It’s a nutty week, so indulge me here if I spend a post on some lazy aggregation instead of original thought. I’ve been meaning to gather some of the more interesting bits of publicity around our newly-launched book. To start, two random online marketing notes:
Our book site is FriendsWithBenefitsBook.com. I count myself very lucky that there’s currently nothing more than a domain squatting page at FriendsWithBenefits.com. I recently talked to an author who failed to renew her personal domain and had it snapped up by a porn star who shared her name. What could she do? I didn’t have a lot of good ideas, save the fact that most porn careers are surely short-lived.
I did a couple of short TV pieces with GetConnected, talking about business blogging. I know, I know, I’m as surprised as you that we’re still talking about this stuff in 2009:
There have been a bunch of reviews of the book, all surprisingly positive so far. I’m still waiting for one that tears a strip off the book. After all, the negative ones are more fun to write. This one initially had promise of satisfying my need for abuse:
I really wanted to dislike this. It was sent to me by the publisher without my requesting it and I’m sure I groaned out loud when I opened the package and saw the subtitle. Social Media? I HATE social media!
Aaargh! OK, I’ll read the damn thing, I thought. Maybe there’s enough fodder here for a scathing review – tear the skin right off the authors and roast them on a spit! That’ll teach that publisher not to send me junk when I don’t want it. I sat myself down on the couch and started reading.
Hmmm. Something’s wrong. Where’s all the crap about getting 4 zillion Facebook followers? Where are the shady tricks, the spammy tactics? What’s WRONG with these people?
I guess I’ll just live in hope. Here, also, is an interview that Julie and I did for The Engaging Brand podcast.
Lastly, last night I sat on a panel on social media and ROI for the International Internet Marketing Association. I typed up a few notes, and then heavily marked them up before and during the panel. I said I’d share them with the audience, but I wanted to annotate them with links first. I’m using Flickr to do this, but you have to visit the actual pages to see the Flickr Notes I’ve added.
Incidentally, I was looking around for a tool like Flickr Notes that would enable me to add linked notes to a much larger image. Flickr only permits you to work with the 500-pixel wide image, and I could do with something twice that size. No, sorry, I have too much self-respect to make an image map.
UPDATE: Long time blogger and podcaster Joseph Planta did an interview with us about the book.
I saw this sign on a beat-up white van parked near Home Depot. I often wonder if these signs actually work. The next time I’m interviewing some car thieves, I’ll ask. Click for le grandeness:
A couple of months back, I wrote aboutFoursquare. It is, as far as I can tell, the location-based social network with the most legs. It enables you to share your physical location, in real time, with a network of friends you select.
I’m not sure why, but I’ve been diligently ‘checking in’ a couple of times a day. As an aside, besides generating a database of where I spend my time, I’ve realized zero value from Foursquare. That doesn’t mean I won’t see future value–I just haven’t experienced any yet.
When I check in, I declare my location to 77 Foursquare friends (looking at their avatars, that’s a big grid of geeky dudes). Just like Facebook or another social network, you can invite other users to become your friends so that you can share location data.
Here’s the thing. I recently checked my list of pending friend requests. I’d been ignoring it for a while, so the requests had added up. When I went through the list, there were over 60 strangers who wanted to share their location and receive notifications about mine on an ongoing basis.
I may have met a few of these people once before at an event–I have a horrible memory for names. Regardless, theirs are not names I immediately recognize.
If I was on some online-only network, I might have no qualms about ‘friending’ near or total strangers. But when we’re talking about meatspace, that crosses a particular line for me. I don’t actively worry about anybody doing something injurious to me, but I want to know who knows where I am.
This leads me to a question: why are strangers friending other strangers? Do they assume, unlike me, that the stakes are the same on Foursquare as they are, say, on Twitter? What do you think?
Last Sunday I saw “The Road”, adapted from the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name. It stars Viggo Mortensen as a father struggling to protect his son as they journey through a blasted, post-apocalyptic landscape.
The book was remarkable–I wrote about it here (take a minute to listen to the audio sample in that post–you won’t regret it). I place it alongside Netherland as the best written books I’ve read in a decade.
In my mind, then, the film had big shoes to fill. The book is all atmosphere and mood, with a pretty skeletal plot, so it was well-suited to adaptation. As I remember things, every event of the book appears in the film, though sometimes in a diminished role. I’m always encouraged when this happens–most adaptations from novels are both too long and too hurried.
In every respect–the grey, dystopian world, the sparse dialogue, the wasted cast of characters–the film accurately reflects the book. In fact, it’s the truest adaptation of a novel I’ve seen since Gary Sinise’s Of Mice and Men. As such, everything I had to say about the novel is true of the film. The movie making craft on display is, in every respect, exceptional.
The film, more than the book, highlighted the theme of how parents are sometimes burdened with parenthood. The incredibly bleak prospects which the father and son face in “The Road” mean that the father must confront some nearly unthinkable possibilities in protecting his son. There weren’t many dry eyes in the house by the end of this film, but I can’t imagine being the father of boys and not being deeply affected.
It’s not an easy movie to watch. If you’re up for it, I recommend “The Road”.
I don’t know what’s up with all the Christmas content, but we needed some cards last night and I spotted this one. As Christmas cards go, it’s not bad. Apologies for the lousy photo. Click for bigilization:
As regular readers know, I recently co-authored a book about social media marketing entitled “Friends With Benefits”. Before that, we wrote an ebook on the same topic. We distributed the ebook as a PDF, enabling people to buy it through PayPal. The traditional book is published by No Starch Press and distributed by O’Reilly Media.
A longtime reader asked that I write a post comparing the two approaches.
Editorial Decisions
If you’re self-publishing, you have complete control over what your book is about. You can publish a book on as narrow a topic as you like (“Capri Pants of Upstate New York, 1963 to 1965″), and you get to decide what goes into the table of contents. When we wrote our ebook, we pretty much skipped MySpace because, well, we didn’t know a lot about it, and we didn’t feel like learning.
On the other hand, we negotiated the book’s outline with our editor. This proved a healthy and useful process, as it ensured that we covered all our bases. We did, however, have to write a chapter on MySpace. That was almost certainly the least fun chapter to write in the book.
An editor has a ton of earned wisdom which they can impart to you. They’ve confronted hundreds of decisions–from ideal chapter length to whether website names should be italicized–that the self-publishing author needs to consider.
Length
Your eBook can be as long or as short as you like. A traditional book has certain expectations around length. In addition to the practical marketing requirement that it occupy enough shelf space to be visible to the bookstore browser, it needs to seem substantial enough to merit its price.
Our eBook was about 25,000 words long, while “Friends With Benefits” clocked in at 90,000. The latter, obviously, is a lot more words than the former.
Marketing and Promotion
With a self-published book, you do all of the marketing and promotion yourself. If you’re up for this work, and maybe have done some kind of marketing in the past, this isn’t a big deal. It’s a lot of work, but it’s not rocket science. If you’ve never promoted anything before, then you’re going to face a learning curve.
Publishers offer marketing help. I hear a lot of authors complain about how little marketing support publishers offer, but they may not understand the economies at work inside publishing houses. The publisher may have dozens of books to promote, and few (or one) staff members to do this work. Our publisher helped with a lot of the marketing legwork–writing press releases, pitching reviewers (we helped assemble the list of reviewers to contact) and so forth. Knowing what I do about publishers and marketing, I’m entirely satisfied with their efforts.
I should also mention the process of signing a book deal. For us, it was super-easy. We were introduced to a literary agent, and she asked us to write a three-page proposal for the book. Armed with that and our ebook, she got interest from a publisher within a couple of weeks. I think we got really lucky, so your mileage may definitely vary.
Production Process
When creating an ebook, you can apply as much or as little design work as you like. I’ve seen ebooks that are style-free Word documents, and ebooks that look indistinguishable from published books. I made the mediocre cover of our ebook myself. It’s adequate, but certainly nothing to write home about. The self-published author needs to handle or outsource all of the production aspects–cover design, layout, illustration, indexing and so forth. For our ebook, we hired a designer we know to tweak our layout and give us some good advice on how to make the book look more professional.
If you’re planning on using Blurb, Lulu or the like to sell your self-published book, be sure that you layout our your book to their standards. This was one of the reasons we didn’t use these services–we couldn’t be bothered to match our layout to their requirements. Another reason, if I recall correctly, was that some services only accepted US-based customers.
The publisher takes care of all of this for the author. In a couple of cases, I simply drew illustrations on our whiteboard, photographed them and sent them along to the illustrator to render as actual diagrams. We’re very happy with the cover and illustrations in our book.
Earned Credibility
Obviously there’s a difference between self-publishing a book and convincing a publisher to produce your book. The latter includes an implicit endorsement of you and your work. Of course, we’ve all read really bad books from publishers and great ebooks, so one should take this with a grain of salt. However, there’s no question that people view published books as more ‘legitimate’ than self-published ebooks. Take that for what’s it worth.
Money
Here-in lies the rub. As I said in an earlier post, you don’t write a book to make money. You can, however, write an ebook to make money. The math is pretty simple.
We sold our ebook for $29. After transaction fees, we made about $27.25 per book.
On our actual book, after our advance, we make less $2 per book.
It’s a little hard to say at this stage, but we’ll probably make about the same amount on the actual book as we did on the ebook.
If you consider all the above factors, the ebook is by far the better money-making proposition. Say you spend 100 hours writing and producing a 25,000-word ebook. Then you spend another 100 hours promoting it, and you sell just 500 copies at $27.25 a book. You’ve just earned $13,625, or about $65/hour. Not serious money, but better than a kick in the pants with a frozen boot. This is doubly true if you’re passionate about the subject matter. Plus, if you write five ebooks, and offer them for sale in perpetuity, then there’s a lot of potential for ongoing passive revenue.
Which is Right For You?
If you want to make money, go the ebook route. You’re the captain of your own fate, and your hard work can translate directly into hard-earned cash. If you’re looking to (as we marketers say) ‘establish expertise’ and ‘build your brand’, then get a publishing deal.
Is that wig meant to be more Scrooge or more Rastafarian? Hard to say.
I was reminded about this album by a recent episode of the Slate Cultural Gabfest. They rightfully raise the spectre of whether or not Dylan is once again having us all on. Robert Allen Zimmerman was born a notorious trickster, so I’m curious to know how much he actually believes in the project. But, heck, the whole thing is for charity, so it’s a question best left to the academics.
