer-centricity. Here’s how you can adapt Amazon’s strengths to become a successful writer:
1. Be reader-centric.
- Write what your readers want to read.
- Take the time and get the help you need to ensure your work is ready.
- Test-market your work so you can publish it with pride and confidence.
- Serve your readers, online and off, in as many ways as you can.
- Make an ever-growing selection of your work available in as many forms, media and countries as you can, along with your other products and services.
- Keep learning from your readers and other authors. Ask them how you can improve every aspect of what you do.
- Mindshare is more important than market share. Readers are more important than profit.
- Be flexible in balancing profit and building a community of readers in pricing your work.
- Reward faithful readers and those who make suggestions for improvements.
2. Innovate.
- Adapt what you write and how you communicate to whatever is working best in the marketplace.
- Have a community of techies who help you keep your technology up to date and provide ideas for innovations.
- At a time of accelerating change, be prepared to change whenever the benefits of changing outweigh the hassles of doing it
3. Be convenient.
- Make it easy for readers to communicate with you and buy your work.
- Make it easy for the media and those who need speakers to find you and the information they need from you.
4. Hold off on drones for now.
For Amazon, the cost of success is being a frenemy: writers’ and publishers’ biggest customer and an evil empire out to destroy booksellers and publishers. It’s nothing personal, strictly business, and as Jeff Bezos has predicted, Amazon will be disrupted by the next retail revolution. Hope you succeed in ways that you can tell your kids about.
What did I leave out?
The goal of the blog is to help us both understand writing and publishing.
Questions and comments most welcome.
The 6th San Francisco Writing for Change Conference / Changing the World One Book at a Time
September, 6th, 2014 / www.sfwritingforchange.org / [email protected]
Keynoter: Adam Hochschild
The 12th San Francisco Writers Conference & Open Enrollment Classes
A Celebration of Craft, Commerce & Community
February 12-16, 2015/ www.sfwriters.org / [email protected] / Mike’s blog: http://sfwriters.info/blog @SFWC / www.facebook.com/SanFranciscoWritersConference
Keynoter: Yiyun Li
Michael Larsen-Elizabeth Pomada Literary Agents / Helping Writers Launch Careers Since 1972
[email protected] / www.larsenpomada.com / 415-673-0939 /1029 Jones Street / San Francisco, 94109
