Summary: If you cannot see the audio controls, listen/download the audio file here Spying is probably the oldest profession (well, excepting maybe one other). The most widely reprinted book on warfare (Sun Tzu's Art of War) has a whole chapter on spies and spying. Spying is really just gathering intelligence. That's why embassies are constantly found out and "embarrassed" when it's "discovered" they've been doing this - over and over and over. For governments, it's just part of doing business. For corporations, it's big business, and a big part of their budget. For marketers, it's called "market research" and "demographics". If you are a self-published author (and don't have a huge marketing budget) you can still have spies working for you. Like embassies, you can have emissaries - in every book you publish. The problem for so long has been that books were considered the end product. Once you sold them, you were done. Or so conventional wisdom said. Your books are actually emissaries because they spread the word about you. They can also gather intelligence for you. Any brick-and-mortar shop owner knows that their local repeat traffic comes from word-of-mouth - and this is gotten by providing incredible service to everyone who comes into their store, regardless of whether they buy anything or not. Local shop owners learn all sorts of things from their customers. That fact is lost on the traditional publishers. They have been so long in the business of having books as a final product that they miss the fact which our modern "native commerce" model exposed. Your book is no longer a finite printed work. It's in many formats, delivered through multiple platforms. It can be updated at any time (although print versions are harder). You book is no longer an end point of your production - factually, it's just the beginning. Books now are your emissaries. They tell everyone about what you think, how you act, what you think of them, how you can help them - even how much you respect them (or don't.) Intelligence your distributors don't want you to knowBooks-as-emissaries are also spies. The best ones have embedded links which bring potential buyers back to your site. And those embedded links can tell you more about that customer than they want to tell you. Well, mostly, anyway. Right now, there are no really good tools to find out what your readers want - except what they actually buy. And that is limited, unless they are buying directly from you. When you publish your books via distributors, they pay you royalties - but they don't tell you all the intelligence they are gathering from getting people to buy through them. All of them have various algorithms which give you "also bought" and "related books" to get you to spend more money with them. As you spend, they keep records of everything you bought - just business. Your books are probably on at least a half-dozen distributors now, and each of these have different audiences. Google seems to sell more nerdy books, not surprisingly. Amazon sales are filtered through their algorithms, so they are basically bargain hunters and fans. iTunes has artistic types, but also business people and early adopters. Nook could be described as hard-core anti-Amazon. Kobo is international in scope, so purchases here range across a wide field of cultural differences. From the little data the distributors reveal, the author up to this point could only say - hey, I got more/less book sales this month! Because that's all the data you're given (other than maybe what continent they came from, which is hardly better data. "10 from the U.S., 2 from Italy, and 1 from France - cheers.") If your business was a local book shop, one of your spies would whisper when that person came into your shop: ((Psst - this guy is basically a nerd. He came from Google.)) or: ((Psst - this is a gal looking for a deal, she came from Amazon.)) And you, being a good spy-master, can arrange your shop to offer that new potential customer just wh
