"WHAT IS YOUR GOOGLE STRATEGY FOR YOUR NEW BOOK?"As somebody with a couple of books gestating in various stages in my head, on paper and in my computer(s), I found
this post by
Dr. David Friedman ( himself an author of academic political economy and fiction) at
Ideas to be intriguing - leveraging
Lulu.com and
Google as a publishing revolution in favor of creators. An excerpt:
"....There remains the third function. To judge, at least, by horrified accounts of the contents of editorial slush piles, enormously more books are written than are worth reading. While publishers do an imperfect job of searching out the needle of literature in the haystack of slush—imperfect in both directions—they do a much better job than a reader faced with millions of webbed texts could do for himself. In order to eliminate publishers, we need an alternative filter, ideally a better one.
As it happens, there is a firm already in the business of finding small needles of worthwhile material in large haystacks of text. It is called Google. Google's core business consists of figuring out what pages users will want to read out of the much larger number of pages that might conceivably have something to do with their query. It performs, and performs very well, a different version of the same task performed by publishers as filters.
I therefor propose that Google ought to undertake the project of replacing publishers. To do so it needs to create mechanisms by which readers can find, not pages of information, but books—the particular books those readers will want to read, buried in an enormously larger number of webbed books that those readers will not want to read. I leave the details of the project to Google's very talented employees "The best way to evaluate and leverage platforms like this proposal by Friedman is really not my field.
Critt, or
Dave Davison or
John Robb or
Steve DeAngelis all might have something pertinent to add here that I cannot. Until then, my eyebrows are raised.