Against Orthodoxy

Michael Jensen | 03/18/2009 | Numérisation

I’ve been playing with an idea that runs counter to existing orthodoxy,that I’ve been trying to find the downside to: crosspromotion.

We have these potentially potent devices—the Web pages that we build for each book, the blog entries about the book that we put on our sites—that we unfortunately think of as billboards, *not as networks.*

Today, publishers are competing for a billion people’s time. And we are asking people to pay a lot of money for the privilege of committing *more* time, to long-form works, when the world of free abundance is a click away.

I’m fearful of the survival of long-form works, and I think publishing needs to *promote long-form works in general* in order to maintain a long-term niche in society.

We need to be defensively strengthening ourselves by promoting our kind of publishing—whatever kind that is. The best way to do that in the digital world is to promote ourselves through muscular crosspromotion.

Google (and all Web search engine) weigh “relevance” in part by paying attention to the *quality* and *quantity of* links to a page and to a site. It is not just the words upon the page that are indexed—the networked context is also analyzed, to determine what to display on the first page of Google’s search results.

Given this algorithmic reality, we need to compete in networked terms.

Canadian crosspromotion can start simple: simply include, at the bottom of Book X’s Web page, a list of “Related Links” that are to your own *and other Canadian publishers’ related books.* These could be easily suggested by our authors and our editors.

In doing this as a group, you could:

a) strengthen Canadian publisher sites in the algorithmic eyes of Google,
b) strengthen the value of each linked-to publisher’s page,
c) build stronger readership of long-form work,
d) increase customer satisfaction,
e) increase the interested readers who can find you,
f) increase the overall chances of finding buyers and readers for your ebooks.

What’s the downside?

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