Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Biff Mitchell

Biff Mitchell is an IT-savvy writer who (mostly) does his own thing as regards publishing and marketing. You might care to take a brief look to see how he does it.

The second edition of Biff's book on emarketing tools for writers has just been published at Fictionwise. I might have bought it but I'm afraid the complications of the Fictionwise site wore out my patience.

1 comment:

Biff said...

I've received a few emails from people who tried to buy eMarketing Tools for writers but couldn't get by the Fictionwise technology. One of them is a friend of mine who's a web programmer and desinger. It took him 20 minutes to order the book.

This is obviously one of the realities that the online book sellers are going to have to address ... the fact that I can go into a physical store and just buy a book and be done with it, but the online stores add degrees of complexity that I don't want to deal with.

The ones that bug me the most are those that want to gather information from me that has nothing to do with the sale. If I'm ordering an ebook that's going to be downloaded to me by email, they don't need to know my mailing address or phone number ... and they sure as hell don't need to know my age or sex. If they were to ask me this in a bookstore, I would tell them to just ring in the book and forget the questions, but at some web stores, you can't complete the book order until you answer their marketing questions.

Internet stores should pay less attention to the possibilities for gathering and manipulating information and more attention to good old fashion customer service.

I.E., here's my money, gimme my damn book!