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August 05, 2005
Self-branding
Writing in the Chronicle, Michael J. Bugeja alerts us to the fact that prospective employers and others search the Web to find information about people. Film at eleven.
He does, nevertheless, have something interesting to say: that authors are now creating domain names for their books, as part of internet book promotion.
Visitors to my book site have access to all manner of free information, including lectures for each chapter; sample syllabi for large, middle-range, senior, master's, and doctoral classes; end-of-chapter materials; forms for paper assignments, journal exercises, and presentations; sample midterms and final exams; a bibliography; and an index.
Interesting. But then he also says,
If you're considering a book site, you should realize the convention of the Internet: People expect things for free. This is not the medium for professors concerned about copyright issues or intellectual property. If you're in that crowd, you won't easily share your pedagogies or methodologies so your site will be static -- or worse, will seem purely self-promotional.
He's offering a peculiar binary here: one's personal website is either static and self-promotional, or—it promotes your books. Huh?
I think the real binary in this piece is between putting up information about yourself as opposed to promoting yourself. Bugeja disdains the former (it's "static") and advocates the latter:
"Creating an online domain -- especially for a tenure-track professor -- is an integral part of developing what in advertising would be called branding," says Jay Newell, an assistant professor in the journalism school I head at Iowa State.
Maybe he's on to a really useful idea here, but my reaction is very skeptical. A site that Bugeja does not name that I associate with self-branding is Michael Eisenberg's. And I associate that site with an incredibly simplfied approach to information literacy. That, for me, is the problem with self-branding: it entails self-reduction.
Via Nick Carbone on WPA-L.
Posted by senioritis at August 5, 2005 08:20 AM
Comments
If what makes the personal homepage static is that it's unlinked and unchanging (nobody cares to link to it and the content is more than a year or two old), then maybe the new sites with new domain names make sense for people who are anxious about the uptake of their newest book. I tend to think the domain buy-up (readmybook.prettyplease) is overemphasized and echoes a kind of mass media perspective on markets (as if the marketers/branders and the customers are on opposite sides of the fence). And so we get a bunch of relatively fixed content about books that doesn't really get people talking about the books, doesn't necessarily trip the book-buying impulse. The domain name ($$) matters much less than the content, links to it, and conversations playing out in webspace (blogs, lists) about the book. An alternative to Bugeja's model would be to pick up a Google API key, blog like heck (on whatever, sometimes related to the book), link to the book page from your weblog, and maybe even get approval from the publisher (I don't know how this works) to kick up a home grown carnival around one of the chapters (a kind of early release party online). Of course, that said, what do I know about marketing, much less marketing books.
Posted by: Derek at August 6, 2005 10:47 AM
Well, you know a heck of a lot about blogging, and I like your ideas here. Publishers should go for it; they're already willing for Amazon etc. to publish sample pages & chapters.
Who's game to try this on their next book? I am, but my next one won't be out for a couple of years. Earlier takers?
Posted by: senioritis at August 6, 2005 11:07 AM