I'm told Orbit had internal pushback about my website from a marketing manager in $OVERSEAS_BUSINESS_UNIT because it didn't have any flash or graphics content. Visually boring, in other words. He therefore assumed it was useless and wasn't going to drive sales and he wanted me to come up with a new, shiny, useful website with lots of book jackets on it.
This is a website that gets 9000-11,000 unique visitors per day, 130,000 unique visitors a month -- probably more than Orbit's national subsidiary in question -- and runs comment threads that get about the same number of postings as "Making Light". It's a community that's taken me a decade to build. And it gets written off because it doesn't have the latest trendy web 2.0 shite cluttering it up and sucking up wholesale bandwidth ...!
Publishing marketing folks are, in many cases, woefully behind the times -- they're chasing to catch up, rather than reasoning about the way forward. (There are exceptions: Baen blazed a trail, and Tor are visibly trying to do the right thing. But most of 'em ...)
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ninetydegrees
no subject
2010-10-11 16:44 (UTC)This is a website that gets 9000-11,000 unique visitors per day, 130,000 unique visitors a month -- probably more than Orbit's national subsidiary in question -- and runs comment threads that get about the same number of postings as "Making Light". It's a community that's taken me a decade to build. And it gets written off because it doesn't have the latest trendy web 2.0 shite cluttering it up and sucking up wholesale bandwidth ...!
Publishing marketing folks are, in many cases, woefully behind the times -- they're chasing to catch up, rather than reasoning about the way forward. (There are exceptions: Baen blazed a trail, and Tor are visibly trying to do the right thing. But most of 'em ...)