Digital Book World: Books vs. Everything Else

I attended the Digital Book World: Discoverability & Marketing meeting this week in NYC. One comment stuck with me after yesterday's meeting. Jon Fine, the director of Amazon's author and publisher relationships (love that that's a position, by the way) gave a talk on "Secrets to More Effectively Marketing and Promoting Your Books on Amazon." He opened with a pretty great theory:

"It's not about Print vs. Digital. It's about Books vs. Everything Else."

That's something we can sometimes lose sight of in the changing landscape of modern publishing. We're so busy freaking out about what e-books mean (it's so easy to self-pub now! anyone can put a book up on Amazon! will bookstores become a mythological beast of the past?!) that we forget about our real goal: to keep people reading. So our real enemy is not the e-readers popping up in every direction.

Our real enemy is every other activity that distracts people from reading nowadays: TV, movies, video games, Facebook, the internet, blogging (ha), etc.

Later in the day, Charles Duhigg gave a talk on "Using the Power of Habit to Market and Sell Books." His thesis, briefly?

Angry Birds is your biggest competition.

Angry Birds, like most video games, is habit-forming and addictive. How does it keep you addicted? It gets increasingly harder as you play, challenging you, but it constantly offers you small and surprising rewards.* How do you keep a reader engaged, then, when they're reading on an iPhone and Angry Birds is just a click away?

Basically, make your book as addictive as a video game (because that's easy right?!). Challenge the reader the whole time, and get more challenging the further into the story they get. But make sure to reward them too -- with surprises and twists.

Take Harry Potter for example. In the third book (SPOILER ALERT), you're reading along thinking "why are all these people warning Harry not to attack a bloodthirsty murderer escaped from prison? OBVIOUS ADVICE IS OBVIOUS." The reader wants to know what's really going on here. We know there's something underneath the surface. We're being challenged as we try to figure out what it is.

Then, as Harry's hiding under a table in the Three Broomsticks, we learn that SIRIUS BETRAYED HARRY'S PARENTS ZOMG. We are surprised (and rewarded for our patience!) and now we want to keep reading. But the plot gets twistier. How the eff did this guy break into the Gryffindor common room?! WHAT IS WITH THAT SKETCHY CAT AND THAT GIANT EVIL LOOKING DOG?!

And when you get to the final reveals of this book, your head explodes. With joy. In my case anyway. So that's my theory on why HP is as addictive as a video game. All you need to do is replicate that in your book! Yes, easier said than done. But it's still good advice.

* for more detail on this idea, I strongly suggest checking out Jane McGonigal's book Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, in which she explains why the "work" we do in video games is so much more rewarding than the work we do in reality. and also how to make real-life work more like a video game. which would be awesomesauce.