on Draft2Digital:

One of the biggest influences on the self-publishing industry, as it exists today, was internet marketing.

In a sense, self-publishing owes its current growth and maybe even its existence to the entrepreneurial pioneers of internet marketing. It was a high-energy, profit-fueled, exploratory form of marketing that was part Mad Men, part guerrilla warfare, and all about using data and creative drive in tandem to build marketing strategies. Thanks to internet marking, indie authors were introduced to concepts such as email lists, marketing funnels, targeting metrics, demographics, and much, much more.

One of the concepts popularized by the internet marketing world (though it didn’t originate there … it owes its origins more to the software industry than anything) was MVP—minimum viable product.