While compiling (many) posts into a book is a common enough practice these days, how many people systematically plan out their blogging to optimize the construction and marketability of their book?

How many people craft different blog posts tackling the same subject from different angles and designed to appeal to different Temperaments?

How many people publish their nonfiction/business book in mind with a firm understanding of what they want the book to accomplish for them, what a book reasonably can accomplish, and…

...continue to read "Book Publishing 2.0 + A New York City Giveaway"

Jeff Atwood’s “YouTube: The Big Copyright Lie” may be the most telling — and concise — article ever written about today’s online copyright law fiasco. According to Atwood, the company’s whole existence teeters a fundamental lie: that so-called “fair use” is in the eye of the beholder, and the only beholders who matter are the copyright’s owner and their attorneys (read: copyrighted material is kept live on YouTube indefinitely until either the copyright holder or their lawyers complain).

Atwood shows that…

...continue to read "The YouTube Effect: Copyright Law Will Eat Itself"

I was reading an article in AdAge about Ian Ayres. He and his publisher were battling over the title of his new book. He wanted to call it The End of Intuition. His publishers wanted to call it Super Crunchers.

[His publishers said] “The End of Intuition” is a terrible name. So boring. But Ian Ayres didn’t believe it. That’s what he wanted to call his new book about how much better it is to test ideas through random trials rather…

...continue to read "What Keywords Say About Your Visitors"

Here’s what you do:

1.) Build a marketing platform. 2.) Write a book people want to read. 3.) Contact Michael Drew.

We’re often asked how Waiting for Your Cat to Bark hit #1 on the Wall Street Journal list, while reaching bestseller status on the New York Times, USA Today, Amazon, and BusinessWeek lists. (AdvertisingAge even called it one of the “10 books you should have read” for 2006.) How is it, they wonder, that Call to Action became a bestseller, despite being sold…

...continue to read "Want to Be a Bestselling Author?"

Amazon (AMZN) pulled the cover off its long-awaited music store, Amazon MP3. Amazon is targeting the long tail that Apple (AAPL) hasn’t captured. Their selection is DRM-free MP3s with over 2 million songs from more than 180,000 artists represented by over 20,000 major and independent labels. Most songs are priced between 89 cents and 99 cents.

Will they outsell Apple’s iTunes?

Check it out and compare it to iTunes. Do you think one is better than the other? Will you shop at both or…

...continue to read "Amazon is Ready to Take a Bite Out of Apple"

Can the IRS obtain information about what you read on a website even if you have done nothing wrong?

I didn’t think it was possible until I read “Order on Tax Evasion Site Blocked” in the NY Times:

On Friday, Judge Peter W. Hall temporarily blocked the portion of the order requiring Mr. Schulz to turn over to the government the names and identifying details of people who had obtained information at the Web site on how to stop federal tax from…

...continue to read "Don’t Turn Over Reader List To IRS Rules Judge Hall"

Clark Hoyt, the New York Times public editor, serves as the readers’ representative. In his Op Ed column, he writes:

A BUSINESS strategy of The New York Times to get its articles to pop up first in Internet searches is creating a perplexing problem: long-buried information about people that is wrong, outdated or incomplete is getting unwelcome new life.

People are coming forward at the rate of roughly one a day to complain that they are being embarrassed, are worried about losing…

...continue to read "SEO Ethics: New York Times is Challenged"

My friend Anne Kennedy sat with me yesterday in the speakers’ room at Search Engine Strategies and told me about a company she’s involved with called Helium; a directory of about a half-million user-generated articles (so far).

But it’s much more than a directory. Helium allows articles its community considers more valuable to get better visibility — and a bigger chunk of its ad revenue. They also have an area for debate and have included a marketplace for publishers and authors to connect. Today, they…

...continue to read "Would You Play with Helium?"

I recently shared lunch with my good friend and business associate, Ray Bard. Ray is the monumentally successful mastermind behind the Bard Press publishing house where I worked from 1999-2002. We established a great dialog during my stint there and try to get together as often as possible to trade war stories about current projects and the state of affairs in the Big Bad Book Industry.

We spent most of this particular lunch discussing the challenges faced by today’s publishers. (This…

...continue to read "I’ll Pay for Lunch"

Two great posts articles today with postmortem analysis on the death of paid newspaper content…

First, Publishing 2.0’s Scott Karp opines the New York Times‘ decision to drop TimesSelect and return to publishing the entirety of its content online — for free. Says Karp:

The ability to charge for content in non-digital media like newspapers, magazines, and cable TV was based on a limited supply of content and monopoly control of distribution. The web and digital media have generated an overabundance of content…

...continue to read "The Death of Paid Newspaper Content"