GrindEFX

At the beginning of this year, Mike Masnick compiled everything you need to do in order to be successful in the music business into one, simple formula:

Connect with Fans (CwF) + Reason to Buy (RtB) = $$$

We’ve discussed this formula various times on the site, for example when Jack White’s label started a tiered subscription service, or when Mike himself made a presentation at NARM 2009. Terry also touched on it during a discussion about a panel at NARM compiled of major label executives.

But today I saw this formula being used in a completely different, albeit very similar, industry – the publishing industry. And I found it fascinating just how closely this story resembled the many stories we hear from independent musicians. Now I don’t know much about the publishing industry, to be honest I’m not much of a “book person”, but I do know that it is struggling in much the same way the music industry is, and I thought this business strategy was brilliant.

Matt Stewart is a struggling author (artist) who couldn’t find a publisher (record label) to pick up his debut novel (album) – The French Revolution. But instead of scrapping it, or wasting another year trying to get a publishing deal (recording deal), he decided to go it alone and put the book (album) out there himself.

So how did he go about this? He came up with a truly innovative way to get his novel (album) to the world. He Tweeted it!

That’s right. He is posting his 380,000 character novel (album) in 130 character blasts – 10 characters for hashtags and links – on Twitter. Before your brain explodes trying to work it out, that’s about 3,700 Tweets. A friend of Matt’s has programmed a tool to automatically Tweet a section of the novel every 15 minutes or so – I’m afraid I don’t have the math for how long it’s going to take to Tweet the whole novel.

Right there is the first part of the formula. Matt has connected with his fans (or readers) by giving them his novel in a unique, interesting and fun way. I’m not even a fan of fiction novels and I’m certainly interested in this project, I’m already following him on Twitter. If he’s got me excited about a novel, then frankly there are no limits for this book.

So how is he going to make money from this? Well of course he’s going to sell it on his own website. You can currently download the entire novel (album) for $1.99 via Kindle (iTunes), which you can also read (listen to) on your iPhone (iPod – this is actually quite fun, it’s like mad libs). Matt is also going to make it available in paperback (CD), which I’m assuming you will be able to buy from various websites soon. And for a limited time you can read the novel in its entirety on Scribd (ummm…Last.fm?) for free.

Why will people buy it? BECAUSE IT’S AWESOME! People are going to see the odd Tweet from Matt every now and again and find themselves connecting with the story, soon enough they will want to buy the novel and read it in its entirety…won’t they? Even if the story doesn’t particularly appeal to them, they might be so intrigued by the unique release of this book that they buy it out of pure curiosity.

Kudos to Matt Stewart for being brave and taking a innovative approach to marketing his work on his own. We’re seeing new musicians trying new and unorthodox techniques to market their music every week, hopefully Matt will inspire more authors to do the same.