in response to my last post about social marketing, babytoaster asked such a great question, and I gave such a lengthy answer, I think it actually deserves its own post. so here it is.

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I think the most empowering way to approach this is, for starters, to forget about classic definitions of being published. Those definitions de facto mean that you look to the established system to select your work out of the mass of works there, and elevate it to a place of public visibility, after which people will buy it (or be exposed to it).  By this definition anything "else" is "less." 

However, this is the model that is undergoing such radical shifts right now that entire media empires - from the Wall Street Journal to Random House to music industry companies - are reorganizing or collapsing all across the landscape because the locus of purchasing and media consumption has so radically shifted among the consumers.

That's us, who inhabit web-land and are interconnected in this manner.

So: ask yourself instead, "how can I get my work out to a large enough number of people that it finds its proper audience?"  In the new model, once that happens your audience will connect around you and your work, and *they* will "select it" once you have made it public.  (This doesn't mean you can't also approach traditional channels to get exposure; it just means you're focusing on this new model and not just waiting for the traditional machine to "pick you" - buy your book, cut your album, franchise your comic, whatever.)

When your work gains some traction, then you have choices: monetize it, if you want green; pitch your works to established publishers because now you can demonstrate real buyers and demand for what you offer. Or just keep doing what you're doing, as an independent artist.

These are just details. What matters strategically is that you think in terms of a radically different business model.

Here is a great series of posts to read, not specifically about social publishing but about this kind of new business model for creative work:

http://dreamcafe.com/words/category/artist-business-models/page/2/

Start at bottom of page, read the blog posts in order.

This is a 21st century artist's business model series of posts taken from a paper written by some new thinkers including Stephen Brust (astoundingly excellent sf writer) and his cohorts.

re licensing options, become familiar with the Creative Commons licenses (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/). That protects you as much or as little as you care to be protected, intellectual-property wise, and gives you the option to make your copyrights more permissive so that consumers can engage more personally and also creatively with what you offer.


 

This is going to flat-out squash vast swaths of YouTube content creators:

YouTube Now Mutes Videos With Unauthorized Copyrighted Music
 

I think I hear the screams of rage in the ether already.