A-ha!

Help us plan Publishing 3.0

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Blog to Book to Blog

And back again.

The intersection of print and online publishing is where we live (WME Books, WME Blogs). So we are very proud and excited to share this conversation from our blog-buddy Toby Bloomberg's blogtalkradio show entitled Creating and Promoting Books with Social Media/Web 2.0. Toby's guests (she calls them rock stars) are book publicist Nettie Hartsock and our own Sybil Stershic, who blogs at Quality Service Marketing and wrote Taking Care of the People Who Matter Most: A Guide to Employee-Customer Care.

Just click the play button and get ready to learn.

Note: Because there is so much great information in the show covering both book- and blog-related topics, I'm going to cross-post this on A-ha! and WME Blogs, so please forgive. I think you'll want to listen to it more than once anyway ... and take notes!

Toby also blogged about the show and provided lists of tips from both Nettie and Sybil. Here's a taste:

Nettie: "Ask not what a blogger can do for you, ask how you, your book or your product can benefit the blogger and its readership ..."

Sybil: [on applying the "3 Rs" from her book to how authors should treat reviewers] "Reinforce their helping you with appropriate reciprocity (such as linking to their blog or website on your blog)."

There's more on Toby's blog and much more in the interview, so I'll get out of the way.

Note 2: In the interest of full disclosure (and maybe a little shameless self-promotion), Sybil is one our authors and her book is one of our best sellers since it's release last October. And she REALLY "gets" the whole blog to book to blog marketing concept.

We also have a connection to blogtalkradio, John Havens (VP of Business Development). John is co-authoring a book on business transparency with another of our clients, Shel Holtz, for Jossey-Bass and it's IABC book series. WME is acting as their agents.

What's your "author platform" made of?

A couple of news stories got me thinking (again) about the problem of selling your book after all the investment of time, emotion, and money to get it written and published. The message remains: the primary responsibility for marketing a book falls on the author.

This morning on the CBS Sunday Morning Show, Bill Geist did an amusing piece on his efforts to sell his new book, Way Off the Road. You can read the script here or click to watch the video.

But to me the story behind the story was Geist's enormous book marketing platform as a television journalist.

An author's platform is critical to the decision-making process in the world of big publishers, as described byWiley & Sons executive Joe Wickert in his blog:

Years ago, [platform] implied things like author visibility, speaking engagements, whether they're a regular columnist in a key magazine, etc.  These are still important pieces, but now you have to add in things like how popular their blog is, how large an e-mail list they have access to, etc.

The same point was made in a ForeWord magazine article by Patti Dickinson a few years earlier:

Simply stated, platform is what an author brings to the marketing table. ... today's authors need to demonstrate the desire and aptitude to make their name and book title known to the book-buying public. ... The truth is, the well-written book by an author who has marketing savvy and a willingness to use it, has a significant advantage over an equal book by an author who doesn't or won't. If the former is someone who can identify a core group of readers and will use the Internet to market the title, what you have is platform personified.

"Platform personified." When that was written in 2000, she likely did not have the term blog to apply to her concept of identifying a core group of readers and using the Internet to reach them.

And today our colleague Greg Bell sent me a link to a NY Times article on the use of podcasts to create audiobooks (I've seen them labeled "podiobooks") and use them to generate interest in the printed book even before it's published.

The technology to create blogs and podcasts is available to any author and can help level the playing field for small presses and independent authors. So what's your platform built from?

They're Out There: A Fifth of Readers Visit Author or Publisher Sites

[Note from Tom: I know no other bloggers experience this, but with our book publishing work directly with authors at WME Books and our other blog work, Yvonne and I feel like we don't get enough time to post in this blog and engage with our A-ha! readers. So we're very happy to have some more help ...

New to A-ha! ... introducing ... Posts by Greg!

Greg Bell, our new A-ha! blogger, is a partner in D.S. Leach Consulting, with his wife Dianna Leach. Both of them will be posting about book publishing here and about blogs at our business blogging blog, WME Blogs. Greg has much to share from his experience both in book publishing and in building and publishing blogs (check out his Jazz@Rochester blog), so let's just dive right in with Greg's first post on A-ha!]

According to a recent report on the Publisher's Weekly website, a survey of a sample of 813 readers conducted by the New York advertising agency Spier-New York found that 18% of readers have been to a publisher's Web site and 23% of those polled had visited the site of an author. A higher percentage of those who visited authors' (35%) or publishers' (21%) sites were under the age of 35 (which as the post notes, is not surprising). The survey also found that 50 percent of those asked said they purchased a book as a gift within the past year. While 89% of those who bought books as gifts apparently bought from a brick-and-mortar retailer, there were still 28% of them bought their book gift online. Also encouraging is that 86% of those buying books as gifts bought at least two books. Using the total number of books sold in a year (it was over 709 million units in 2005) the actual numbers of readers involved could be pretty impressive.

So, is there anything to take away from this survey? To start, it shows that people are still buying books as gifts. And, most importantly for A-ha! readers, an author's or publisher's website (or blog) is becoming increasingly important in driving those sales.

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.

A Gathering-place for Authors and their Ideas

Again, a warm Welcome! to everyone. And we do mean everyone, since we believe the adage that everyone has at least one BOOK in them.

Yes, that includes you. Remember that book idea that's been germinating in your head for ... what, years now? This blog is meant to help anyone with the desire to take that idea and nurture it into the book you've always dreamed of writing.

Along the way, we'll all learn from each other. Our successes and challenges will provide guideposts to smooth the way for the next author.

A-ha! Authors helping authors.

Which reminds me, where are my manners? Introductions are in order.

We're Yvonne, Tom, and Maryanne, the ones who'll be writing the main posts. That was Yvonne writing yesterday. This is Tom writing today. And you'll hear from Maryanne tomorrow.

Confused? Well, don't worry. It's like we've just met and been introduced in a group. It may take a couple of visits for us all to get comfortable. Think of this blog as a virtual gathering place, like it's the watercooler or coffee area at WME Books, where you can stop by and get to know us. As you do, we're going to share our experiences with our own writing and encourage our authors to do the same. We hope you'll join in, too, with comments and maybe a guest post?

We're writers and bloggers ouselves. Yvonne is well known for her Lip-Sticking blog focused on marketing to women online. Tom's is called Knowledge Aforethought and he writes about "collecting and connecting the dots" (i.e. knowledge management and information design). Maryanne recently launched her own blog, Maryanne's Blog: Powdering Our Noses.

Together we all work to help others join the "bloggersation" (Maryanne's word) with our Business Blogging Boot Camp seminars and the supporting Business Blogging Boot Camp blog.

There, that gives you a start on who we are. What we want to share here are books ... and the ideas that fill them ... whether they've been written yet or not ... by us, or one of our authors, or you.

Please join us.