Not a television writer (they generally stay locked up in an airless room crafting their scripts), but a writer of books. You’ve probably only seen a writer on a television show – Late Night with David Letterman, or the Today show – if that writer also happens to be a celebrity of some sort. An actress plugging a health and fitness book, or a sports legend plugging a memoir.

But what about someone – a writer who isn’t yet a household name – who’s written a good book? A book that could be something that might interest legions of television viewers?

Anyone?

Didn’t think so.

In many countries besides the United States, writers occupy a strong place in the cultural dialogue, often appearing on television discussion shows to weigh in on this or that. They’re considered worthy of attention. Not that they’re considered right or wrong in what they express, simply worthy of being included because they’ve taken the time to organize their thoughts into a narrative they’ve managed to get published.

Not so in a country where more than a million books are published each year.

The United States has a lot of readers, but its many writers don’t get a lot of notice. That doesn’t mean that you can’t get noticed.

Don’t expect television to be your path to fame as a writer. But you don’t expect that now anyway – since you’re probably someone who’s developing an online platform for ideas, for building an audience.

Nor should give up on “television” as a medium for your message. The new television isn’t one run by the broadcast networks. (Remember them? All-powerful in the days before the niche-ing of today’s television spectrum, with thousands of cable channels catering to all different tastes? Kind of like what might be happening, what actually is happening, with traditional publishers…)

The new television is run by viewers. YouTube is only one outlet. Many more such video outlets exist and are springing up almost daily. Younger viewers continue to watch television, to absorb video content. But they choose to watch it through their smart phones or on their tablets or at their computers. And content – as well as marketing – can be created for this demanding viewing audience that is no longer tethered to the living-room television.

Just as you’re not tethered to traditional methods of marketing your message.

You can reach a vast audience by keeping your message strong, by interacting with your audience, by including video content in your own online discussions of your work and your ideas.

You may not yet be invited to weigh in on matters of cultural importance on a late-night broadcast. But you may just be building a much stronger audience of readers who care more about what you write than what TV personality you sat next to.

At least, that’s the speculation. According to an article in The New York Times, among other newspapers and news sites, since Amazon is in the process of opening more, and larger, distribution centers, can an Amazon physical retail presence be far behind?

Well, never say never, but it seems unlikely. Amazon is not only the largest vendor of books, but also a significant retailing presence for a wide variety of products, from shelf-stable grocery items to rugs and furniture and clothing.

Sure, bookstores sell more than books nowadays, things like toys, stationery, souvenirs – they have to, to cover the costs of selling books. But it seems that as digital sales of books themselves soar, Amazon would be foolhardy to open stores to offer all sorts of merchandise (or a carefully selected choice of all the merchandise it offers).

And Amazon sells so very many different things, a store would seem to be more like a crazy dumping ground like something you’d find in the sci-fi series Warehouse 13 than even the best-supplied Walmart. And does Amazon want to become like Walmart?

The discussion itself, though, reveals the interest in Amazon, as a kind of merchandising version of computer maker and seller Apple: seemingly all-powerful.

What does this represent for writers who are creating books (either for online or physical distribution), or building a platform to increase their audience?. Not much, really. As an author, your concerns are content, and distribution. As someone building a platform, you’re working on creating content and you’re building an audience to follow you wherever and however you distribute that content.

After all, the content is more important than the delivery system. And whatever Amazon does in terms of opening physical stores or not, it’s pretty likely that once you’ve built a large enough platform and finished your book, you’ll be able to sell it anywhere.

But you probably knew that.

Still, the latest figures from the American Association of Publishing show that while year-to-year sales for that month decreased by nearly 21%, e-book sales jumped by 123%.

So the increase in e-books more than made up for the decrease in hardcovers.

This is not great news for traditional publishers eager to shore up earnings in the face of shifts in book-buying habits. But it does show that people are still reading books.

Or at least buying them.

Which is good news for any author. Especially one who’s building a platform for his or her ideas and who wants to engage with a growing audience through that online platform.

Still, e-publishing isn’t the cure-all for any sales ailment the publishing industry might be feeling. It’s another option – albeit one that is getting to be a more potent one. The future is digital, as author J.A. Konrath notes in an excellent blog posting, “Franzen and the EBook Bubble”. And, bit by bit and perhaps byte by byte), the power is returning to the author as the creator of content, rather than resting with the publisher as its distributor.

You are more likely to make an impact, regardless of how your book is published, if you’ve devoted time to building your audience through blogging, social networking, interaction with your tribe and commenting on other posts.

But it seems to be an increasing likelihood that the e-book is the book that will be in everyone’s hands (via e-reader of some sort) in the very near future.

Apart from that, however, what’s important is that you still devote time to finding your voice and crafting your message. No matter what method of information delivery you choose, you’ want to be transparent.

Authors are entrepreneurs (and many entrepreneurs should be writers to increase their reach), and should act, not react. Embrace the platform concept, and move forward in finding an audience.

So much for the enduring nature of the printed word in book form.

Barnes & Noble has decided not to stock physical books published by Amazon. It will offer them online, but not in its brick-and-mortar stores . Comments from readers on the Galleycat.com, which had reported on this, were generally opposed to Barnes & Noble’s actions.

The thing is, how many physical books does this mean? Well, not many for now. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will distribute print books from Amazon Publishing, and that represents only a fraction of what Amazon offers in digital form anyway.

Still, what Barnes & Noble is doing in the name of protecting its interests – or in simply making a statement that it opposes Amazon’s increasing power – is limiting the choice of consumers. What Barnes & Noble is doing in the name of protest is saying that choice is important, but only when the retailer is doing the choosing for the consumer.

As more and more books are being read on electronic devices, the rejection of physical copies of books may not amount to much. But Barnes & Noble’s actions underlines the fraught conditions in the retail marketplace.

What does this mean for authors? At this point not much – unless you’re an author who will have a physical copy of your book distributed by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and will need to tell your fans that they can’t find it at their local Barnes & Noble. Not likely, right?

But how authors distribute what they write is important. They want to be heard, to be read, to reach their audience, to make a difference. They have been building a platform to get their ideas across and their book is an extension of themselves. Even if one consumer is unable to find the book he or she wants because a retailer has decided against stocking that book, that consumer – and that retailer – suffer.

That shouldn’t happen.

Definitely, says James Altucher, a writer and entrepreneur. In a riveting and informative blog post on TechCrunch he describes how self-publishing has worked for him, and why it should work for any entrepreneur.

Altucher makes many of the points we here at Beneath the Cover do when discussing why having a book is so important for an entrepreneur:

1. Entrepreneurs can exploit their knowledge and content
2. They can strengthen their role as expert by having published a book (and this includes self-publishing)
3. A book is a great way for an entrepreneur to stand out and, as Altucher writes,

“At the very least, when you hand someone a book you wrote, it’s more impressive than handing a business card. It shows that you have enough expertise to write the book. It also shows you value the relationship with the potential customer enough that you are willing to give him something of value. Something you created.”

For anyone, entrepreneurs especially, who want to become known, a book is perhaps still one of the best ways toward that. It becomes a part of your platform to help you spread your ideas and build your business.

Equally interesting is Altucher’s argument about why self-publishing is viable in an age when traditional publishing, though still powerful, is less of an option for the vast majority of writers. Writers who might make money but who are often overlooked in favor of the handful of big-name authors whose sales support the publishing business’s operating models.

Altucher is the most recent, but not the only, writer to extol self-publishing. Self-publishing may not work for everyone (it helps first to have a platform to reach people), but it might be something that more and more writers – good writers who are rejected by literary agents and publishers (not that good writing is an indicator of potential success – will consider going forward. More and more consumers are choosing to spend their time reading self-published books. So more and more authors will undoubtedly self-publish.

Barnes & Noble has spent a great deal of effort in promoting its Nook e-reader, and even devotes a lot of in-store floor space to Nook boutiques. But, as Jim Hilt, vice president of e-books at Barnes & Noble said, speaking at a conference on digital books, “The device is just an entry point at helping consumers do what they already do today, which is read great books and discover content.”

Amazon, too, is aware of that, even with the success of its Kindle, and wants to ensure that content, even its own, gets to a reading public. The online retailer continues to offer a variety of publishing options and is a powerhouse Internet distributor, but has also inked a deal with Houghton Mifflin to distribute Amazon’s adult titles in North America outside of the Amazon.com platform.

Although many millions of iPads, e-readers and such have been sold (and will continue to sell), changing the nature of the reading and book-buying experience profoundly, it all comes down to what’s on the screen (or page). The distribution of content is evolving. The content remains key, though.

Even when a tribe contributes to the content. If you’re building a platform for your message, you will rely to a certain extent rely on what your audience tells you about your message when it responds to what you write. The creation of that content falls ultimately to you, of course. Books written by committee – anything done by committee – have a committee feel, that is, an unfocused point of view, as if something had been given so much market research that the sparkle that made people enthusiastic about it in the first place.

The point is, though, that despite the tools for market research, audience testing and distribution, the content of a book is the most important thing. Everyone wants to find an audience – even the seemingly all-powerful distributors like Amazon. Content is too precious for it not to find a home in the mind of a reader.

The latest comes from NBC News, which has begun a new electronic imprint, NBC Publishing. NBC had teamed with Penguin and the Perseus Books Group on enhanced ebooks. For this new venture, NBC hired as creative director someone who had previously worked at Perseus. (Publishing experience counts for something.) But NBC has considerable strengths as a media company, so this digital venture is not a big gamble: it can’t ensure that its books will be bought, but it can nevertheless promote them widely.

NBC is also taking advantage of its multimedia resources to offer enhanced e-books with videos. It’s also using its significant marketing platform, through which it can publicize whatever titles it releases.

This is a logical step for NBC News, since it can re-use its video content. And NBC is branching into an area that more and more news organizations are exploring. Books with timely content can be released much more quickly electronically than through traditional publishing, and for a news organization, this is very important.

The timeliness of content may seem to matter less to writers who are building their own platform, or to novelists. And if you’re weighing whether to self-publish or try to get your work accepted at a traditional publisher, the timeliness of a release my not matter so much to you. Traditional publishing operates more slowly because of its needs. It needs to inform its sales staff of what’s coming and these salespeople need in turn to try to sell bookstores on the coming works. Many authors rely on publishers to help get the word out about their books – and publishers do rally behind the authors whom the publishing sales staff seem to warm to. Such pre-publication promotion takes time.

And most authors don’t have a platform the size of NBC News. So they work with their publishers to help build awareness for their work. Of course, authors should be doing their own awareness-building. They may not opt for self-publishing via e-book, but they still should use digital tools to broaden their base and engage with their readers, well before publication.

NBC is in a position to jump into digital publishing, because it’s already laid the groundwork: it’s built a platform and it continues to build it.

Most authors aren’t yet in that position. If they choose to self-publish, as many are doing, they still need to do what they can to prevent being lost in an ocean of other digital titles.

Not all experts know everything.

Case in point: My good friend Greg Habstritt just spent some personal time with legendary expert direct-marketer Dan Kennedy.

Dan Kennedy is a brilliant no-BS entrepreneur for whom I have immense respect.

But.

But: I have to say the advice he gave Greg is wrong.

Kennedy told Greg that online content is no longer king.

Hold on. What?

Are you kidding me?

How could any intelligent Internet marketer make such a bold, and patently wrong statement?

To be fair to Dan, he isn’t actually an Internet marketer. He has a website to which he provides input. He doesn’t have an email address let alone a blog, a Facebook account or a Twitter tag.

Nevertheless, despite his avoidance of today’s social-networking tools, Dan is a brilliant marketer and his observations on the Internet are worth discussing. So, let’s examine them here:

Dan supported his belief that content is no longer king by saying:

“It’s about the relationship that you build with your community and the people in it. When you have that relationship, it’s very difficult for anyone else to get their attention, or to attract them away from you.”

OK, I agree with this statement: It is about the relationship, but how do you build a relationship?

More on this later.

“The second key is developing a unique and compelling offering that generates significant ‘pain of disconnect.’”

Hold on: If you’re not “selling” something (which is how I interpret “develop a unique and compelling offering that generates significant “pain of disconnect”) you’re doing something wrong, and selling takes precedent over content?

Wow, so let me get this right:

1. Develop a relationship
2. With the intent on selling someone something.

I’m sorry, but that doesn’t hold water for me. Ask yourself something: If you knew that the only reason someone was developing a relationship with you was simply to sell you something, how would that make you feel?

Would you find it easy to develop a relationship with someone who just wants to sell you?

My answer is that I run as far away as possible from people like that. I don’t want to be sold, I want to be engaged.

Trust is established through the transference of confidence between one person and another. Trust is needed to develop a relationship. Can you really trust someone whose intention you know to be one that’s simply based on selling something to you? I can’t.

And let’s get over this idea that we are all trying to sell something to someone else in everything we do (i.e., taking a shower, putting makeup on in the morning etc…). There’s a distinct difference between subtly selling who you are, and overtly selling something under the guise of selling who you are.

Honestly, what Dan is suggesting is transactional marketing disguised as relationship marketing.

What Dan and Greg seem to miss is this: that content is an expression of  both soul purpose and voice, your own soul purpose and voice.

Without expressing your voice, you have no ability to initiate or create a relationship with your audience.

Let’s use Greg Habstritt as case in point.

Greg created his excellent Engage Today event because he wanted to share an expression of his voice, after he’d noticed the moving shifts in business, communication and personal development. He had many opportunities to share his voice, but he chose to exercise it by putting on a fantastic live event, Engage Today.

This event was a reflection of both Greg’s soul purpose and his sharing his voice.

He got many of the world’s top thought leaders to appear and speak, including:

His Holiness the Dali Lama

Sir Richard Branson

F.W. Declerk

Steven Covey

Tony Hsieh

Eben Pagen

and many, many others.

Each of these speakers, as well as the subsequent DVD box set of the recording, Engage Today 2010 and 2011, and Greg’s blog Simplewealth.com were all a reflection of Greg’s soul and his voice. All of this was content.

Greg’s a close friend, and I know that his intention for hosting the initial Engage Today was not to make money. In fact, when he asked me to speak at Engage Today it was only after he had seen me present the Pendulum presentation in which I discussed how society was moving away from a “me” (or individualistic) mentality into a “we”- (or community) based one. He told me that Pendulum helped him articulate why he was doing the Engage Today, because it wasn’t a profit center for Greg, rather a labor of love.

Greg’s intentions are pure: He wants to help radically transform the world. Selling a product or service came second to making a difference.

So, the advice taken from Dan that Greg has latched onto is counter to his own personality and, I take it, his intentions. Greg, I want my readers to learn from your heart, not your pocketbook.

Living into soul purpose and sharing your voice doesn’t require selling something. It requires a genuine desire to want to help someone. If selling a product or service will help people, then that’s great. But it isn’t a must that you sell something, anything, in order to make a difference.

What’s interesting is, at the end of his post Greg says:

“The days of content ruling the world are over – so the secret is to focus on the relationship you build with your community so that they TRUST you (which is a key lacking element in the world today).”

Greg is both painfully wrong and painfully right.

Content for content’s sake, à la Emily Dickinson writing poetry and hiding it away, has never been king.

But Greg is right: The Internet is a relationship-building technology.

How, however, do you develop a relationship? How do you develop trust with people?

Through conversation. And what is a conversation made up of?

Content!

So, I guess Greg and I aren’t that far apart.

What does that say about the state of books today?

That books are a mere part of the retail landscape.

But they always have been. What it really says is that retailers simply can’t rely on the sales of books to stay afloat. They often augmented their sales with things like trinkets or stationery, but the bookstore has become even more of a kind of mini department store. Even Barnes and Noble’s success with its Nook – which the company is considering splitting off – doesn’t offset the very real need to make money elsewhere. It really is like a recent New Yorker magazine cover that showed a bookstore that had toys, games, souvenirs, and other paraphernalia and one small shelf devoted to those old-fashioned paper and pasteboard constructions: books.

For several years, of course, retailers have been discovering what many authors have learned: that you can’t live by books alone. Sure, many fiction writers earn livings as teachers of creative writing at colleges (thus ensuring a continuing flood of authors onto a not-always-welcoming marketplace) while many nonfiction writers are entrepreneurs (and often college professors as well).

Books aren’t the goal: recognition for your ideas is. It’s the rare author who can make a living solely on the sales of his or her books. The books are a stepping-stone to other things (even for super-successful fiction authors who often realize more money through ancillary sales, such as rights to movie or television adaptations).

Even bookstores that rely on a steady flow of appearances by interesting authors – such as Rainy Day Books in Kansas City – markets these author appearances as theatrical events, selling tickets (which often include the price of the book), for authors who know how to speak to a crowd in an entertaining way.

Just as many movie actors are contractually bound to promote their film – their job doesn’t stop when the shooting ends – so authors, who are often eager to have a crumb of marketing from their publishers, should think beyond the book and into what their book represents for their careers going forward.

If you stick to your book alone, it’ll be a tough slog. Of course, writing a book is a great achievement, and to have written one or two or many books is the sign of a disciplined mind and a singular ambition. But the most savvy authors don’t stop with the writing.

Just as bookstores can no longer count on sales of books, neither can authors can’t on them – it’s the ideas, it’s the platform – it’s the opportunity to expand your reach.

It isn’t easy. But it’s doable.

Things are winding down at publishing houses as harried editors put aside manuscripts, rejection letters and agents’ calls and look forward to the Christmas break.

As for authors, well, authors are still writing. And if you’re an author who’s building a platform, then you know that there’s no downtime. People who read don’t take a break because it’s a time when magazines publish their best-of issues, or when television dwindles down to repeats and Hallmark holiday movies.

You’ve got a message to get out and, if you’ve been doing your job right, your audience remains hungry to hear what you want to say.

Any professional writer – and that’s what you are – knows that writing is something you do everyday, like going to work but without real holidays. Look at it this way, you never stop reading things, right? You’re always searching for news, for ideas, for comfort from the written word, no matter how you process it, whether it’s through a newspaper, an RSS feed or a smart phone app.

People don’t stop supplying information simply because the calendar says it’s time for a breather. And as you’re trying to build your audience, you’re not going to stop providing that audience with your content.

The thing is, as an author, budding or not, you should keep a schedule. Commit to writing three to four blog posts a week – and stick to it. If you think you’re going to run out of ideas, don’t panic – you’ll have plenty of fodder for your writing as long as you’re communicating with your audience, who’ll provide you with the feedback you need to inspire you to create more. But as someone who has committed to posting a message several times a week, you might want to keep a rolling file for offhand ideas that can also lead to inspiration.

You don’t want to go to the trouble of establishing your brand, and trying to build it, and not feed it. People are hungry for information, and they’ll be hungry for you if you continue to feed them your ideas.

Even when the rest of the country says it’s time for a holiday nap.