Facebook and distribution

Idle speculation time here.

With Facebook pretty much dominating social media, and having obvious gaming aspirations, I began to wonder what else Facebook can deliver.  Once I began theorizing, I really began to wonder more.

Facebook could actually be useful as a way to distribute artistic (comic and manga) and written fiction.  Easy for alerts, easy to notify people it's ready, incredibly easy to get more fans to buy into it.  Nice, public distribution that makes people very aware of what their friends are doing and reading.

Facebook could be an excellent distribution platform – read the manga there, discuss it with your friends, etc.  There's already a lot of this in place now – and the widget creation could let OTHER companies do it while Facebook enjoys the piggybacking and additional attention (and possibly cash).

As its my firm belief community building is a big part of success for media efforts, especially new ones, Facebook is a logical place to try or do some of it.  You want to build and maintain an audience – that's one of the ways to do it very fast (with some limits).  A retained, happy, engaged audience buys more of your stuff when it comes down to it, and is more likely to want to see you at a con or invite you to one.

Do I think this is where media distribution is going?  No.  Part part of it doubtlessly will try, far more than is being done now.  I await seeing the results.

– Steven Savage

Backlog In Media

Imagine you're someone that produces media – or maybe you already do  Perhaps you make video games, or manga, or fantasy novels.  You have a good thing going, and of course you have competitors, but you can deal with them.  You can do more, faster, better . . . except there's one competitor that's getting better all the time and has a LOT more material than you could ever produce.

The backlog of games, anime, comics, media etc. that's out there now.  That's a growing competition for everyone working in media right now.

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Kindle, Amazon, Technology, Trust

As the Kindle Deletion Disaster continues, I'm seeing a lot of analyses of what this means.  Yes, there's what it does to Amazon, there's the political repercussions (what's to stop a government from manipulating omni-delete features), and there's more to come.  I'd like to add one thing the Kindle Deletion Disaster does to writing: it affects trust.

Trust is a very important thing in the world of media, as we geeks and fans know.  A company can loose trust with a lousy game, by cracking down on fansites, etc.  But the Kindle and similar technologies give companies – and creators – a chance to completely destroy trust in their work by doing boneheaded things.

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