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A New Ecology of Book Publishing

orionwell — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 19:25:44 +0000

Several interlinked shifts are leading to a whole new ecology within book publishing. First is the loss of jobs in the industry. Over the past year, for example, employment in print related industries, including book publishing, has fallen by almost 90,000 jobs. Second, as technology plays a bigger role in all aspects of book publishing, many publishing jobs are becoming obsolete or are being radically transformed. Third, the expectations that publishers have of authors is changing. More and more, authors are asked to do a greater share of the marketing for their titles both before and after publication.

At the same time, the continuing democritization of book publishing means that more books are being produced and marketed than ever before despite the down economy. These trends are symptomatic of an ongoing process of creative destruction and haves created a (mostly) freelance ecology of contractors who are retooling for the new era in publishing,

In addition to the traditional freelance jobs associated with the development of a book, here are some examples of non-traditional jobs this new ecosystem does or might include:

Ghost blogger – Many authors use blogs now as a way to build and maintain an audience for their work. But blogging can be time consuming and the pace of frequent blogging can be demanding. A ghost blogger is an individual that writes blog posts or tweets on behalf of an author.
Blog tour specialist – A person who sets up and manages blog tours, where an author’s work is reviewed on blog sites pertinent to the book’s content.

How to Create a Virtual Book Tour

Social media specialist – Someone who monitors and manages an author’s online presence, especially as it relates to the use of social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Shelfari and the like. Many folks from the realms of traditional book PR are moving into this area.
Book project manager – As more of the work of marketing titles shifts to authors, they will need the assistance of a team of specialists who can help them get the greatest possible exposure for their work. The role of this person is to help guide the author through the maze of choices and assemble / manage the right team of people for their book project.
Web developer – The continuing incursion of technology into book publishing arena brings with it the need for experts to help with author website development, widget creation, even database setup for certain types of titles.
E-book conversion specialists – There are now many e-book formats, some easier to navigate than others. A number of companies and individuals now provide assistance with getting titles converted into all the major formats and making sure they look good in those formats.
Book video producers – Book trailers are becoming a popular and effective marketing tool. Creating and distributing a quality video usually requires expertise outside that of the author or their publisher.
Analytics interpreter – These days, authors and publishers can be awash in numbers- e.g. website traffic, blog metrics, book sales data from BookScan, social media stats. Gathering and interpreting this data will become more important as we move from intuition based to evidence based publishing. Making sense of it all could become a specialty of its own.
Online writing coaches – This individual works with authors making the transition to new, compressed forms of writing – e.g. mobile phones, blogs, Twitter, etc.

The emergence of a new book publishing ecosystem is inevitable as the industry embraces technology. It offers new opportunities and hope for those who have been displaced from book publishing firms over the last decade.

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e-Book Alchemy – An Interview with Olive Technology’s Virginia Thomas

Rick Moody's Novel Experiment with Microserialization

orionwell — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 06:00:47 +0000

Electric Literature will begin a new venture in microserialization by ‘tweeting’ Rick Moody’s new story, Some Contemporary Characters, from November 30th to December 2nd. Mr. Moody wrote the story expressly for Twitter.

As Andy Hunter, Editor in Cheif of Electric Literature remarked in his announcement of the Twitter story:

It is broken into bursts 140 characters or less, each clearly labored over with a precision and lyricism that floored us.

Rick went head-to-head with the 140 character limitation of Twitter and used it as a source of creative inspiration. It reminds us of the film The Five Obstructions, wherein an artist’s acceptance of an arbitrary constraint leads to innovation. We feel Rick has taken something that could seem gimmicky – “Twitter-fiction” – and created something transcendent.

Rick Moody is one of the most celebrated American writers of his generation. He is the author of four novels, three collections of stories, and a memoir, The Black Veil which won the PEN/Martha Albrand award for the Art of the Memoir.. In 1994, he published The Ice Storm, which became a best seller and was made into a feature film of the same name, directed by Ang Lee. His new novel, The Four Fingers of Death will be published in July 2010. He also plays music in The Wingdale Community Singers, whose new album, Spirit Duplicator, is out now.We had the opportunity to ask Rick about Some Contemporary Characters and the challenges this new medium presents to authors.

FPP: What inspired you to write a Twitter story?

RM: I think my contempt for Twitter is what inspired it, initially. In general, I think the way to describe the world is to get longer not shorter. Twitter, by virtue of brevity, abdicates any responsibility where real complexity is concerned, because it forbids length. This seemed to me like a challenge, then: how to get complex in a medium that is anathema to complexity and rigor. And a challenge is always thrilling.

FPP: What is the most difficult part of writing a story 140 characters at a time?

RM: That’s it’s 140 characters at a time! Is that not difficult enough? It’s very difficult to get real traction and real change into that space.

FPP: What is essential to carrying the story line in this new species of storytelling?

RM: I think you have to imply a lot of story because there’s just not that much action you can get into the character-count box. You can’t dramatize a scene so much on Twitter. Or, you have to cut up scenes into the little hunks available. To the extent that you can imply action rather than depicting it, you’ll have more room available for doing other bits of fictive work. Description, dialogue, character, and so on.

FPP: How does character development change in the Twitter format?

RM: It didn’t change that much for me. It’s still central to this piece, as it most often is, in my work.

FPP: Did you create Some Contemporary Characters as a Twitter story originally or take a full blown story and trim it down for the Twitter format?

RM: It was absolutely written ground up on Twitter, for Twitter, about Twitter, with the character counter page open the whole time, to keep me from going OVER.

FPP: Would you consider using Twitter as a means to preview future stories for your readers?

RM: Never say never. But I sort of think that if you mean to use Twitter well you should use it from the start, rather than carving up hitherto existing text to fit into its strictures. That seems slightly obscene to me. It’s cheating.

FPP: What did you learn as an author from creating “Some Contemporary Characters”?

RM: That, despite my contempt for Twitter, it IS sort of like writing haiku all day long. And I like writing haiku. Twitter’s brevity, that is, started to have some sublime qualities.

FPP: Do you think micro-serialized Twitter stories can find a permanent place in literary fiction or is the format too restrictive to be viable long term?

RM: It remains to be seen, really, because the form is still in its infancy. I’m betting it’s a flash in the pan. I’m betting Twitter itself is a flash in the pan, and that as soon as video is more readily available a lot of these text-based media on the web will be a thing of the past. That’s good, because the word “tweet” is really embarrassing.

FPP: Are you planning to do more Twitter stories in the future?

RM: As of right now, I am not. But you never know.

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Julie and Julia - The Blook Goes to Hollywood

orionwell — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 02:33:46 +0000

365 days. 536 recipes. One girl and a crappy outer borough kitchen.
- Julie Powell (The Julie / Julia Project – August 25, 2002)

Blog to book success stories have been around for awhile. Now Julie & Julia has entered new territory – making a profitable transition from blog to book to movie. The first month’s box office receipts topped $70 million. Sales of Julie & Julia (the book – Amazon rank 90) were brisk and Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking (Amazon rank 4) have sold more this past month than they did in entire years past.

For the aspiring writer, are there attributes that augur well for a blog in terms of turning it into a book and perhaps a movie? What was it that made Julie & Julia a hit? Here are some thoughts:

Celebrity - The blog involves a celebrity – in this case Julia Child. What made the whole thing interesting was that she would have the conversation with Julia Child (who was not supportive of the blog) as well as her readers.
Drama - Julie Powell made herself the story; setting out her challenge in a very pubic way. And she had a definite deadline; there was no ambiguity about whether she would succeed or flop.
That could be me! – Julie Powell took on the fears of EveryCook – preparing difficult recipes and sharing all her travails with her audience. Each day, her readers could empathize with her discouragements and celebrate her triumphs, but be glad they weren’t going through it themselves. In some respects, it was like reality TV.

All the right elements for any good story. The blogging medium might be new, but the formula for success is age old. Bon appetit!

Julie & Julia movie trailer

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How Authors are Hacking the Twitter Spew

orionwell — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 21:11:17 +0000

The term Spew refers to the torrent of information spilling out over the Web. It was an image first conjured up by author Neal Stephen. Today the term could serve equally well as a description for the tsunami of tweets pouring forth from Twitter-ers across the globe. Individuals and organizations have discovered many interesting uses for Twitter:

A research tool to plug into the raw elements of news stories while they are unfolding - e.g. the Tehran protests
Live blogging at conferences
Distributing news stories – e.g. CDC using Twitter to get the news out swine flu
Mobilizing customers – e.g. the bakery in San Francisco that updates local customers on when its sumptuous peach pies are coming out of the oven

Top Twitter Tools Exposed & Explained at Lightning Speed

Not to be left out of the Twitter-mania, authors have also started using the tool to support their book development and marketing efforts.

Seek assistance with research for your book
Build a following that you can direct to your longer blog posts
Respond to comments about your book
Announce events such as readings, appearances and book signings
Delivering sample book content
Share news stories (and pictures) related to your book

A plethora of Twitter apps are now available to make all these task easier. The most comprehensive list I have found so far is at Mashable. Want to follow some authors, agents or the publishing industry? Try this starter list from Maria Schneider’s blog. And if you want to track and quantify all your tweet followers and activities, there is a list of excellent Twitter analytics tools available at Social Media Today.

Enjoy!

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Story Seeds & Micro-lives

orionwell — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 20:49:27 +0000

Every life is a complex story. Our particular story is shaped by milestone experiences and important relationships whose consequences unfold over time and ultimately define us like the living sculpture that emerges from the careful prunings of a young bonsai tree Several sites have built large followings by allowing individuals to share their stories and secrets in a micro-format; in this case a postcard. Like the dwarf bonsai tree, the art that results is due in part to the constraint imposed by the container.

For authors looking for character sketches or a good idea to build a story around, these sites can be invaluable. Two of the most notable sites in this regard are PostSecret and Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story.

PostSecret - This is a site where individuals share their ecrets in pubic. They submit their secrets on a post card and mail it – yes snail mail – to the Post Secret PO box. The site’s founder, Frank Warren, then pubishes a new batch of secrets every Sunday evening. Some of the ssecrets are humorous, others naughty, while many touch on very dark areas of the sender’s life experience. Most individuals have presented their secrets in a compelling and artful fashion.

Postsecret Confessions

Michel Writes Your Life Story - This site is a variant of the postcard theme used by Post Secret. Individuals tell their story to Michael Kimball, the site’s owner, who then renders a micro-biographysized to fit on the back of a postcard. According to an interview with Madelaine Brand on NPR, Kimball began doing this in response to a friend’s challenge to turn his writing into performance art. Kimball demonstrates a knack for extracting the meaningful core of each individual’s story.

There are many useful toolsto help authors develop character profiles with depth and powerful story ideas . Drawing on this public psychography may be a productive means to jump start the imagination. The sites above reinforce the old adage that truth is often more interesting than fiction.

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Blogs for Sale on Kindle - Selling Ice to Eskimos?

orionwell — Wed, 27 May 2009 20:00:58 +0000

Amazon recently rolled out a new program called Kindle Publishing for Blogs. The beta program offers Kindle owners subscriptions to blogs. Blogger receive 30% of anywhere from $0.99 to $1.99 per reader per month; so for every thousand readers, a blogger could get $999 to $1,999. (It’s not clear how Amazon determines the price it charges for a particular blog subscription.) The setup process takes about 12 to 48 hours before a blog appears in the Kindle Store.

For bloggers, it offers potentially wider distribution. As Shawn Farner commented on GizHQ, “Aside from giving the content creator a weak 30 percent, the new system could present an opportunity for blogs to tap into new audiences and become more widely read, and I’m all for that.”

But it’s unclear how Amazon will get consumers to pay for what they can now get for free. Kit Eaton of Fast Company wondered about Amazon’s larger strategy:

. . . blogs derive much of their power from their nowness–their real-time relevance is what’s presenting a challenge to traditional media reporting. By offering them to Kindle readers as so much dead text…is this Amazon’s subtle way of propping up the ailing newspaper industry?

Either that, or Amazon is thinking far into the future to a time when people will pay to read blog posts. Hard to imagine, but not outside the realm of possibility.

Some other possibilities:

Amazon sees blogs eventually supplanting newspapers (and in some cases magazines), at least in the US. As these blog based news organizations grow in influence and sophistication, they may begin offering premium content for subscribers.
Amazon sees a tie between blogs and books. Blogs can function as the progenitor of books, and as an extension to a published book. Blogs by popular authors may command a small subscription price and help drive sales of books.
Amazon thinks readers may be willing to pay for a different blog reading experience – something between a computer screen and a printed page.
Amazon isn’t sure what to expect but thinks the experiment is worth a shot.

One thing is sure; if the Kindle blog publishing program is successful, other purveyors of e-readers will soon follow with similar programs of their own.

Jeff Bezos and Bestselling Authors Discuss Amazon Kindle

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On Being Visual - Author Video Blogs

orionwell — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 04:23:31 +0000

Authors have one more tool they can use to build community around their work – the video blog. A video blog (also called a vlog) is essentially a blog that uses video vs. text as its primary way to communicate. According to Wikipedia, video blogs have been around in one form or another since 2003. Today there are thousands of video blogs. For authors, video blogs offer yet more way to connect with their audience.

Many authors are already using book trailers as a visual medium to communicate the message of their book and perhaps offer a little bit of their own background. However, book trailers are limited in the goals they are trying to serve. Book trailers are aimed at getting potential readers interested in a title. They are typically 1.5 – 3 minutes in length. This makes them an effective promotional tool, but not a good way for readers to get an in depth understanding of the author.

A video blog on the other hand is something that is ongoing. It provides a recurring engagement with the audience. While it makes sense to keep any given video blog short (probably 3 – 5 minutes tops), the author can address a variety of topics across multiple video blog posts. The visual presence of the author provides a stronger impact and a keener sense of his / her personality and temperament.

Some publishers are already encouraging their authors to experiment with video blogs. Koldcast is an online video channel that publishes book trailers and video blogs from Doubleday’s authors. AuthorCams offers another use of author video. It showcases a variety of author video book tours readings through three author news networks—PubBuzz (fiction and non-fiction), CooksRead (cookbooks) and KidsRead (children and young adult books).

Setting up a video blog is straightforward and inexpensive or free tools abound to help authors wanting to explore this new avenue of outreach. For a good list of video blogging resources and tips, check out Christina Laun’s post.

Happy vlogging!

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Author Lofts and Pyramids of Value

orionwell — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:01:29 +0000

Why do authors write? They want a wide exposure for their ideas and stories. Publishers have generally focused on playing the role of Darwinian gatekeeper for those ideas; determining which will live and die accoring to often opaque criteria. This has been driven in part by the investment required to successfully produce and market a printed book in a few crowded and competitive channels.

In an interview on The 25th Story, Seth Godin chided publishers for misunderstanding their true role in the book industry. He noted:

Publishing is far too focused on the pub day. The event of the publication. This is a tiny drip, perhaps the least important moment in a long timeline. As soon as publishers see themselves as marketers and agents and managers and developers of content, things change.

If they would help authors find that wider exposure for their ideas, and not be locked into the concept of printed books and sales in bookstores, they could leverage that intense desire and potentially be more profitable than they ever dreamed, he insists. What would such a publishing model look like? Here are some thoughts.

Author “lofts” – In a idea driven book industry, publishers provide online spaces where authors are encouraged to develop their content and build an audience around it. As I have discussed before this could include, but not be limited to, blogging, building socials networs around content and carefully tracking the size, engagement and needs of that audience. These lofts are essentially incubators for authors and could be dsigned to be self funding. Not every author becomes published in the traditional sense, but they have a real opportunity to move their ideas forward.

Pyramids of values – Not every idea will (or should) become a printed book. The ideas may be most effectively expressed in a blog, or best distributed in some digital form – e.g. widgets or e-books. Or shared out on social networks. Books are being delivered in chunks – via e-mail, on CD (ala the NetFlix model) or to iPhones. Any of these idea distribution modalities can serve to create an audience.

Free (and sumptuous) samples - Just like fine cuisine, ideas should be sampled to be fully appreciated. In the past, this has been limited to reviews, carefully controlled excerpts and author appearances. However, the degree of sampling necessary to become a loyal member of the audience varies by individual. This calls for broader and more flexible sampling tools - e.g. Google Book Search. Google has settled the lawsuit with the AAP and the Authors Guild, opening the door to wider access to the content of books. Despite the fears of the publishing industry, this will increase book sales, but it may reallocate the revenues.

All of this is leading to a new concept of book. It begins as a “digital haze” where consumers can sample content and publishers can see whether the idea should be promoted to a higher place on the value pyramid. Some ideas will find their audience and may eventually form a (solid) core: a printed volume which represents to the consumer, author and publisher the highest expression of value. Not every idea makes it all the way up this pyramid, but not every idea has to.

As Godin points out, there are many ways to monetize ideas. The key is to build an audience for those ideas by being creative in the way you develop, promote and manage them.

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Achieving Depth in Chunks - An Interview with Online Reporter Monica Guzman of the Seattle P-I

orionwell — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 02:49:31 +0000

Monica Guzman

In the US, newspapers have struggled to come to grips with both the threat and the opportunity presented by the Internet. At a recent conference on blogging, I met Monica Guzman, a staff blogger for one of Seattle’s two daily newspapers, the Seattle Post Intelligencer and she shared some of her thoughts about blogging for a newspaper and the future of journalism. She has worked at a number of newspapers including the Houston Chronicle, the Midland Daily News in Michigan and Foster’s Daily Democrat in New Hampshire. Monica was the Seattle P-I’s first online reporter and currently writes its most popular blog, The Big Blog.

In addition to her work on The Big Blog, Mónica gives a weekly radio round-up of the week’s most talked about stories Wednesday afternoons on Seattle’s KOMO 1000 and serves on the advisory board for the University of Washington Information School’s Masters of Science and Information Management Program.

FPP- How did you become a staff online reporter for the Seattle PI?

MG – I was first hired here as a Hearst Newspapers fellow, to cover youth and tech culture in Seattle through a blog and weekly column. When that was finishing up, the paper decided they wanted to launch a news and conversation blog that appealed to younger people and had a younger vibe. So they hired me to stay on.

FPP – How do you choose the stories to blog about?

MG – First, it’s got to be interesting. I look at what stories are getting people talking, scan local blogs, local news, reader comments, Google Trends, national news and my own inbox, then make my choices based on what could spark interest and conversation among my readers.

FPP – Does the newspaper put any restrictions on what you blog about or how you blog?

MG – The newspaper demands that I be journalistic, that I be held to the same standards as any other reporter in the newsroom. Beyond that, I have a lot of flexibility with form and content. I’ve been able to develop a voice and style.

FPP – Do your blog posts go through the same editorial review process as stories in the print version of the newspaper?

MG – All my blog posts get edited, but often at a faster pace than stories meant for print.

FPP – You have a number of other contributors to The Big Blog; what do you look for in a guest blogger?

MG – All the contributing bloggers are members of the P-I staff. I’m open to including guest bloggers from the public, though. I think it would be a wonderful way to bring new voices in.

FPP- How would you characterize your blog’s readership in terms of size, demographics, and / or interests?

MG – Can’t really go into size, except to say it’s one of our most read blogs. Demographically, readers tend to be young and tech savvy.

FPP – From your perspective of reader reaction, what have been your most interesting or controversial posts?

Bristol Palin

MG – Last November I wrote a post about the beginning of the Amanda Knox casethat became the most commented item in seattlepi.com history. This year I wrote one about Bristol Palinthat also sparked strong conversation. On the local side, earlier this year I wrote a series of posts about the videos a woman in Belltown [a Seattle neighborhood] took of allegedly criminal activities in her alley and then posted on YouTube to highlight the problem. It was a dense story with lots of angles and got intense reaction, too. In general, though, posts about strong local symbols — like the viaduct, Starbucks and the Sonics — especially those in which I analyze conversations going on in other parts of the site — tend to get strong reaction.

FPP – How do you (and the newspaper) measure success for The Big Blog?

MG – I measure it by the quality of the conversation. We have our ups and downs on that front, but I’m confident that despite the sometimes vitriolic comments we get, the conversation is steadily improving. Readership and content value is also, of course, critical.

FPP – What types of stories would you like to write about, but haven’t tackled yet?

MG – When you write a blog, it can be tough to tackle stories that take a lot of time to report and develop. I sometimes miss writing those longer kinds of stories, but am learning how to achieve depth in chunks.

FPP – Which journalists – in any media – do you admire most and why?

Ben Smith

MG – I LOVE Ben Smith at Politico.com. I think he’s a great model for neutral yet personable blog journalism. He’s thorough but not longwinded, he puts content above form and he’s managed to write an interesting political blog without coming down on one side or the other. When he speaks out, it’s to make an observation about the interplay of politics or how aspects of the campaign are being perceived. The strength of his content and his choices in picking what to write about and how give him extraordinary authority.

FPP – How do you think newspapers could best use the Internet in the future to build readership and generate new sources of advertising revenue?

MG- I think it’s important to enable reporters to engage with readers online and in person, to show their human side in their work and to make it as easy as possible for them to use whatever media they deem most appropriate for their work. The Internet makes all these things possible in ways we’re still just beginning to explore. As for ad revenue, that’s a toughie. I’ll leave that to the experts.

FPP – What would you like to do next in your career?

MG- I’d like to keep working in online journalism. It’s got so much promise and it’s so exciting. I’m not sure what form that would take in my career — two years ago I never would have imagined I’d be doing what I’m doing today — so I’m just going to keep going and see what’s next.

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The Naked Author - Tales of the Blooksphere

orionwell — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 02:24:08 +0000

Declan Burke

Despite commentator hand wringing over the advisability and viability of blog to book projects, the practice continues to grow and evolve. An example of the blog novel was reported in the Sigla blog and featured the writings of Declan Burke, an Irish crime story writer who has both online and offline. His current crime novel, Gonzo Noir, can be found at its own site or excerpted on his site. His second novel, The Big O, has recently been published by Harcourt in the United States.

Beckett Gladney

Debbie Ridpath Ohi

A different sort of blog novel project is a graphic novel being developed by Beckett Gladney and Deborah Ridpath Ohi. The originated after Ms. Ridpath Ohi, who had written some young adult novels that took place in a town called Curiosity, decided to turn these into graphic novels instead. She recruited Ms. Gladney to create the artwork. Their blog, named Curiosity, features sketches, plot synopsis, writing samples, and a running commentary about the novel’s progress as well as research about the comic / graphic novel industry.

Some writers use their blog not only to publish sample book content, but also as a research vehicle for the book that is based on the blog. An article in Computerworld describes a project by two authors, Gregg Taylor and Lori Thiessen, writing about the new group of nomadic workers operating from venues like Starbucks. The book and the blog are both called Coffee Shop Office. The blog site will data for both blog and book.

And some blog to book projects are the stuff of Hollywood. Consider the recent New York Times article, Why Blog? Reason No. 92: Book Deal, about a book deal between Random House and Christian Lander. In January, Lander started a blog called Stuff White People Like. Here is the description of how the deal progressed:

Readers discover stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com, like it and forward links to their friends, who forward them to lots more friends. Newspaper columnists mention it, stealing – er, quoting – some of the better jokes. By the end of February, the NPR program “Talk of the Nation” runs a report on it, debating whether the site is racist or satire.

And then on March 20 Random House announces that it has purchased the rights to a book by the blog’s founder, Christian Lander, an Internet copy writer. The price, according to a source familiar with the deal but not authorized to discuss the total, was about $300,000, a sum that many in the publishing and blogging communities believe is an astronomical amount for a book spawned from a blog, written by a previously unpublished author.

Gina Trapani

One of the early pioneers of blog to book writing was Gina Trapani of the popular LIfehackerblog. In chrnoicling her own experience of writing the book Lifehacker, based in part upon her blog, she encouraged both bloggers and book authors to explore this new form of book writing:

There’s a world of difference between being a blogger and a book author, but more writers are wearing both hats these days. It’s not surprising that pro writers are becoming bloggers, but “amateur” bloggers getting book deals are turning heads online and off.

If you’ve got a book in you, a blog could be just the stepping stone you need toward your first deal. More than ever before, literary agents are paying attention to quality weblogs, and publishers are looking for someone with writing chops and a fresh take on a topic.

More recently, Ms. Trapani blogged about a site called WEBook. WEBook is a new direction in public writing. which provides a kind of “writers’ “ lounge where authors can showcase their projects and have visitors vote

But the skeptics abound. Gawkerrecently featured a blog post asserting that people who read blogs, peopole who read books and people who buy books based on blogs are two mostly non-overlapping audiences; thus implying publishers would be foolhardy to project big book sales based solely on a successful blog. The post features the author’s list of probable wins and probable misses (including Gawker’s own blog to book project).

The Gawker posts make a good point; blogs are different than books and not all content translates seamlessly betweent these two media. It seems we are destined to re-learn that lesson with every new medium that comes along.

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Blog Touring - End of Innocence, Beginning of Wisdom

orionwell — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:59:58 +0000

While blog touring is still relatively new as a book marketing and promotion strategy, some anecdotal learning and tribal knowledge are beginning to emerge. There are a number of good reasons why authors, publishers and book marketers should consider blog tours. The blogosphere is:

Influential – 12 of the top 100 media properties in the US are now blogs
Large – 100+ million blogs & over 1.3 million posts daily
Global
Mainstream

Since blogs often bear the personal imprint of their owners, it is easy to forget that they can be powerful media properties. For example, in May 2008, Nielsen Online reported monthly audience numbers for some of the top blogs. Here is a sampling:

BLOG	VISITORS (million)
Huffington Post	4.71
sport.aol.com/fanhouse	3.94
PerezHilton.com	2.13
Engadget	2.04
Gawker	2.01

One important consideration is which blogs to invite to a blog tour. Bill Rederick’s approach to selecting blogs for a tour is highlighted in this guest post on All Book Marketing. Bill is the author of My Virtul Book Tour Secrets!, which covers blog touring in depth. He describes his formula that involves combining seven factors to determine a blog’s suitability.

Author Karen Harrington who recently conducted a blog tour to promote her book Janeology(published by Kunati Books) shared her experiences and learning in a recent post. She used the firm PumpUpYourBookPromotion.comto manage her tour. She was accompanied on her virtual tour by other writers and found this helped amplify the positive results she achieved. She also found that the blog tour had an “echo effect” with many bloggers who became aware of the tour contacting her about follow-on interviews. She also noted that many of the bloggers on her tour also posted on Shelfari and LibraryThing giving her book additional exposure.

Another example of a blog tour, for author Mary DeMuth’s (Authentic Parenting) blog tour in late 2007, was showcased on Gooward Editing. It demonstrtes some important lessons learned about blog touring and provides a good analysis of the data used to evaluate the success of the tour.

Author Susan Wittig Albert has had expreience with both blog tours and traditional book tours. She compared the two types of promotion in an interview on Blog Book Tours. She liked the convenience and low cost of the blog tour, but felt it lacked the impact with readers of a conventional book tour.

Ben McConnell & Jackie Huba

The authors of Citizen Marketers, Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba, provided a new twist on the traditional book tour. In October 2006, they asked readers of their blog, Church of the Customer, to help them select cities for their upcoming book tour. Readers could invite them to speak at events in their locala area. As a result, they went on a book tour that spanned 40 venues in 5 months. They sold almost 7,500 copies of their book and in the process tripled traffic to their blog. Nice work!

intrepid explorers

The blog tour is coming of age in step with the maturing of the blogosphere. At some point in the future, much of the experimental wisdom will be refined into neat should’s and should not’s, must’s and must not’s. Until then, success belongs to the intrepid explorers who aren’t afraid to try new things. We salute you – and keep that wisdom coming!

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Four Quadrant Zooming - An Interview with Max Quick Series Author Mark Jeffrey

orionwell — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 19:12:12 +0000

Mark Jeffrey

Most of us have enough on our hands just keeping up with our day jobs. But Mark Jeffrey, author of the ultra popular Max Quick series of books and podcast audiobooks has two day jobs. His first podiobook, Max Quick 1: The Pocket and the Pendant, has received over 2 million downloads to date. And he is currently CTO of Mahalo.com, a human-powered search service. Previously, Mark co-founded ZeroDegrees, a business social network (sold to IAC/InterActiveCorp in 2004). He was CEO and co-founder of SuperSig in 1999. Mark also co-founded The Palace, Inc., an early (1995) avatar chat platform backed by Intel, Time Warner and Softbank with 10 million users (sold to Communities.com in 1998). Mark lives in Santa Monica, California.

We recently interviewed Mark about his work, as well his thoughts about writing and the future of publishing.

FPP: How did you come to write the Max Quick series and why did you choose to pursue the young adult audience?

The Pocket & the Pendant

MJ: Initially, it was because it was something I thought I could do, that it was within my abilities as a first-time writer. I thought I would start with a ‘toy world’ and graduate from there to more serious stuff. But I quickly realized that I had actually, unwittingly, begun writing in one of the most serious of worlds possible. Paradoxically, it’s adult fiction that is usually rather trivial. Think about it. Who’s zooming who, who killed who — it’s all the same stuff, over and over. But Young Adult (YA) deals with large, archetypical themes. We are dealing with stories from the collective unconscious. That’s explosive. That’s handling nitro, baby.

Carl Jung once said, “One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games and it cannot be done by men out of touch with their instinctive selves.” I think the same can be said of good YA fiction (though I don’t think it’s as much despised these days )

The Two Travelers

I think Harry Potter and His Dark Materials opened some eyes to the fact that this sort of thing could be successful in recent years. Of course, there have been countless similar examples over the last century: Star Wars, the Oz books (easily the ‘Potter’ of the turn of the century), Narnia and Lord of the Rings are all supposedly ‘young adult’ content. In fact, I find the stuff I like best tends to fall into this category.

One other bit of ‘young adult’ content I would highlight includes ‘Ender’s Game’ by Orson Scott Card. I had not read it before I wrote ‘Pocket’. But a lot people told me ‘Pocket’ reminded them a lot of ‘Ender’s Game’ in that the children have to grow up very fast, and they’re kind of on their own. The children are not there to be cute. Nor are they sort of half-people. Rather, they are narratively full, rich individuals and are taken very, very seriously as people. Same thing with ‘Stand By Me’, actually. I tried very consciously to do the same thing.

But finally, there is a certain marketing logic to YA. The movie industry whispers in awe about a ‘four quadrant’ hit — one that appeals to young and old, men and women equally. Good YA is likewise ‘four quandrant’. It has much more hit potential than anything narrowly focused. Why? Because it is archetypal. It is universal and timeless. At least when it is done correctly

FPP: What do you think has been responsible for the tremendous success of the Max Quick series?

MJ: It’s simultaneously very similar and very different to other things out there right now. ‘Potter’ opened everyone’s minds, of course. And created an audience. But after that, in the book world, you pretty much have Pullman, and that’s it. Nobody else has delivered! Space has been done to death. Sword and sorcery has been done to death. But YA … its been done well very few times. I like to think I’ve done it pretty well At the very least, I’ve done something people like, judging from the reviews in the iPhone App Store.

Secondarily, the podiobook version of ‘Pocket’ was early enough and popular enough (it’s gotten 2.3 million downloads to date) that it provided the early explosion in the fanbase. That was certainly a factor, and I owe a thanks to Evo Terra and podiobooks.com for that early success.

FPP: Are there particular authors who have influenced on your work?

MJ: Absolutely. I am a huge fan of Stephen R. Donaldson and Anne Rice in particular. I’ve also read lot of Carl Jung, Stephen King (specifically Dark Tower), Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash), Mervyn Peake, Karen Armstrong, JRR Tolkien, Philip K. Dick, JK Rowling, Carlos Casteneda, Frank Herbert, Phillip Pullman — all great stuff. Movies and television influence me as well — some of my favorites include Star Wars, Amadeus, Somewhere In Time, Fight Club, The Natural, Blade Runner … and TV: LOST, Battlestar Galactica (new, not disco version), Deadwood, Carnivale … it’s an interesting mix.

And all of this stuff influences me, of course. There is a theme of both Philip K. Dick and Donaldson that is a big one in ‘Two Travelers’. As Dick puts it: “Anyone who defeats a segment of the Empire, becomes the Empire.” In Donaldson’s ‘Thomas Covenant’ series, Covenant thinks he is supposed to destroy the Banefire — and he very nearly does — which is exactly what the Enemy wants him to do. Lastly, Jung has a saying: “The which we resist, persists.” I find this paradox fascinating, that the more we fight something negative, the more we actually give it power. Kind of a Chinese finger-puzzle, if you will. So that became a big theme of ‘Travelers’.

FPP: You are a serial entrepreneur who has started a number of businesses based on new Internet technologies. How has that influenced your writing and marketing of the Max Quick series, if at all?

MJ: Oh, it has influenced the marketing of it quite a bit. A lot of my previous businesses succeeded because myself and my partners were among the very first people ever to do them. ZeroDegrees, my third company, was the very first win in the social networking space. It was sold to Barry Diller’s IAC/Interactivecorp in Feb 2004. At the time, we didn’t even have the word ’social network’ anywhere on our business plan! We didn’t know it was called that.

Similarly, the Max Quick Series has been marketed in many innovative ways — and was among the first in each case. And that can be directly traced to my ‘DNA as an Internet Guy’, if you will. I released the book first via Lulu.com in 2004 as a self-published paper book and as a downloadable PDF. In the beginning of 2005, ‘Max Quick 1: The Pocket and the Pendant’ was one of the very first podiobooks ever released (Scott Sigler’s Earthcore and Tee Morris’ MOREVI were the other two). I also released ‘Pocket’ on the Kindle. And most recently, ‘Pocket’ and ‘Max Quick 2: The Two Travelers’ were both released in the iPhone App Store as $5.99 ebook downloads.

FPP: You’ve distributed your work as podcast, in print form, as a download, an e-book on Kindle and now on the iPhone. What adaptations, if any, did you have to make for each of those formats?

MJ: The Kindle was a bit of a pain. The iPhone was quite easy — my partner on that, Tom Peck, took my original Word documents and converted them to his iPhone e-reader format — and it was some work on his end, but nothing terrible, I’m given to understand.

FPP: Has the free podcast version aided or detracted from sales in print and other paid formats?

Abigail Breslin

MJ: Definitely added. The free podcasts have gotten over 2.3 million downloads. And as a direct result, Oscar-nominee Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine) heard the podcasts and recently called it one of her favorite books. Which was great marketing, of course — nothing better than one of the top child actors in the world saying nice things about your books!

FPP: Could you tell us a little about how the community of readers / listeners for the Max Quick series has evolved since you began writing it?

MJ: A lot people follow me on Twitter and friend up with me on Facebook these days. Some people email me. It never gets old, either. I love hearing what people think about the series — the good and the bad. I love hearing how they found out about it. It’s still sort of something that you have to discover somehow on your own.

In the second edition of ‘Pocket’ I included a lot of fan art that people sent in to me. Most of it is quite good! There are some seriously good artists reading the books!

FPP: How do you see technology changing the way consumers read and authors write over the next several years? Is the printed book in danger of extinction?

MJ: I don’t think so. Personally, I am still a big fan of being able to have a book on my bookshelf — and I think a lot of people feel the same way. Maybe if I were younger I would feel differently — I might be too old to adopt fully digital books.

However, I was shocked at how much I liked reading books on my iPhone. I wouldn’t have called that one. I am personally not a big fan of the Kindle or the other e-readers out there. Probably because I already have in my iPhone a multi-purpose device, and the Kindle is a one-trick pony. It seems ridiculous that I should have to purchase a bit of standalone hardware like that. My iPhone is already my email client, iPod, web browser, ebook reader, GPS device, camera, etc. It’s already in my pocket. You get the point. And I’ve sold way more iPhone copies of my books in the first two weeks than I’ve sold on the Kindle in the last year. So, I think the iPhone — or other multipurpose mobile device — crushes the Kindle. You heard it here first! You can’t be a one-trick pony hardware device anymore.

I also love the fact that I can go direct to a market of millions without a publisher as an unnecessary intermediary. I published directly to iPhone via Tom Peck’s wonderful e-reader application. Apple takes a cut, Tom takes a cut, but I — the artist — take the biggest cut. Now that is a proper world! And of course, I am very happy to see both Tom and Apple do very, very well. I want them to do well!

FPP: How do you balance managing your new startup, Mahalo, and your writing?

MJ: Ha. Well. Mahalo.com — where I am CTO, for your readers who do not know — is a new human-powered search engine. All the results are hand-crafted by humans. No spam! The best links always on top, not buried on page 32 or 47 of the results. (Short-form information is also presented with the links, so if it’s just a factoid you’re looking for, you’ll generally get it.) It’s really pretty extraordinary — and a big leap beyond the machine-powered search engines. It’s all information you can trust 100%. Sorry to sound like a commercial, but Mahalo is really an awesome idea (and it wasn’t mine, I’m sorry to say it was the idea of Jason Calacanis, our CEO and personal friend of mine) and it’s sorely needed: the Net is getting more polluted every day — and that’s why I signed up.

But Mahalo is an internet start-up. And it is intense, with very long hours. Which doesn’t leave a lot of time or ‘psychic energy’ for writing. I come home drained a lot. You’ll notice there is no Max Quick 3 yet. True, I am doing Max Quick 2 as a podiobook now, but I’ve got that down to a science — only takes me 2 hours per episode now, it used to take me 8. And it is kind of ‘rote’ — I just have to do a performance of something I wrote awhile ago, edit it, release it. Very different from finding the proper ‘head space’ for writing a Max Quick book.

At some point that will be finished with the podiobook, and I’ll slowly begin work on MQ3 (I do have an outline). I’m guessing by October I’ll break ground on it.

But I’ve done several internet startups of my own before, as you note. I knew what I was signing up for with Mahalo. And so far, it’s been one of the best startup experiences I’ve had.

FPP: What writing projects would you like to pursue after Max Quick?

MJ: I have no idea. The Max Quick universe is large enough to encompass just about any story I want to tell — sort of like Star Trek or Gate. At least, for me it is. Every time I toy with an idea outside of the Max Quick universe, I end up integrating it. In ‘Two Travelers’, the Casey storyline was a separate book — until I realized it was perfect for the Casey story that had been eluding me. Likewise, I had an idea I called ‘Bondsman’ that was to be a series parallel to Max Quick and end on the same book — until I realize it was perfect for the Max storyline in book 3.

So when I figure this out, it’ll be as much a surprise to me as it is to you.

FPP: Based on your experience, what advice would you give new writers today?

MJ: Take advantage of the new distribution mediums! Own your own future! Get it out on Lulu.com, the Kindle (why not?), iPhone, PDF, podiobooks.com – whatever. You’re problem is not that you’re not rich. Your problem is nobody has ever heard of you before. It’s a privilege that someone else will take the time to read your stuff.

Also, the definition of what a book actually *is* … is pretty fluid now. It’s more like software. For example, what is out right now for ‘Pocket’ I consider ‘Pocket 1.0′. I may do a ‘Pocket 2.0′ with expanded scenes, new scenes, etc. I may double the length of it — like an extended edition DVD. There’s a lot of things I wanted to do with the journey across America that I could not get to and remain under 100,000 words. Now that there are so many fans of the book, I feel I have permission to expand it. There’s no reason not to.

I may release the first six chapters for free in the iPhone App Store (in fact I probably will) like a sampler game level.

The point is: we are no longer in a world where you publish it and it is set in stone for eternity. You can keep upgrading it. You have to be careful so you don’t destroy the illusion of continuity — you can’t be completely fluid to the point of silliness (for example, in the newer ‘Star Wars’, Lucas has Greedo fire at Han Solo first — and miss at point blank range! — that is silliness, don’t change your stuff THAT much).

Finally, your early audience can help you write your book. Readers have found consistency errors in earlier version of Pocket that I’ve since corrected. They are basically beta testers. Take their feedback, fix your book, re-release it. Scott Sigler, JC Hutchins (7th Son) Matthew Wayne Selznick (Brave Men Run) have commented on this at length. The audience can help you write. Take advantage of that. Again, books are more like software now.

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Social Vampires & the Art of Bookselling - Lessons from the Twilight

orionwell — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 19:34:32 +0000

Breaking Dawn

The July 31,2008 issue of BusinessWeek put the spotlight on social media as an effective force in helping to drive book sales. In the article, The Online Fan World of the Twilight Vampire Books, Heather Green chronicled the manner in which Stephanie Meyer, a 34-year-old mother of three from Phoenix, built a huge fan base for her work using a variety of social media sites and tools. Meyer has written four books (the Twilight Saga) featuring two star-crossed lovers, Edward Cullen (a handsome vampire) and Bella Swan (a teenage girl living in Forks, Washington). The final book in the series, Breaking Dawn, was released August 2. The book has an initial print run of 3.2 million copies. Overall, sales of books in the series have topped 7.5 million copies. The film adaptation, Twilight, is due to be released in theaters December 12, 2008. In the meantime, numerous Twilight videos (including the official movie trailer) have appeared on YouTube and other video sites.

Edward Cullen & Bella Swan

Her story and characters were inspired by a dream. She describes it on her website:

In my dream, two people were having an intense conversation in a meadow in the woods. One of these people was just your average girl. The other person was fantastically beautiful, sparkly, and a vampire. They were discussing the difficulties inherent in the facts that A) they were falling in love with each other while B) the vampire was particularly attracted to the scent of her blood, and was having a difficult time restraining himself from killing her immediately.

Her location for the saga was somewhat less inspired – the result of some research on Google.

For my setting, I knew I needed someplace ridiculously rainy. I turned to Google, as I do for all my research needs, and looked for the place with the most rainfall in the U.S. This turned out to be the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. I pulled up maps of the area and studied them, looking for something small, out of the way, surrounded by forest… And there, right where I wanted it to be, was a tiny town called “Forks.” It couldn’t have been more perfect if I had named it myself.

But it was her efforts to build an audience for her books that was truly inspired. Here are some of the extra steps that Meyer took to develop this community.

Personal website – She created a website for her novels separate from the publisher’s book site
Fan access – Meyer gave readers her personal e-mail and shared family photos on her website.
Active community sites – Enthusiastic readers have built up a large number of fan sites that help drive sales of Meyer’s books. On her website, Meyer lists over 100 fan sites, including 5 in languages other than English.
Fan content – Allowing, even encouraging fans to play with the content.
Events – For the launch of Breaking Dawn, Meyer helped organize a kind of vampire prom night in multiple cities. These kind of events reinforce the community experience for fans.

In terms of community building, Stephanie Meyer does many of the same things as J.C. Hutchins (Seventh Son) and Frank Warren (Post Secret). What lessons can writers draw from her success? There is no magic formula for the mega success of the Twilight Saga. Many genres may have the networks of inspired enthusiasts necessary to match Twilight’s level of success. But here are some things that could probably benefit any aspiring writer.

Engage potential fans early and often; access is important though it may not be sustainable if you become hyper successful
Go to the sites and forums where your readers hang out
Let your fans play a role in defining your brand

None of these steps is easy; all are time consuming. But an author’s most important job is building an audience. The good news is that these days there are plenty of good social networking tools to make that job easier.

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The Blook Network - Farewell to the Slush Pile

orionwell — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 18:39:16 +0000

Blog networkshave been around for awhile and represent a new form of online publishing – functioning as online magazines or newspapers. In earlier posts, I have talked in general terms about how blog networks might serve as the foundation for a more open model of book publishing. Now it’s time to talk specifics.

First, the rationale. Publishing is risky business. The biggest risk, and the progenitor of most other risks in publishing, is title selection. Publishers have experiemented with different modelsin an effort to address this risk. In the past, publishers have relied on the judgment and experience of editors or agents to act as gatekeepers to the publishing kingdom. Sometimes celebrity status or previous publishing success serve as good rpoxies for judgment and experience. And sometimes the title acquisition process is more subjective and opaque. More often that not the results are less than satisfactory.

Another approach is to substitute voting for gate keeping. How would this work? Enter the blook network. It starts with the premise that anyone might be a successful author; we just don’t know which ones. So provide anyone who has a story, an idea or a manuscript the opportunity to try and find an audience big enough to be book-worthy. The tool for this is a blog. The publisher rents the writer space in a blog network with a style guide for blogging in a manner that makes it relatively easy to go from blog to book. The rental also includes an appropriate set of metrics to track how the writer’s audience building efforts are doing.

Blogs on related topics are linked. In this way, stronger established blogs help direct traffic to newer blogs. Blog statistics are tracked by the publisher to determine which blooks are developing an audience. When pre-established audience targets are met, the publisher is alerted and may decide to publish the writer’s work. The publisher correlates audience statistics with sales data for books in the category (e.g. from Book Scan) to make the final publishing determination. In this way, analytics guide the decision to make the publishing investment. Since the blog has been structured to be easily converted to a book, time to market is faster. Editors use metrics to identify the best content in the final manuscript, thus helping to ensure a more marketable product.

The blook network helps the publisher find authors who can build an audience sufficient to warrant publication. And the discovery engine pays for itself (or even earns a profit). Even writers who are not successful in terms of getting published will have useful information (in the form of metrics, reader comments, etc.) that they can use to refine or retarget their efforts.

The process can be summarized as:

Replace manuscripts with blogs
Replace the slush pile with a publisher’s blog network
Structure network blogs so their content can be readily converted into books
Combine blog metrics and book sales data to determine when and who to publish
Reinforce traffic to new writer blogs with links from high traffic network blogs

The benefits to publishers of using this approach are that it:

Creates added capacity for publishers to take on new writers without expense
Generates service revenue while the writer is developing an audience
Provides detailed knowledge of the market before the book is published
Provides a speedier path to market

The blook network is a potentially powerful tool for helping publishers better manage the risk of title acquisition and provide a firmer rationalization of their investments in editing, production and marketing.

Non-Fiction Blook Mechanics Part 2: Organizing Posts into Manuscripts

orionwell — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 17:24:47 +0000

In an earlier post (“Non-fiction Blook Mechanics Part 1: Blook by Design“), we discussed several ways to structure a blog to resemble the structure of a book. For example, using category labels that could double as a table of contents. Taking content from blog posts and turning it into a readable manuscript can be a challenging task. Especially when you have a large inventory of blog posts from which to draw. In this post, I want to propose two tools - the post outline and post sequencing – that can help you organize your posts into a manuscript in a logical manner, without massive rewriting.

Post Outline

First, use your manuscript outline as a tool for cataloging your posts. An outline is good writing practice. But it can also help you organize your blog posts. Here’s one approach. Use a numbering scheme for each levvel of your outline. (Most word processor or other outlining software does this for you automatically. The top most level correspond to chapters. Lower levels correspond to sections of chapters and content within sections. The outline forms the basis for a numbering schema to identify the part of the outline to which your posts will be associated.

Let’s say you are writing a bog about raising dogs. Part of your outline might look like:

1. Dog breeds
1.1 Hounds
1.2 Terriers
1.3 Herding dogs
etc.

2. Dog grooming
2.1 Coat
2.2 Teeth
2.3 Musculoskeletal
etc.

3. Dog nutrition
3.1 Diets for puppies
3.2 Diets for adult dogs
3.3 Diets for older dogs
3.4 Organic dogfood
etc.

Post Sequencing

Next, use tags to indicate the specific intended location of a post within the manuscript outline. One approach to doing this is to use the sequence numbers from the outline. For example, using the outline above, if you had a post about talking about the different types of organic dogfood, it would appear in the category “Dog Nutrition” and might be tagged as “organic-dogfood-3-3-4.” Sequence numbers would be as long as the number of levels in the outline. Blogging platforms accomplish tagging differently, but it is a fairly universal feature. Such sequence tagging allows you to later use the post search tools of your blog to find and organize posts corresponding to each part of your outline.

Of course, outlines are subject to change. Chapters can be added, inserted or deleted and this can cause problems with post sequencing based on outline numbering. An alternative approach might be to code tags with names that correspond to the outline labels. Then, if the outline changes, the tags are still valid. Again, using our dog manuscript oultine above, let’s say your organic dogfood post was about feeding your hound chicken flavored tofu . Using this scheme, you might code the post as ”nutrition, organic, tofu chicken” where the tags are arranged in the descending order of the outline. If you had multiple tags about chicken flavored tofu for your dog, you could assign a sequence number as the final tag, or find a label that distinguishes them further.

The advantage of this approach to tagging is that should you decide to move dog nutrition to some other part of the outline, your post sequences remain valid. If you make dog nutrition part of a chapter on dog health, you can simply add a tag “dog health” to the head of all your tag lists for dog nutrition.

Creating an outline and using one of the post sequencing techniques above can greatly simplify the task of organizing your blog content into a manuscript. Good organization is only the first step. There are other editorial processes that must be applied to get a manuscript that doesn’t feel chopped up, but we shall save those for later posts.

Why Every Author Should Blog

orionwell — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 04:09:49 +0000

First consider the size and structure of the blogosphere. The popularity of blogs has soared in the last few years. There are now over 100 million blogs tracked by Technorati, which doesn’t even include the more than 70 million Chinese blogs. According to recent demographic surveys by the Pew Internet Study and the New York Times / CBS News, blogs have become mainstream and represent virtually every audience and topic area.

Blogs focused on a given topic tend to link to similar blogs. What this means is you can use blogs to:

Develop an audience for your work while you write
Promote your book effectively and at low cost once it is written

A blog bears many resemblances to a book. Both have a title and subtitle that reflect the content of a book. Blog posts can be organized into categories which serve as a kind of table of contents to classify and group related material. Blog posts, typically 300-500 words in length, represent the raw content of a book. Links within posts or on the blog roll serve as a bibliography, showing references to source material.

How do you attract people to your blog? Initially, through searches individuals make on popular search engine sites like Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN. By using popular keywords in your blog title, subtitle, categories and posts, your blog will begin to turn up in these searches. You can discover these keywords using keyword discovery tools or simply checking out popular blogs in your topic area. The more you blog, the more others discover and link to your blog content, the higher will be the ranking of your blog site in search results, and the greater the traffic you will receive.

Blog software usually provides a basic set of statistics that allow you to track important information such as number of visitors, page views, referring sites and average time spent by each visitor. Page views and comments left by visitors for specific blog posts provide an indicator of popular content. This makes blogs an excellent way for you to field test and select material to be included in your book.

Once you have cultivated an audience, you can transform your blog into a great marketing platform. For example, you can:

Feature your book on a special blog page, with your bio, a book description, excerpts, press releases and testimonials; thus your blog can double as a book website.
Promote your book to a wider audience by arranging a blog tour. A blog tour is a series of scheduled guest appearances on related blogs, where you have the opportunity to talk about your book. This is a low cost, high impact method to discover new readers for your work.

The blogosphere is not the only place to market your work, but it can one of the best.

Whether you are publishing independently or trying to sign on with a traditional publisher, blogging can be key to your success. More publishers are now starting to view the blogosphere as a fertile ground to find promising writers. Why? As an author who blogs, you can quantify your audience and this is attractive to risk averse publishers. This is, in essence, the new author book pitch.

Blogging is a low risk, low cost way to build your audience while you are developing your work, and then promote your finished book to that same audience. Give it a try!

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Emerging Blook Motifs

orionwell — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 04:39:04 +0000

Blog to book stories are becoming more commonplace. We have chronicled a number of such examples, and you can find a virtual library of blog to book stories on Blooking Central. Some of these were serendipitous, but more and more writers, especially new authors, are being more intentional about converting their blogs into a printed title. There is more than one way to execute a blog to book strategy. Here is my attempt at a blook typology:

indie blook – This is the type of blook where an author independently publishes and markets a title based on their blog. Low cost self publishing and inexpensive Internet marketing techniques are making this an attractive option for new authors who are not shy about self promotion.
traditional blook – This is the form of blook that you read about in the newspapers. A publisher discovers a high traffic blog and offers the blog owner a book deal. Tjhe rationale is that the blog has an established audience and a topic in line with the publisher’s market focus.
podiobook - This is more of an audio blook. Here the author serialize his or her book into podcasts and uses a blog for audience feedback and book marketing. It is especially effective for fiction writers. Two of the best know podiobook authors are Scott Sigler and JC Hutchins.
crowdsourced blook - This is a rare blook, but every author’s dream come true. Here, the blog is so popular that a community emerges and contributes content which eventually winds up being part of the publishing or marketing strategy for a title. In other words – build a community that helps you generates content and then publish it. The best known example is Frank Warren’s Post Secret.
reverse blook – In this scenario, an author blogs the content from an existing book to build an audience for the current or a new edition. This may be a good way to revitalize a book whose sales are fading.

We believe that these – and other - blog to book strategies will replace the traditional (and mostly ineffective) approach to getting a book published which involves submitting a manuscript to agents or publishers in hopes of getting it read and eventually published. Publishing is a risky business. Of the many risks, the first and biggest is signing an unkown author who may or may not be able to attract an audience for their title. An author who has a blog with an established audience is an attractive proposition. Publishers can assess the quality and appeal of the writing. The popularity of blog posts can be measured and ranked. We can see how the audience reacts to the content long before it is edited into book form. In the case of a popular blog, the audience can be larger than the circulation of many magazines or newspapers

Blooks are not just a publishing sideshow – interesting examples of pluck and luck. They represent the future of publishing in a world of consumer generated media.

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Quick Tips for Marketing your Title on Social Networking Sites

orionwell — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 04:58:43 +0000

Social networks are the fastest growing social media sites according to recent figures from eMarketer. As a recent article in Publishers’ Weeklypointed out, many authors and publishers are beginning to experiment with these sites as a way to add to their book sales. Below are some simple tips for creating an effective book marketing presence on a social network. (For a good introduction on how to get started with a social network, check out Karen Post’s article The Social Networking Guide for Newbieson FastCompany.com.)

Write a compelling profile
Point to your blog, book website or book video
Join and be active in networks that are in the topic space of your book
Establish yourself and your book as a resource
Solicit Amazon reviews from your “friends”

In addition to the large social network sites like MySpace and Facebook, don’t overlook LibraryThing and Shelfari. While these two sites have smaller user populations, they are geared toward bibliophiles.

Authors have attempted to devise many different kinds of networking techniques to get more exposure for their books. For example, one writer describes using a “fake” event to promote his workon Facebook. However, overt attempts at marketing can backfire – e.g. consider Sam Jordison’s account of his experience on Facebook in the Guardian.) Key things to be aware of:

Make sure you can accurately target your audience on these sites
Don’t underestimate the time commitment
Be careful about violating the terms of service for these sites
It may be difficult to track your sales results back to specific social networking activities, unless someone (a friend)orders directly from your book website
Don’t expect big results – social networking should be just one component of your overall Internet marketing strategy

Probably the most important thing to remember is that this is a new online space, whose rules and etiquette are still being worked out. It’s easy to make mistakes. So take your time, build your network and let your book sales develop at word of mouth speeds.

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The Book of Enemy - Cautionary Tale of a Collaborative, Multimedia Blook

orionwell — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 05:06:39 +0000

Blook Looks

by Cheryl Hagedorn

Cheryl Hagedorn authors Blooking Central, which examines
published books to discover what makes for a blookable blog.

In late August of this year, Steve Garfield posted at Off on a Tangent about an exciting new project called The Book of Enemy. I’m waiting to learn if the novel ever made it into print. Even if it failed as a blook, it attempted to pioneer something phenomenal. Here is an excerpt from Garfield’s post:

I’m working with a friend of mine, Dave Wildman, on a project that brings blogging, and videoblogging together with his forthcoming novel, The Book of Enemy.

We’re looking for volunteers to participate in a social media art experiment. The Book of Enemy is a groundbreaking blog-novel that is happening in real time throughout the month of September. The project will culminate in a reading/performance piece at Axiom Galleryin Jamaica Plain, Boston, MA on September 28. A number of Boston artists, photographers and filmmakers are providing illustrations for the show, and we’d like to open the project up to the vlogosphere.

The concept is similar to that of The Germaine Truth in that multiple individuals could simultaneously collaborate on a story. The difference was that The Book of Enemy imposed a time limit of only 30 days. Judging by the three blogs referenced at The Book of Enemy website, participation was light. One of the blogs has only a single post! On another, I struggled to see any connection to the story at all. This leaves one blog that appears to have been written by a character in the novel, but it’s hard to tell.

The inclusion of video was supposed to differentiate The Book of the Enemyfrom most other online works of fiction. However, there is only one video clip. The Book of the Enemywas supposed to include photographs but none are posted; yet the announcement says “A number of Boston artists, photographers and filmmakers are providing illustrations for the show.” What’s up? The scarcity of blogs and posts, as well as the dearth of visuals raises two questions. First, was there an adequate audience from which to recruit participants? And second, how was the marketing of the project handled?

I assume that Wildman’s novel must have been written and distributed to at least a handful of friends before being posted on the internet. Attracting participants to a collaborative online novel is too difficult otherwise (unless you already have access to a large and motivated readership to begin with!) It turns out that Mr. Wildman is the Arts Editor and chief film critic for Boston’s Weekly Dig. He had this to say about his reason for posting his novel on the web:

It’s tough getting attention for literary works. I actually got a rave review from Chuck Palahniuk, but I’ve had trouble getting agents to bite. So I’m making a spectacle out of it.

As a “social media art experiment” I’m not sure that it succeeded. As an indicator of what the future might hold, I think it’s right on the money.

Another multimedia novel which made a splash — assisted by some healthy advertising – was Edge of Paradise by Roc Hatfield. It includes a soundtrack as well as photographs and a slide show. I don’t know if the color photographs made it into print. I’m sure the music didn’t! On the other hand, the music CD is available.

On the non-fiction side of things Carbondale After Blog by David More was based on the Carbondaley Dispatch blog. More describes his blook this way:

Only the first two pages of each chapter will be printed in the paper edition, including one photograph. Also included inside the paperbound cover, a compact disc containing the complete text of every chapter, plus hundreds of color images, audio and video files and web-based content. Software needed to read Carbondale After Blog (TK3 Reader) will be included on the CD.

Both Carbondale After Blog and Edge of Paradise were solo efforts (as far as I know). The Book of Enemy and Carbondale After Blog both include video. But it is the social, collaborative aspect of The Book of Enemy that could have made the project outstanding.

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Vive le Permalink! - the Humble Source of Readership

orionwell — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 23:13:03 +0000

Years ago, I remember reading a delightful book by Henry Petroski entitled The Evolution of Useful Things. The book considered the labored genesis of inventions like the paper clip, zipper and fork – items so commonplace that today we take them for granted. They become almost invisible to us.

One such Internet innovation is the permalink, a tool that is at the heart of a blog’s ability to build traffic . The permalink, is a unique identifier (typically human readable) that ensures Internet users will always be able to link to your posts, even those in the archives. When someone links to one of your archived posts, they use a permalink. This humble innovation means that the content you generate in your posts is forever available (unless you choose to delete it). The thing that makes permalinks so useful is that linkages made with them become small traffic feeders to your blog. In this sense, every post is a magnet with the potential to attract a steady stream of visitors over time. As content accumulates, your traffic naturally increases in tandem.

You can amplify this potential by adding a “related posts” section to the end of each post. The related posts are simply links to other content that is relevant to your current post. Why do this? This exposes more of content to readers. Every time you publish a new post, it pushes older posts further down the list. At some point, readers will have to page back to older posts and it is unlikely they will. The related posts area keeps older, relevant content within easy reach. It also makes it more likely that someone will create a link to one of those older posts.

Another tool to expose archived content is a “Featured Posts” area on your sidebar. This is just a set of permalinks to posts you think might be of interest. You can use other variants such as “Popular Posts.” The idea is to use these links to get visitors, especially new visitors, to explore your content.

Social bookmarking sites have become very popular in the last couple of years. Millions of individuals use sites like del.icio.us, StumpleUpon, Digg and others every day to share URLs to content they like. Adding a bookmarking widget to the end of each post makes it easy for them to do this and potentially drive more traffic to your site. I would recommend a single widget that contains access to many bookmarking sites rather than cluttering yours posts with multiple widgets. For example, I use AddThis, which lets you choose a bookmark from a list of 36 sites.

Perhaps some day, Petroski might decide to compose a history of useful Internet technology. Surely the venerable permalink would be near the top of his list to write about. It is so simple, useful and ubiquitous that it has become invisible. Today, Americans are celebrating Thanksgiving, a time when we consider our blessings after enjoying an impossibly large meal. Writers contemplating the power of the blog to create a readership for their work, should give thanks for the humble permalink.

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Blog Networks Rising - An Interview with b5media's Jeremy Wright

orionwell — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 04:38:13 +0000

We have often speculated that blog networks will play a key role in the future of publishing. We decided to get an expert’s opinion and talk with Jeremy Wright, the CEO of b5 media. ZDNet defines a blog network as “An organization that hires people to write blogs. It sells advertising and owns the blogs.” With more than 290 blogs, 15 vertical channels and over 10 million unique visitors a month, b5mediais clearly one of the largest blog networks in operation today.

Jeremy Wright is a serial entrepreneur, some have even said a “blogpreneur” for his focus on communications-oriented ventures. He is also the author of Blog Marketing, designed to help businesses figure out blogs, and use them to get into the conversation with their customers. In addition to running b5media, he also writes the blog Ensight, a popular business and technology blog, and consults on blogging, communication, IT and time management.

In our interview, Jeremy provided insights about the inner workings of blog networks and what he sees for the future of this nascent publishing medium.

FPP: Technorati has indexed over 100 million blogs. Why do you think blogs have become such a powerful publishing medium?

Jeremy: There are really 2 kinds of blogs (as far as I’m concerned): personal/family blogs and “professional” blogs. Personal blogs are really all about you telling your family how you’re doing, what you’re up to, etc. In some ways, social networks like Facebook are starting to take the place of this kind of blog. But personal blogs are about expression, connecting with people you know and love, etc. For these kinds of blogs, this is the first time in history that we’ve been able to basically pen pal with everyone we care about, which is incredibly powerful. The second kind is “professional” blogs, which is really 2 camps: those who are blogging what they love and are good at (at least in part) so they can improve their career, establish new connections, network, establish themselves as thought leaders, etc. And the second kind are commercial properties which range from one guy writing about something to make money all the way to true blog-based content companies like b5media, Gawker Media and Know More Media.

FPP: What is a blog network? Are blog networks like online newspapers or magazines, or do they represent a new type of media?

Jeremy: In a lot of ways a blog network is like a magazine, just without the paper. Some networks, like Gawker Media, treat each blog as their own magazine (complete with editors, researchers, correspondents, etc). Others group blogs together and treat the whole as a magazine (this is how my company, b5media, does it). At the same time, they definitely represent a new form of media, as they really bridge the gap between mainstream media’s “we talk, you listen” metaphor and blogging’s “we talk, we listen” metaphor. It’s still commercial, but the best of these blogs (or magazines) are the ones that serve both metaphors: quality content, interactive conversation, by/for/with passionate people.

FPP: Do blogs in a network intentionally reinforce each other with shared readership? Or do they operate as standalone media properties?

Jeremy: The ability for a network to grow and establish a community of bloggers who are all passionate about similar topics (be it technology, business, entertainment or fashion) is really where the magic happens. Sharing strategies, linking to relevant stories across multiple blogs, drawing energy from the community… These are what make blogging at a healthy network so much more enjoyable than blogging on your own (which can often feel quite lonely). At the same time, the individual blog still has its audience to serve. So bloggers in a network are able to write for their audience, while drawing strength, inspiration and energy from the community.

FPP: What do you believe are the key success factors for a blog network? Are there particular metrics you use to measure the effective of blog networks?

Jeremy: The best metrics for any online company are the hard and fast ones: traffic, revenue and growth. But those don’t really speak to what it takes to achieve those key metrics. Each network motivates writers, chooses content areas and builds out the network differently. For us, we’ve always believed that if we keep writers happy, they’ll produce great content. And great content will mean more traffic. And with enough traffic it’s hard notto make money. So we focus a lot of energy on community and blogger happiness. We also regularly conduct surveys of our bloggers, our readers and our partners to see how we’re doing on the “soft” elements of success.

End of the day, a strong network has a strong editorial side with committed and energized writers, a solid business behind it, and talented folk to run technology, ad sales, marketing and admin areas.

FPP: Many authors have successfully gone from blog to book. Do you think it is feasible for book publishers to set up blog networks to enhance and scale this process?

Jeremy: That’s an interesting question. It’s not something I’ve seen yet, primarily because book publishers tend to exist to promote a book at launch, and then sit back and wait. The exception to this rule would probably be O’Reilly, which publishes a lot of information online, and encourages its authors to publish a lot of information online both pre and post-publication of the book. The idea of publishers getting into daily publishing is interesting, but it’s probably outside the DNA of all but the most technically-oriented publishers (where daily content is the norm). After all, if a publisher can’t do a weekly newsletter, can they really run 10-20 blogs, all with daily content?

FPP: What services do blog networks typically provide the writers who work for them? What type of compensation models are currently used by blog networks?

Jeremy: In terms of compensation, there are typically 3 types: revenue share (where the writer gets a percentage of the revenue the network earns), payment per post (often with a traffic bonus) and flat-fee (ie: like a contract writer would make). All 3 models work, though revenue share tends to put all the risk on the writer so is often used by networks when they’re starting out (to keep costs down). But, all 3 models can work. At b5media, we use a combination of flat-fee for meeting the writing requirements (which is kind of payment per post) along with a traffic bonus, though we’re currently evaluating new pay models. In terms of services, most networks really just ask writers to write and try and get them and their blogs exposure. I know at b5 we try and do as much as we can for our writers, ranging from free hosting for their personal blogs to training and from attempting to arrange press access for events to promoting the individual blogger in every way we can. It’s certainly one of the things writers should ask about before joining a network.

FPP: What traits does a writer need to have to be effective in a blog network?

Jeremy: I’ll defer to some of our most prolific writers on this, but in a recent training session, Leora Zellman and Mary Jo Manzanares said the most important things to have or develop were fantastic time management, to find your source of motivation daily and to both have your own quiet space and to reach out to other network writers so that you aren’t alone.

FPP: Blog valuations and acquisitions have become hot topics recently. What factors does b5media take into consideration when evaluating a blog purchase?

Jeremy: At b5media we have an internal engine we use to value a blog’s worth. We typically stay within range of that valuation when we acquire blogs, but sometimes there’s something that’s intrinsically more valuable than our model takes into account, so we don’t mind deviating. For us, traffic, revenue, unique visitors and subscribers are the key metrics. We’re able to gauge pretty successfully how well a blog will do over the long term with these metrics, so tend to stay pretty close to them. If it’s more of a strategic buy (we recently purchased a video platform company, for example, and are currently negotiating for a podcast network), then other factors may come into play that can bring the valuation up or down. As with any acquisition, you set your initial boundaries and then either go up or down based on strategic or external factors (such as a trend towards or away from text links, in the case of our most recent acquisition).

FPP: Where would you like to see b5media in the next 3 years? Do you think book publishing is part of its future?

Jeremy: While we might do a few e-books or encourage our authors to do books, I don’t think we’ll get into the book industry in a big way. I do see e-books as being a potential growth area, though. Beyond that, I’d like to see b5media move beyond the “blog network” box. We’ve started to do that a bit already by licensing our platform to Know More Media, doing ad repping, syndicating our content, etc. But we need to do more. I don’t want to get into specifics, largely because I believe talking before you have something to show is bad luck .

FPP: How do you see blog networks evolving in the future?

Jeremy: Well you’ll definitely see more consolidation and more partnerships. The last year has already seen a dozen or so of these (we’ve led 3-4 of them), but the pace will continue to quicken as the larger networks are able to grow traffic and revenue more quickly than the smaller ones, the larger ones will simply pick up small to medium sized networks because it’s cheaper than building blogs themselves. Beyond that, you’ll continue to see a meshing of blog networks with social networks (9rules and Instablogs have started to do this, and our gateway release at www.spekked.com will continue this trend over the next few months), and you’ll see more partnerships between blog networks and mainstream media networks (online and off).

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The Business Blook as Beta Publishing

orionwell — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 18:21:59 +0000

Blook Looks

by Cheryl Hagedorn

Cheryl Hagedorn authors Blooking Central, which examines
published books to discover what makes for a blookable blog.

Business books that are based on blogs – “blooks” – are finally coming into their own. There have already been monster successes, of course, such as:

Seth Godin’s Small Is The New Big
Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More
Eric Sink’s On the Business of Software
Robert Scoble and Shel Isreal’s Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers

Now, others are catching the vision. Authors such as Avinash Kaushik (Web Analytics: An Hour a Day) and Michael Lopp (Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering) compiled their selected essays and posts into book form. Even Harold Feld of The Sausage Factory is considering capturing his blog’s content in dead tree form.

On the other hand, Tammy Lenski’s approach (Making Mediation Your Day Job) was deliberate from the outset – she intended a book – and invited comments, criticisms, and suggestions as she posted. This seems to be becoming the norm. A case in point is a blook called We Have Always Done It That Way: 101 Things About Associations We Must Change by Five Independent Thinkers.

A quote from a post called Beta Publishing really lays out the argument for blooks:

The software industry has been able to grow and be more effective by actually releasing “beta” versions of programs. Users recognize that these products are not finished (thus not perfect), but in exchange for the ough edges, they get to provide feedback to the designers and actually have an impact on the final product. This concept has now been extended to the book publishing field as well, particularly by Pragmatic Programmers Press.

Blogging your strategies, concepts and wisdom - as a “beta” form of pubishing – seems to capture the idea, doesn’t it?

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The Blook Journey - Interview with Lori Smith

orionwell — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 02:11:35 +0000

Lori Smith has explored her passion for the life and work of Jane Austen, both literally and figuratively. In July of 2005, she set off on a month long trip to England to follow the life of Jane Austen. She describes the experience as “searching for a connection with the writer whose books (and the movies based on them) had become like literary comfort food to me.” Lori is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Washington Post Book World, Publishers Weekly , Washingtonian and Today’s Christian Woman. She is also author of The Single Truth and creator of the popular literary blogs Following Austen and Jane Austen Quote of the Day. She has now turned her blog musings into a book, A Walk with Jane Austen: A Journey into Adventure, Love and Faith. She recently shared another journey she has taken – this one from blog to book.

FPP – What interested you most about Jane Austen?

Lori – I had been reading her books since college, and felt very close to her (which many of her readers do, I’ve found, and which I can’t entirely explain). I had read the books over and over — they’re like literary comfort food to me — and when I felt like I had nowhere left to go, started reading biographies and her letters. I wanted to see the places she lived, the countryside she loved. The book grew out of a month-long journey following her life.

FPP – What do you think attracts modern readers to Jane Austen’s life and work?

Lori – She wrote very intelligent romances. The falling-in-love journey is an awful lot of fun on its own, but there’s so much more to Austen than that. We still recognize her characters today; the dialog is pitch-perfect. She had a wonderful wit and energy for life which comes through in the stories. But I also think the solid foundation of her stories is that character was so important to her — moral character. I think the real triumph for Austen — possibly more important than the romantic conclusions of her novels — is when her heroes and heroines are willing to recognize their faults and change. I think we’re drawn to their character, too, perhaps without realizing it.

FPP- What was the most unusual thing you learned about Jane Austen during your research into her life?

Lori - The fact that she had an opportunity to marry and chose not to. Harris Bigg-Wither, a dear friend of the family and heir to a great estate, proposed one night when Jane was visiting. She accepted the offer, apparently stayed up most of the night reconsidering, withdrew her acceptance in the morning, and left the house in disgrace. It would have been a nearly perfect match — except that there wasn’t love, and for Jane that would never do.

FPP- What inspired you to start your blogs?

Lori – I started Following Austen to begin to connect with readers, and start to build an audience for the book. The Jane Austen Quote of the Day I really started as a marketing tool. Of course, I love the quotes, and there were so many I wanted to share anyway, but I thought it would be a great way to reach the Austen fan base.

FPP- How would you characterize your blog readership?

Lori- I’m afraid I don’t know much about them, other than the fact that I assume they are die-hard Austen fans. I know that about half the daily syndication for the quote of the day is on LiveJournal, where it’s reproduced on people’s friends pages for others to read. I think that’s great.

FPP- How much of a role did your blogs play in the development of your book?

Lori- I really enjoyed getting initial pieces of the book out there and getting good feedback from readers. In the beginning stages, writing is such a lonely process that hearing from readers who loved it meant so much to me. It didn’t really affect the development of the book though, in terms of structure or how I wrote it, except perhaps that I learned to think of it in bite-sized pieces that would work on the blog. We ended up working it back into longer chapters, but I think that helped me tackle it initially.

FPP- Have you found your blog to be an effective marketing platform for your book?

Lori- Definitely. I’ve connected with a whole world of Austen bloggers, who’ve been enthusiastic about the book and in turn have blogged about it. It’s also given me a place to send people for excerpts and more information, and a kind of legitimacy. There are so many opportunities for online promotion now that are completely free, and a blog is central to that. I would recommend it to every writer.

FPP – What other things would you still like to know about Jane Austen?

Lori – Much of her life is hazy. She didn’t keep a journal, and her sister burned most of her letters. If I could talk to her, I’d ask her about writing — and about her faith, which she was hesitant to discuss. (She felt it was more important to live it than talk about it.)

FPP- Do you think if she were alive today, that Jane Austen would have a blog?

Lori – I don’t think so! She was very private. I think she would find the trend – and our celebrity-obsessed culture – full of fictional possibilities.

FPP – What is next for Lori Smith?

Lori- I’m not sure yet, but I’m guessing there will be another book — and another blog!

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Turning Readers into Customers with Social Media - An Interview with Beth Whitman

orionwell — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 22:10:55 +0000

Blogs and social networks have grown in importance as marketing platforms, as the audiences they are able to aggreagte have grown. Technorati is now tracking over 100 million blogs and comScore reports that social networks MySpace and Facebooknow have 68 million and 30 million members, respectively. For authors, they are becoming essential readership building and book marketing tools. We recently spoke with Beth Whitman, a popular travel writer, who is using blogs and social networks to help create and market her titles.

Beth Whitman is a self-described “travel addict” and has been a solo traveler for 20 years. She wrote her first book, Wanderlust and Lipstick: The Essential Guide for Women Traveling Solo in order to encourage and inspire other women to travel independently. She is the publisher of www.WanderlustAndLipstick.com and the travel blogger for the Seattle Post Intelligencer. Beth has two books scheduled to be released in 2008: Wanderlust and Lipstick: For Women Traveling to India and Wanderlust and Lipstick: For Women Traveling with Children.

FPP - Your book focuses on tips for women traveling alone. Is this a relatively new area of travel writing?

Beth – It’s definitely not a new area of travel writing but it’s a growing category, for sure. There have been a few books out on the subject for a number of years but there seems to have been an explosion of interest in the topic during the last year or so.

FPP- How did you become interested in blogging?

Beth- I knew that I needed an online presence in order to build up my audience. By happenstance I landed a writing gig with the Seattle Post Intelligenceras their travel blogger and started blogging on my own site about six months prior to the release of my book.

FPP- How much of your content from your blog did you use in writing your book?

Beth - Not a lot for my solo book as a lot of the writing for the book had been done when I started blogging. However, I’m working on another book, For Women Traveling to Indiaand will be repurposing a lot of the content for both book and blog. In retrospect I should have done more of that for the original Solo book but didn’t.

FPP- What challenges did you have in converting blog content to book content?

Beth - I think the challenge is breaking down all the info from the book down into bite sized chunks that will hold a reader’s attention on a website. It’s got to be snappy and usually in bullet form so that can scroll through quickly.

FPP- What role does your blog play in marketing your book?

Beth- It plays a pretty big part. I am constantly working on building my community through my blog, newsletter and through social networking sites where I place links to my blog. So far, I’ve driven traffic to my website and sold books through this online marketing campaign.

FPP – What role have social networks played in your book marketing campaign?

Beth – It’s becoming more and more significant as I learn the ropes. There are a lot of things to figure out and it takes time to build up your network. I’m just now starting to see it pay off and hope to have a good holiday season as a result!

FPP – How do you allocate your marketing effort between web based and traditional methods?

Beth - While I do market offline (I’m in the middle of a book tour right now), I spend more time marketing online. While both methods are time consuming, I’m starting to see the advantages of online marketing campaigns and social networking sites (especially since I don’t have to pay travel expenses for those methods!). I connect with other bloggers and other individuals with like interests (in my case, travel).

I think that down the road I’m going to see far more traffic going to my site and more people buying my book because of the online marketing that I’m doing. It’s just a matter of being focused on it, which, honestly, most authors aren’t.

FPP- What’s ahead for your writing and your blog, Wanderlust and Lipstick?

Beth- I’m working on books number 2 and 3 right now and continue to blog a few times a week on the Seattle Post Intelligencer site and my own site. I’m working on a book for women traveling to India and another for women traveling with children in which I’m collaborating with two co-authors. This time I will take a more thoughtful approach at adding content to my blogs that will be included in the book so that I can build up my audience prior to the book’s release in the spring of 2008.

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Blogs are the New Takeover Bait for Mainstream Media Outlets

orionwell — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 21:06:16 +0000

Attention all ye weary bloggers, exhausted from constant posting; your labors may finally bear fruit! We have often speculated about the value of blogs. Now Standard & Poor’s is indicating that blogs may be the next round of acquisition targets for investors hungry to cash in on the Web 2.0 frenzy.

The blogosphere continues to grow like topsy; as of September, 2007, blog tracker Technoratiindexed more than 106 million blogs, 12 million more than in the previous month. It has long been a shadow medium, existing alongside traditional media outlets. Now as it demonstrated the ability to garner both readers and advertisers, blogs are gaining more respect. According to a recent article in S&P’s Outlook,

Blogs – especially the big-name brands such as TechCrunch, Gawker, GigaOm, Boing Boing, and the Huffington Post -appear to have attractive business models. This is good news for traditional media companies that are being marginalized online and off, and are hoping to catch up to–and cash in on–a rapidly evolving Web 2.0 world.

Traditional media – especially newspapers which have been bedeviled by rising costs, falling subscribership and dwindling display and classified ad revenues – and bloggers are teaming up to extend their offering and build readership. This has sent valuations, at least on well known blogs, soaring. Advertisers are beginning to link up with A list bloggers and traditional media outlets will no doubt follow the advertisers to the blogosphere.

However blogging is still only a small part of the overall online traffic of newspapers. As Red Herring reporter, Alexandra Berzon, commented in a January 17, 2007 post, Newpapers Go Blog Crazy:

Newspaper blogs still represent only a very small percentage of overall newspaper Web traffic. The top ten newspaper Web sites saw nearly 30 million total viewers in December, 2006-led by The New York Times-up 9% from the year before.

But the growth rates in readership for blogs are tantalizing. A Nielsen/NetRatings release, quoted in the article, showed that the top 10 U.S.-based online newspaper blog pages were up 210 percent year over year.

So how high could blog valuations go? Try this one on for size. In a post on Silicon Alley Insider on October 3, 2007, Henry Blodget cited speculation by analyst Doug McIntyre at 24/7 that Techcrunch, a very popular blog focusing on new Silicon Valley startups, might be sold to CNET for $100 million.

So how do you value a blog? Some advice to would be blog moguls is given on a July 20, 2007 Performancingblog post entitled How To: Put The Right Price On Your Blog. The factors considered include:

Niche potential
Revenues and expenses
Traffic
Content
Reputation
Branding

These are all very reasonable. But if we are in a Web 2.0 bubble, as some have suggested, all conventional valuation techniques could be tossed out the windows as companies try to buy a piece of new media real estate.

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