What's the way forward: better or different?

In an interview on physorg.com, marketing guru Al Ries was asked how Sony or Microsoft could fight back against Nintendo in the games market. His answer was they should focus on “new and different, rather than ‘better.’ Both companies made strategic errors with Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. They focused on ‘bigger, better’ while Nintendo focused on ‘different.’ Different always wins.”

 Hmm, it’s interesting to speculate whether (and how) that might apply to books. One obvious answer is e-readers like the Kindle. They are better mainly in terms of portability of a large number of titles in a device the size and weight of one book and in some ways inferior (lacking the tactile element, for instance) but they do qualify as different.

 One obstacle is that publishers are still very reluctant, for the most part, to be innovative. It’s still a slow-moving and tradition-bound industry. For instance, three things that could help keep books alive:

1.     Local print on demand . Since April, Blackwell’s book store on Charing Cross Road has had the Espresso Book Machine. It allows a book to be selected from a library of a million titles and printed and bound in under five minutes. You can also order  POD book online at www.blackwell.co.uk.

2.     More places to sell books. Yes, you can get a couple of titles at Starbucks coffee shops and sometimes cookbooks at high-end food shops, but the potential for selling titles that relate to specific types of businesses is huge.

3.     More sponsorship. What if you could get a 25% discount on a book as long as you didn’t mind having an ad on the back cover or in an insert? Personally, I prefer my books ad-free but I’m sure many people wouldn’t mind if it meant saving money, and the sponsors would get more eyeball time than from a one-off ad in a newspaper.

        My hunch is that the way will be led by self-publishing authors and when traditional publishers get desperate enough they'll follow.

        (for ideas on how to write and market your book, get a copy of my book, "Your Writing Coach," from Amazon or your other favorite online or offline retailer.)