When you're writing for the Internet, you have the analytics, and you know that people are bailing every second. But various people kept reminding me that once people have bought a book, they're in. You don't have to be selling them on every page.
Interpretation
Writing for the Internet requires attention to analytics, but book readers are committed once they make a purchase.
This quote highlights the difference between writing for the Internet and writing a book. While online content must constantly engage readers to prevent them from leaving, a book entices readers with the promise of a complete journey once they decide to buy it. The commitment of readers who purchase a book allows the author to focus more on delivering a coherent message rather than constantly selling every page.
In practice
In a seminar about digital marketing, this quote can illustrate the importance of reader commitment in different formats.
To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.
There is dust enough on some of your Bibles to write 'damnation' with your fingers.
Not everyone realises that to write a really good piece of journalism is at least as demanding intellectually as the achievement of any scholar.
Most of these students are so conditioned to success that they become afraid to take risks. They have been taught from a young age by zealous parents, schools, and institutional authorities what constitutes failure and success. They are socialized to obey. They obsess over grades and seek to please professors, even if what professors teach is fatuous. The point is to get ahead, and getting ahead means deference to authority. Challenging authority is never a career advancer.
The First Book: Go ahead, it won't bite. Well... maybe a little. More a nip, like. A tingle. It's pleasurable, really. You see, it keeps on opening. You may fall in. Sure, it's hard to get started; remember learning to use knife and fork? Dig in: you'll never reach bottom. It's not like it's the end of the world -- just the world as you think you know it.
The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free.
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