It’s 2012. It’s been 2012 for the past two weeks now and it’s been nearly four years since I started this blog. Originally, I started this blog for two reasons. The first was that I wanted a venue for me to talk about the books I read. I read a lot of books so, in my mind, it wouldn’t be too hard to simply write a few words about each book I read and post it on here. I, of course, was wrong. Do you know how hard it is to post about everybody you read immediately after you read it? Damn near impossible for a procrastinator like myself. As much as I hate to admit it, there is sometimes the period of a month in between me finishing a book and me posting the review. I’m a terrible book reviewer. I’m working on accepting that about myself.

The second reason I started this blog was because I am an aspiring writer. Granted, I haven’t been published and my novel is in a perpetual state of “work in progress”, but someday I hope to get it to a point where I am comfortable with other people reading what I’ve wrote. That “someday” will be in 2012, or else. “Or else” what I do not know. This blog directly relates to aspiring writing career. I know times are changing and self-publishing your own e-book is becoming more and more common for authors. Just ask author Jonathan Selwood (I greatly enjoyed his first novel,The Pinball Theory of Apocalypse) who self-e-published his second novel, Die Like a Girl
. I’ve been brought up on the belief that being a successful author means landing a book deal with a major publisher. Yet over these past four years as I’ve watched the book industry evolve, I have been forces to accept the fact that I may never see any of my books in print, only in digital formats. I’m fine with this. I believe you can be a successful self-e-published author.

I got a Kindle Fire for christmas. It seemed like the time to jump on the e-reader bandwagon and the Fire appealed to me. I’ll properly review the Fire later on (you know, in about a month), but after playing around with it, I’ve become more OK with books moving to digital. I don’t believe print is going anywhere anytime soon. There will still be books and authors that I must have a hard copy of. But there are also books that I am fine only having a digital copy of.

Getting back to the second reason, this blog is marketing tool for my brand. I am my own brand: Colin Matthew, the book pirate. Aside from here I also have my twitter (@thebookpirate) and that’s it. I don’t particularly enjoy trying to market myself, but it’s become a necessity for all authors with the exception of Stephen King or John Grisham.

Now long ago I was contact by a representative from ooshirts.com pitching the idea of expanding my brand to include t-shirt. While I have nothing I personally wanted to put on a shirt, it is something I could see other authors doing to strengthen their brand. Artists in particular could benefit from featuring their art on shirts and selling them. With writers it’s harder since we focus on words, but we’re nothing if not creative and it would be possible to make some cool book-related shirts. In fact, in my closet I have a bunch of t-shirts that could be described as “literary” and I frequently get compliments on them when I wear them to Powells. I took ooshirts.com up on their offer to give them a try and had them print up a t-shirt featuring the artwork of Terry Blas (with his permission of course). The final result can be seen below. Overall, I like the quality of the shirt and the way it turned out.

The only other thing I can think of that I might make as a self-marketing tool is bookmarks. Everybody needs bookmarks! Well, unless you’re reading on a Kindle Fire.

Anyway, to sum up, 2012 will be interesting.

Friday, January 13th, 2012 at 8:18 pm.
Filed under: Musings, shameless plug.