I believe the disservice to those looking for viable promotion lies in the broad stroke dismissal of “on-line” as if the choice of leveraging media and technology versus focussing on traditional outlets is an either/or proposition. In fact, they are adjuncts. Statistics say there are 33 million people in Canada; 61 per cent of them are on-line. Artists and their promotion marketers can not hope to find a better avenue than the on-line world – immediate, inexpensive, direct, vast and interactive – a powerful way to connect to the right people to build relationships over time, an avenue that amplifies and extends traditional promotion.

Who is she to say?

You should know my bias up front – I’m a tech-geek nerd with an intense love of the arts. It was my privilege to be immersed in the forefront of the digital communications revolution at its tipping point in the early 1990s. I continue to plumb the opportunities that come from the convergence of art, communications, and technology with my company BookShorts, and am especially thrilled to act as an enthusiastic ambassador to the many writers and publishers with whom we collaborate in the creation of digital media promotion campaigns that flow easily from real to virtual world.

The same but different

Internet marketing represents the convergence of all previous marketing models. It is the same, in that all the principles of crafting the message apply. But different, in that the presentation and consumption of a message delivered using media and technology are vastly different from what happens in traditional outlets.

Most notably, it presents a two-way exchange, an invitation and the means by which to take part in the process. It is immediate, sent or received sometimes within seconds. Even though immediate, the message may live over a long period of time, stored in a database archive for retrieval many years hence. And the message is dynamic, evolving over a period of time through the contributions from an active and engaged community.

The beauty of the digital platform is its ability to link and leverage, within its own media as well as through traditional media outlets. This is its “connective tissue” function. TV appearances with URLs onscreen, display ads with special offers to log on, radio spots promoting podcasts, all are examples of “viewer rotation,” moving the consumer through different channels, always taking the opportunity to personalize the one-to-one message unique to this form.

FACT: Audiences are increasingly occupying niches – television and film producers constantly scouting for literary material for film options are not hanging out in the same place as moms looking for romance novel divertissement. Mom is definitely not using the same traditional or non-traditional media as a teenager looking for peer gossip. Because column inches and server space is cheap in cyber real estate, being able to channel your marketing to extremely refined groups is an incredible opportunity, especially in the face of a book sales economy like Canada’s. There may only be an audience of 2,000 for your title, but new media increases the odds that you will, eventually, sell to every one of them.

FACT: The interactive dimension of marketing is invaluable because it helps de-construct the factors that prompt people to purchase your book. What draws their eye to a particular cover? It’s typically impossible to reach inside each reader’s brain and analyze their discriminative purchase instincts. Building a community allows you as close as you will ever get. Ask them! Fans and readers are no longer an undifferentiated mass of people, but rather a database of e-mail addresses, a community of opinion. Blogs and social networks are particularly strong vehicles, being that they are free, easy to administer, easy for the world to access, and serve as a centralized destination whose virtual address is can be included in all the other traditional and non-traditional promotion marketing you do, in any format.

FACT: No matter how altruistic the intention, people habitually disobey the directive “don’t judge a book by its cover.” You as a writer have varying degrees of authority over its final design. What you can not control on that front (pun intended), you can address by bringing the cover to life through other media. For example, Previewthebook.com is a website that presents nothing but thirty- to sixty-second trailers – have a look at how various types of books have been adapted for the screen. Push the adaptation a little farther creatively, and now your cover is not just an ad, it’s entertainment. That’s the spirit of what we aim to do with BookShorts.

Entertainment marketing

The second major function media has, especially in its digital form, is its ability to serve two masters – entertainment and advertising. Unlike plumbers or accountants, a writer’s “product” is entertainment. The writer’s “product as marketing” is, therefore, an authentic sideways shuffle from pure entertainment to entertainment in service to marketing.

Consider all the “content” you create in the course of your daily writer’s existence: e-mails to friends and colleagues; journal entries; research notes; a reading event; and – for those who have been successful in eliciting it already – a radio interview; an appearance on television; a feature article about you in the newspaper.

Now consider capturing that creative content in a technology wrapper, and releasing it in a “new media” form. For example, a few informal e-mails sent to friends can be tweaked to become your monthly e-newsletter. Practicing a live reading at home can be captured with a simple computer microphone and delivered via iTunes – now you’ve made a podcast. The reading at the library, the one your accommodating cousin shot on his camcorder? Upload it to YouTube and embed it on your website. If it turns out well, that media becomes an audition tape for the TV producer you’ve been pursuing. When the producer books you, ask permission to excerpt the on-air interview. Voila, you have a professionally produced video clip that extends that once-only TV media coverage into marketing that keeps on ticking.

Make, adapt, re-package, re-use: this is the mantra of media marketing. Take your work and turn it into attention-grabbing streams different from its origin: text blogs, video blogs, podcasts. Think about where your audience may gather – Facebook or MySpace, Bebo, or Revver – and direct that stream right into the niche. Each is populated with different types of people – so capturing and releasing your creative output in different media channels allows the message to reach that many more and to build relationships in the interstices between traditional-media-worthy career events.

You don’t have to choose

These two functions – connective tissue and content as marketing – are what make “new media” so powerful as a promotional tool for any writer, no matter what point they are at in their career. It’s cheaper, faster, increases its value over time, it’s controlled by you – frequency, content, target audience. It survives the vicissitudes of PR departments, keeps your fans your fans, regardless of how long between books, and keeps them connected to you as artist, regardless of what particular publisher puts any one title on the shelf.

Best of all, it requires little training in the finer points of marketing per se. You are using your authentic voice to gather a loyal audience, appreciative of what you have to offer, since their participation is elective. Your job is that of communicator, not sales person or spin-meister, a role much more sustainable by artists dedicated to their craft.

You cannot argue with the merits of traditional media promotion, and I am certainly not suggesting that here. Newspapers still have more reach than blogs; TV reaches ten times as many viewers as YouTube; the publicists tell me an interview on CBC radio has a measurable impact on book sales. But the chances of getting through to secure that coverage are daunting (see sidebar) and primarily relevant only when an artist has a “new offering” of some sort, be it a new novel, film adaptation, TV series or some other event-based catalyst, a situation that is not always at hand or realistic to manufacture.

Should you throw up your hands, make sacrificial offerings to the goddess of good promotion to ensure you get through to traditional media journalists? Sure, why not, can’t hurt. And while you’re in that spiritual state of mind, consider becoming one with the current universe, be present in the twenty-first century, and embrace the empowerment that comes from using all promotional resources at your disposal. An integrated media and multi-channel approach to bringing your creative voice to prospective audiences, always on, building over time, with technology and media as a tool in the toolbox, is an option that can’t be ignored in the world we now live in.