A-ha!

My Personal Pet Book

Books come in all shapes and sizes, and are written for hundreds of different reasons. At our publishing offices, we meet budding authors on a daily basis, some with books in hand, others with just ideas. No matter what phase they are in, we're happy to meet them.

Recently I discovered a truly unique book online. Ken Halloway developed this brand new, exciting concept called: My Personal Pet Book. I think it deserves a quick look see...I predict you won't be sorry!

And, it's print-on-demand! What an innovative guy Ken is! If you want to learn more about him skip over to my other blog, Lip-sticking, and read this week's Smart Man Online.

Blog Your Book!

One of the best parts of our trip to BEA was the chance to visit with our friend, author and fellow book-blogger, Gerry Murak. His just-released book, Our Fathers Who Art in Heaven, presents a collection of stories and essays from around the world honoring the contributors' fathers.

Scroll through some of the posts on Gerry's blog and you'll get a feeling for the power his book has to inspire.

We take special pleasure in Gerry's success, because we introduced him to blogging as a business tool at one of our Business Blogging Boot Camps late last year -- though he has accomplished much of what you'll see there on his own. Since the first halting steps we helped him take, he's grown his blog into a tool for collecting contributions to the book and now turned it toward helping spread the word to share the book with as many poeple as possible.

His achievements with this book show what an author can do by understanding the networking aspect of blogging and using it to create and grow real relationships, online and off.

Way to go, Gerry!

Blogs as Authors' Notebooks

Here we are at Book Expo America 2005 in NYC. Today was filled with educational sessions and a major theme was how the Web in general - and blogs in particular - affect the way books will be written, published, marketed, and sold. We heard about writers serializing books on blogs, authors and publishers making books available online, bloggers as book reviewers, and driving online book sales with Google's new book-search tool Google-Print.

But before we got to BEA and today's sessions, just after arriving at our hotel on Wednesday night, Yvonne settled in as the featured guest on the ConversationsWithExperts teleseries hosted by Denise Wakeman and Patsi Krakoff (sponsored by their Build a Better Blog). The interview focused on Yvonne's writings and experience in Smart Marketing to Women Online and is summarized on their blog.

At the end of the interview, Denise and Patsi made an announcement that provided a perfect segue to the theme at BEA today: they're offering a new service they're calling the Blog to Book Project. The program offers several levels of service, but the key benefits are captured in a few nuggets from their descriptive page:

• lessons will be delivered via a private blog with steps and guidelines on how to write a book, followed by actual examples of books being created in real time ...
• organize your chapters through categories on your blog ...
• post articles for your book and get feedback from readers along the way, helping to shage the content of your book to meet readers' questions and needs.

As noted above, today's sessions at BEA showed that these techniques are gaining the attention of the publishing industry. We've encouraged authors to incorporate blogs into their writing and marketing efforts ourselves. Denise and Patsi have developed a program that should provide writers with a valuable service.