“WHAT IS YOUR GOOGLE STRATEGY FOR YOUR NEW BOOK?”
As somebody with a couple of books gestating in various stages in my head, on paper and in my computer(s), I found this post by Dr. David Friedman ( himself an author of academic political economy and fiction) at Ideas to be intriguing – leveraging Lulu.com and Google as a publishing revolution in favor of creators. An excerpt:
“….There remains the third function. To judge, at least, by horrified accounts of the contents of editorial slush piles, enormously more books are written than are worth reading. While publishers do an imperfect job of searching out the needle of literature in the haystack of slush—imperfect in both directions—they do a much better job than a reader faced with millions of webbed texts could do for himself. In order to eliminate publishers, we need an alternative filter, ideally a better one.
As it happens, there is a firm already in the business of finding small needles of worthwhile material in large haystacks of text. It is called Google. Google’s core business consists of figuring out what pages users will want to read out of the much larger number of pages that might conceivably have something to do with their query. It performs, and performs very well, a different version of the same task performed by publishers as filters.
I therefor propose that Google ought to undertake the project of replacing publishers. To do so it needs to create mechanisms by which readers can find, not pages of information, but books—the particular books those readers will want to read, buried in an enormously larger number of webbed books that those readers will not want to read. I leave the details of the project to Google’s very talented employees “
The best way to evaluate and leverage platforms like this proposal by Friedman is really not my field. Critt, or Dave Davison or John Robb or Steve DeAngelis all might have something pertinent to add here that I cannot. Until then, my eyebrows are raised.
December 1st, 2006 at 11:34 pm
i’m not one of those luminaries, but i’ll still weigh in 😉
even better, if you can’t get a book deal, put you book on the web for free. if you pimp it right, and if people find it useful, you’ll eventually get a deal for the book that is free on the web, not to mention the next ‘n’ ones…
it’s new media, baby. ask Marshall McLuhan, Kevin Kelly, et al.
December 2nd, 2006 at 3:18 am
Ah, but you can proof, and they can’t. And you still have a lot more familiarity than do I with these things.
Yep, need a “pimp” strategy…
December 3rd, 2006 at 3:33 am
Everyone can write . . . OK, almost everyone can write, and the lulus of the ‘Net can do the publishing, but it’s the editing that’s a b****. My 3,000 word journal contribution wasn’t edited but all my mag pieces are and you can tell the difference. All us aspiring Friedmans/Barnetts/Robbs need a “Google Editor” as much as we need a new way to disseminate the great american novel. I mean, all those English majors waiting tables need a shot at a job in their field too, right? 😉
December 3rd, 2006 at 6:48 am
Hi Michael,
As Sean can attest -and does periodically – an editor is something I could use from time to time. Good prose is like sculpture -it isn’t the massiveness of the block of marble but what you ruthlessly cut away that usually helps give decent writing clarity and power.
Err..Sean…any table waiting in your past ? ;o)
December 4th, 2006 at 3:59 pm
Thanks Mark for this post. David Friedman has it just right. The time for self-publishing is here! My own suggestions in no priority order:
1. Blog your book concepts and use your commentors as editorial and promotion staff.
2. Provide the early versions of your book in Creative Commons free downloadable form
3. Use LuLu for hard copy production and promotion.
4. Submit the book concept as a manifesto to ChangeThis, and if you have a winner you can reach a discerning pre-audience this way.
5.Use Amazon Associates and its wise group of reviewers to promote the book
5.Try to gain the interest in your memes by interesting key bloggers in your content and start an online conversation with these readers- include links to their blogs and their comments in your online and print versions.
6.Get on the public speaking circuit as a featured speaker at key events like PopTech, O’Reilly, FiRe, and other live conferences
5. Start a google group and a wiki around your book’s primary themes – start and stimulate a conversation around them.
6. Create a visual “diagram” of the book’s main themes in a PowerPoint or Breeze presentation.
7. Share your presentation on SlideShare.net
8.If you don’t know how, get a webmaster to organize and manage the web processes described above.
9.Pray for a miracle that your memes are useful and readers will find you and your thoughts valuable enough to spend the time to read your work.
December 4th, 2006 at 4:01 pm
Thanks Mark for this post. David Friedman has it just right. The time for self-publishing is here! My own suggestions in no priority order:
1. Blog your book concepts and use your commentors as editorial and promotion staff.
2. Provide the early versions of your book in Creative Commons free downloadable form
3. Use LuLu for hard copy production and promotion.
4. Submit the book concept as a manifesto to ChangeThis, and if you have a winner you can reach a discerning pre-audience this way.
5.Use Amazon Associates and its wise group of reviewers to promote the book
5.Try to gain the interest in your memes by interesting key bloggers in your content and start an online conversation with these readers- include links to their blogs and their comments in your online and print versions.
6.Get on the public speaking circuit as a featured speaker at key events like PopTech, O’Reilly, FiRe, and other live conferences
5. Start a google group and a wiki around your book’s primary themes – start and stimulate a conversation around them.
6. Create a visual “diagram” of the book’s main themes in a PowerPoint or Breeze presentation.
7. Share your presentation on SlideShare.net
8.If you don’t know how, get a webmaster to organize and manage the web processes described above.
9.Pray for a miracle that your memes are useful and readers will find you and your thoughts valuable enough to spend the time to read your work.
December 4th, 2006 at 4:20 pm
Wow! Thank you Dave ! Not just a comment but a media strategy !That was excellent!
I’m probably about one-two years from finishing either in the sense of polished manuscript but that is only a two-sigma guess as I am working with collaborators on each. Things will accelerate to the degree they can step up ( one is overstretched in terms of schedule, the other is getting ready to collaborate in earnest)or back out.