Several people have asked me where my main feed is — and I just got another request this morning.
I don’t have one.
My thinking is that each title needs to stand on its own. As a result I rebuild every title’s followers from 0. That means that if you don’t keep track of me either here or on Podiobooks, you might miss it. It also means I don’t have the advantage of a captive audience that I get to build on for each book. People have to actually DO something in order to keep up with me.
I’m beginning to think I should.
If I think in terms of building a brand .. creating that product kind of thing where I maximize my exposure and potential market .. I absolutely need to be capitalizing on my previous work by making sure that anybody who subscribed before gets a taste of the new work and subsequently has to opt out — take some action to NOT get the new stuff. That will maximize my downloads and assure that I get numbers that make me look as good as possible.
That’s always struck me as being a trifle self-serving, and not necessarily something I want to do. My objective has always been to provide the best quality entertainment value for my work within the scope of my ability.
But it occurs to me that it also *prevents* people from staying up to date by forcing them to keep track of me. It almost forces them to subscribe thru podiobooks (altho I realize that iTunes music store by-passes subscription) and therefore maximizes my exposure on podiobooks. That prevention factor seems even more self-serving. After all, if I want to make sure you get the best possible experience, then I should make it as easy as possible for you to get the work. That means you should be able to get it all in one feed if you want. It also means you should be able to get it in multiple formats. (Watch for news on that in the first quarter of 2010.)
So, I’ve used the excellent Yahoo Pipes tool to merge all the feeds together.
Enjoy.
