I love what I do. So writing books, thinking up ideas for blog posts and delivering talks is not really “work.”
I don't procrastinate. When I have a good idea in my mind or I am on deadline, I crank it out.
I don't have to sit in any damn meetings (unless I want to).
I'm always looking for material. I travel the world giving talks and really dig when I find a great example of great marketing or PR that needs to be told.
I am an efficient writer. One way I stay efficient is with Text Expander for the Mac which I was turned onto by my friend Steve Johnson. The product allows for codes for long strings of text that I use frequently. When I want to type "Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History", all I do is type “mlgd\” and the application fills in the rest. I've got about 100 things with codes. So, for example, it takes me just a few seconds to reply to a speaking inquiry.
I repurpose content. Blog posts that have a positive reaction from people frequently become stories in one of my books.
I put my internal editor on hold for first drafts. A technique called "Freewriting" that I learned from Mark Levy in his book Accidental Genius: Using Writing to Generate Your Best Ideas, Insight, and Content allows me to get ideas down very quickly without seeing if it is "good." (Mark's book is just about to release in its second edition.) With Freewriting, I write and write and write for ten minutes or thirty minutes without caring about spelling or grammar. Then I look for nuggets of inspiration, which I edit to become blog posts.
How about you? How do you stay efficient and crank it out?
One of my favorite riffs is: "Ebooks are the hip and stylish younger sister of the nerdy white paper."
When I deliver the line to B2B marketing or technology audiences, it gets a lot of laughs.
But there are also a few people who are incredulous. Their body language says: "How can David be so rude to white papers?"
I wouldn't say I am totally dismissive of white papers. However, I do not agree with how white papers are typically used, which is why I talk so much about the ebook as different.
I've found that it is nearly impossible for marketers to get out of their bad white paper habits. Therefore, I prefer suggesting they do something completely different – an ebook.
Here is why readers do not like white papers:
- White papers are usually boring. (Hey, they're white). In fact they are so boring that most people don’t want to read white papers. Instead they feel they have to read them.
- The portrait orientation of a typical white paper does not work on a computer screen. It either frustrates readers or forces them to print out the document.
- Most white papers require registration (and therefore are used as lead bait instead of true information delivery). The forced registration sets up an adversarial relationship with the reader. The give (email) to get (white paper) is a transaction.
- Because of the registration requirement, very few people blog or tweet about white papers (because they do not want their readers to be hit with unwanted emails or sales calls). Therefore white papers almost never go viral. But an ebook like, say, What Matters Now has been downloaded probably a million times.
- White paper content is frequently just re-hashed product information designed as a "problem-solution" narrative. When you promise to deliver valuable content written in an interesting way and then prattle on about your products you annoy readers.
- Most white papers use too much gobbledygook -- the flexible, scalable, cutting-edge, mission-critical, world-class, innovative sort of words.
I admit I'm being a bit lazy.
It's too difficult to convince people to change the way they do white papers. So instead I am a cheerleader for ebooks.
Many people ask me for advice about getting a business book published, so I wanted to blog it for all to see. See below for my 8 ideas if you are interested in doing a business book.
But first, check out this short video interview shot by my friend Tim Street where I talk about publishing a business book. Direct link here.
1. Know your goals for writing a business book.
It is unlikely you'll make much money from the book itself, so think carefully about why you are doing it. For most business book authors a book helps bring in consulting gigs, speaking opportunities, or serves as thought leadership to build a business.
2. You have many options to publish, including:
Free ebook without registration (a book you publish online and offer absolutely free- no registration required)
Paid ebook (sell your ebook on your site or via Kindle or other ebook software)
Self-published print book (you act as general contractor and pay all the costs to design the cover, typeset, print, store, and ship the book)
Author-supported publisher (work with a publishing house who serves as general contractor, but you pay all the costs)
Smaller or niche publishers
Large business-book publishers with international distribution.
3. There is no perfect way to get a book published.
Each of these approaches has merits and drawbacks. I’ve done a bunch of free ebooks, have self-published a hardcover book – a novel called Eyeball Wars (2002), worked with a small publisher, CyberAge Books on Cashing In With Content (2005), and the last several books I’ve done New Rules of Marketing & PR (2007 / revised 2010) and World Wide Rave (2009) have been with Wiley, the largest business book publisher in the United States.
4. Because it is so easy to put a book out yourself, you really do need to consider if you need a publisher at all.
Anyone can set up an account on Amazon and sell a self-published book. By doing a book yourself, you control more aspects and make more money per copy sold.
5. The main benefit of a larger publisher is distribution.
There are tens of thousands of business books published each year and only a tiny fraction of them ever make it into physical bookstores. Even fewer get worldwide distribution. So without a large publisher behind you with the contacts in the bookstore marketplace, it is unlikely that your book will be stocked at Barnes & Noble, Borders, and the other chains.
My book The New Rules of Marketing & PR is now out in 24 languages, plus on Kindle, in audio book format, and in condensed format. Each of these “subsidiary rights” brings the author more money and also increases the number of people who see your ideas. Again, working with a large publisher makes it much more likely that your subsidiary rights will sell.
PLATFORM PLATFORM PLATFORM
6. OK, so how do you get a big publisher interested in your book idea?
The most important thing is that publishers want to know how you will sell books for them. They are interested in your platform. A large publisher wants to know how often you’re quoted in the press, how often you speak, if you do television appearances. They want to know if you blog, tweet, publish videos. Basically, they want to work with authors who are likely to promote their books and make sales.
When I got my first book deal from Wiley, one of the most important factors was that I had published an ebook called The New Rules of PR (2006) that had been downloaded about 50,000 times in a month or so. The ebook had been written about on dozens of blogs. So showing that I had the ability to generate interest in my ideas, I was able to give the acquisition editor confidence that I could sell books.
7. Hire an editor.
No matter how you publish your book, it is important to have someone to work with to provide editorial advice. No writer can edit himself, and only a fool tries. A good editor pushes you to clarify your thoughts, helps with organization, and advises on the big picture.
8. Only you can market your book.
No matter how you publish your book, you must market it yourself. I recommend that authors spend as much time marketing a book as they do writing it. However, very few authors actually do it. Most either expect their publisher to market it or hope that the market will discover the book. Don’t assume. Get out and market your book.
All good film and all good fiction is really just about conflict, right?
Usually, it's one character in conflict with others (Batman against the bad guys). Sometimes it's a character in conflict with herself ("I really shouldn't go into this bar, but...").
One writing teacher went so far as to say, "Writing without conflict is propaganda."
But very few marketers and business writers introduce conflict in their writing.
We all see tons of this stuff instead: "Here’s our product. It is great. Here are customers who say it is great. Now buy some of our product."
Sadly, this classic propaganda-driven marketing crap is everywhere.
Gaijin Male Model
This ebook is a departure for me because most of the ebook is an example of conflict-driven business writing called Gaijin Male Model, from an essay I wrote several years ago about my experience as a part-time model in Tokyo.
The essay first appeared in the Summer 2004 issue of North American Review (America’s oldest literary magazine) and also appeared in Hacks, an anthology of published excerpts from novelists, poets, non-fiction writers, screenwriters, and short story writers.
In the spirit of "show, don’t tell" I hope this example gets you thinking about how to introduce conflict into your own writing.
I’ve been a fan of Adrian Neylan’s "cab blog" for the past four years and I even included it as an example in my book The New Rules of Marketing & PR.
Adrian works the late shift, driving a cab in Sydney, Australia from 5:00 PM to 3:00 AM. After most shifts, Adrian writes a story about a memorable encounter with a passenger and posts it on his blog.
Adrian is a fantastic writer. His stories are funny and interesting, and can sometimes be moving. I find myself laughing out loud or thinking throughout the day (or sometimes both).
So it was with great excitement that I finally had a chance to meet Adrian while in Sydney this week. I hired him at the start of his shift to take me on a personal tour of South Head and Watson’s Bay. Truth be told, he could have taken me anywhere because I just wanted to meet him and see what it is like to be in his cab. After reading so many of his stories, I felt the cab to be a strangely familiar place.
You can read any of Adrian's stories to get an idea of his style, but here are a few opening snippets from recent posts.
Fridays: "Most drivers consider Friday night the best shift of the week. I absolutely loathe it. If it’s not the endless peak hour traffic and it’s frenetic ratbag drivers, it’s the difficult office jerks who lose any semblance of courtesy after a few drinks."
Old mates: "Working predominately at night I rarely encounter the generation from war time Australia. So it’s always a surprise and an honour whenever one of these old diggers climbs aboard and puts some perspective on the hustle and bustle of life."
Luck: "Like most jobs taxi driving has its moments of luck, usually the result of preparation and perserverance rather than simply slacking around."
Or if you want to get a bit racy, you can also read about sexting.
Adrian told me that he has enjoyed storytelling since he was in school. Six years ago, he realized that he can publish through a blog and get an instant readership. He describes his cab as a "content rich environment" with a "story every night."
In this video, I asked Adrian about how he creates the stories.
A few thoughts:
1) All of us can learn from the way that Adrian puts stories together. I certainly have. If you’re struggling with what to write about in your own blog, read Adrian for inspiration.
2) If you find yourself in Sydney and need a cab at night, contact Adrian!
3) Attention book publishers: Adrian has over 1,000 stories on his blog. The best ones would make a fantastic book.
(Note that Adrian goes on holiday for the first two weeks of September, 2009 so no new taxi stories – what am I gonna do every morning? for the next 14 days)
Have you noticed that more and more bulk email comes in these days with an opening "Dear Colleague"?
What’s up with that?
According to Wiktionary, a colleague is: "A fellow member of a profession, staff, academic faculty or other organization; an associate."
I recognize that this might just be a pet peeve of mine. But when I see an email that starts out that way my brain turns off. I just delete the damn things.
I often get these emails from trade publications making offers (such as inviting me to a webinar) and event organizers who have me on a list because I have attended in past years and they want me to sign up for the next shindig.
If I am on your list, you should know my name. So please either say "Dear David" or just leave the salutation out completely.
Please let me know if I'm being overly harsh here. (I didn’t get much sleep last night.)
I'm fascinated by online popularity. Why does one YouTube video have 100,000 views and another seemingly similar video only 100 views? I believe that popularity is something that you can help to influence and I wrote about it in World Wide Rave.
But what about extreme popularity?
My friend Chris Brogan has a blog at chrisbrogan.com that's ranked by Technorati as one of the top 100 blogs in the world. He regularly gets 50 or 100 comments on his posts. And @chrisbrogan has 69,000 followers on Twitter as I write this.
WTF? How does one achieve this extreme popularity?
Bottom line is that Chris is helpful and friendly and funny and smart. People like to be around him. And he's prolific.
I'm reminded of High School. Remember those people who could move within any group and be friends with all of them (even the teachers)? That's Chris. I have no doubt that in High School he was tight with guys on the football team, had friends who played Dungeons & Dragons in dank rec rooms, and could sit with the cheerleaders at lunch. And he likely hung out with teachers after class.
And that's true for him online today.
BTW – Chris writes VERY FAST. I sat with him at the MarketingNow conference in Wellington New Zealand a few weeks ago and watched him bang out a blog post in about the time it took me to write a tweet. Get this: Chris has updated twitter over 40,000 times. That’s forty thousand tweets. Yikes. Photo credit @SiobhanBulfin
I asked Chris about extreme popularity and in this video he shares some thoughts.
Boston, MA - April 8, 2009 - David Meerman Scott is pleased to announce innovative solutions for new and improved, next generation, cost effective, world class, high performance, value added outcomes.
Does the sentence above suck or what??
That's how so many PR people write — using gobbledygook-laden phrases that are so overused to have become meaningless.
I have just completed an analysis of all 711,123 press releases distributed by North American companies in 2008 through Business Wire, Marketwire, GlobeNewswire, and PR Newswire. The project looked at 325 gobbledygook phrases from a variety of sources, with the detailed analysis on the number of uses for each phrase done using Dow Jones Insight.
Here are the top 25 gobbledygook phrases used in press releases sent in North America 2008.
Gobbledygook terms were drawn from these sources:
- Informal survey of my journalist friends in order to create The Gobbledygook Manifesto, first published in 2007.
- This Paperclip is a Solution: A survey of general business and trade publication editors in September, 2006 by Dave Schmidt, VP, Public Relations Services at Smith-Winchester, Inc.
Many people think that Search Engine Optimization involves some sort of magic formula.
Sadly, quite a few SEO firms perpetuate this myth by shrouding their work in secrecy and mythology, spouting ten-dollar words like "algorithm" when they talk to potential clients. They make it seem like their SEO work is similar to driving the space shuttle and mere mortals can never do it.
Note to regular readers: I have written about this subject several times, but it is worth a re-visit based on how many people ask me about it.
Almost inevitably, I find that the sites people want optimized (and that the SEO firms work on) are crap filled. They're poorly written. They ramble on and on in an egotistical way about what the companies' products do. They're filled with industry jargon and corporate gobbledygook.
I tell people that they need to understand their buyers and create great content that buyers will want to consume. That way, their pages will attain high rankings as the search engines gradually reward the great content.
Usually I get pushback. People say they just want an agency to "tweak our existing Web pages." And, of course, many SEO firms are happy to take their money to do this.
Sorry, this doesn't work. The only way to create high search engine results is to create great content that people want to link to.
Performing search engine optimization on a crap-filled site just makes it slightly less crappy.
I'm amazed by how a piece of interesting content (a blog post, an e-book, a Web page) can generate high rankings for a tiny company, rankings way above those of the big, famous organizations.
Your challenge: Go to Google and do a search for the important phrases that your buyers are using to find organizations like yours, and look at where you fall in the search results. Consider what great content you can publish to trigger a World Wide Rave that will get people linking to your content and send your site to the top of the search results.
An aside: There are many excellent SEO firms that understand content. I am not picking on the entire industry here. I am pointing out that there is no easy way to "get high rankings" that matter.
Or you can use social media and have fun with your characters at the same time, like Spencer Quinn has done with his new book released last week called Dog on It: A Chet and Bernie Mystery.
Quinn started a blog and Twitter feed in the voice of his main character. But, get this, the main character is a dog. Meet Chet, the wise and lovable canine narrator of Dog on It, who works alongside Bernie, a down-on-his-luck private investigator. Chet might have flunked out of police school ("I'd been the best leaper in K-9 class, which had led to all the trouble in a way I couldn't remember exactly, although blood was involved"), but he's a detective through and through.
I just love Chet's blog and Twitter feed. Quinn speaks dog language amazingly well. Great stuff.
Example tweet: "Love surprises myself. Finding a forgotten chew strip, for example. What beats that? Not much."
From Chet's blog: CONGRATULATIONS STUMP!
"Way to go, Stump, winner of the Westminster Show last night. The ears on that old guy - maybe the best I've ever seen. And the whole show - is there anything better on TV? Not that I know of. I didn't catch quite all of it, on account of when the dogs run around the circle I get a bit excited. Did you see how many treats they got? Watch how the handlers are always reaching into their pockets - that's for treats! Can't tell you what kind because there’s no smell on TV, one of the big drawbacks. Are they working on fixing that? Also, TV has sound but it’s not quite right. Bernie never seems bothered by that. Maybe humans don’t notice. Humans are full of surprises, but I've liked just about every one I’ve ever met, even some of the perps we've taken down."
There is also a Chet Appreciation Society on Facebook where one discussion centers around who (as in which canine actor) should play Chet in a movie version of the book.
This is a fantastic example of smart marketing! And considering that this is Quinn's first book and it is selling briskly, the marketing is working amazingly well.
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