Steve Rubel points out that blogs and trackbacks aren’t the only thing happening these days (TrackBacks Are Dying.) Digg/reddit and lenses and instant messages and tags are all part of the same universe. Each serves a different purpose, but all of them are related and keep moving ideas around.
If you haven’t invested in a blog as a platform, perhaps you want to be the best in the world at something right next to a blog instead…
I’m serious. Smart people with good ideas worth sharing can get a lot out of this exercise.
It’s technically easy and when it works, your idea will spread far and wide. Even better, the act of writing your idea in a cogent, organized way will make the idea better. You can write an ebook about your travel destination, your consulting philosophy or an amazing job you’d like to fill.
Seven (wait, now it’s 12) years ago, I wrote a book called Unleashing the Ideavirus. It’s about how ideas spread. In the book, I go on and on about how free ideas spread faster than expensive ones. That’s why radio is so important in making music sell.
Anyway, I brought it to my publisher and said, “I’d like you to publish this, but I want to give it away on the net.” They passed. They used to think I was crazy, but now they were sure of it. So I decided to just give it away. The first few days, the book was downloaded 3,000 times (note: forgive the layout. It’s not what I would do if I was doing it today). The next day, the number went up. And then up. Soon it was 100,000 and then a million. The best part of all is that I intentionally made the file small enough to email. Even without counting the folks who emailed it hundreds of times to co-workers, it’s easily on more than 2,000,000 computers. I didn’t ask anything in return. No centralized email tool. Here it is. Share it.
A Google search finds more than 200,000 matches for the word ‘ideavirus’, which I made up. Some will ask, “how much money did you make?” And I think a better question is, “how much did it cost you?” How much did it cost you to write the most popular ebook ever and to reach those millions of people and to do a promotion that drove an expensive hardcover to #5 on Amazon and #4 in Japan and led to translation deals in dozens of countries and plenty of speaking gigs?
It cost nothing.
Changethis, which I dreamed up in a moment of weakness a few years ago, is still going strong under better management now. It’s the epicenter of ebook distribution, but there are plenty of places just dying to host your content. And your blog is the best place to launch your idea. The biggest challenge is that there are no barriers. If you want to do it, go do it. Ideas worth spreading, spread.
I’m trying something new this May.
Usually, when authors tour, they trudge from bookstore to bookstore. It’s grinding and a little demeaning (here’s a tip: if you see an author in a bookstore, don’t go near him unless you’re prepared to buy the book (or at least hide it somewhere in the store.)) The whole interaction isn’t very pleasant for the reader either.
Well, I love to do speaking gigs, but rarely get the chance to do events that are open to the public and relatively inexpensive. So I figured I’d combine both.
Here’s the deal. (Details are here). In each city I’m able to get to, if you buy 5 books (in advance), you get to come hear me give a speech for free. OR, if you prefer to think of it differently, if you pay $50 to hear me speak, you get five books for free.
Why five books? So you’ll give four away. That’s why I wrote the book. So you would buy copies and give them away. You register online, you pay in advance, you’re guaranteed a seat and you’re guaranteed your copies, available when you show up. We can’t do refunds, because the books are a pain to move around, so please be sure you can come when you sign up.
Which cities? So far, just Philly. UPDATE: We just added Chicago.
More to follow soon, I hope. If you have a very large network or a very large organization in a city in the US (sorry, too much travel to go overseas), drop me a line if you’d like to discuss running an event in your town. The minimum is 500 people, though. [let me reclarify: you need to get the books through a special link, not from just any store… and, I will be posting new cities, very soon! Promise.] If it works, I’ll tell you. If it doesn’t, I’ll tell you. Either way, it’ll be interesting way to meet a lot of readers and get books into the hands of people motivated to give them away!
…doesn’t mean it’s gone.
The music business used to be simple. You gigged and prayed and waited and hoped that Berry Gordy would give you a contract. Once you had a record label, you were in. The Dip was early and steep.
Now, of course, making a record is trivial. A laptop and some microphones and you’re in. No permission needed.
And making a music video is a lot easier. And who needs MTV if you can get it on YouTube.
Hence the problem. Before, there were thousands of frustrated musicians with no record, no promotion and no Clive Davis. Now, there are thousands of frustrated musicians with a lot more at stake. They’ve got recordings and CDs and videos and MySpace pages but they’re still not successful.
It doesn’t feel fair. It’s not. It’s the Dip.
The Dip is what separates a hit from a non-hit. And the irony is that without the Dip, it would be useless to try to succeed in pop music. Without a chasm that separates the hits from everyone else, the hits aren’t worth anything.
Embracing the Dip, not cursing it, is the only way to stay sane (and become successful).
Jordan Tierney and her colleagues have been working for months on the Periodic Tableaux, a one-of-a-kind art book that’s not for sale.
Why invest the hours and the sweat and the talent in a piece of art you can’t (and won’t) sell?
Two reasons. The best reason is that when you practice your craft for yourself, not for the market, it drives you in new and important ways. And the other reason is that people are going to talk about it.
Ideas that spread, win.
Three years ago, I posted about anonymity. I still agree with every word I wrote. Anonymity hasn’t made the web a better place. Instead, it has allowed some of the worst ideas ever to get published. (This link is unsettling). All we can do is root for Kathy and hope that the bully behind this is caught. It makes me angry.
Where do attitudes like this start? Alas, anonymous bullying is not that far from the hateful things Times critic Harry Hurt says in a review he did of Suze Orman last week. "Among the substances that need hazmat warning labels are the liquid
that bronzes Suze Orman’s hair, the paste that whitens her teeth…" He goes on for paragraphs in a personal attack that has nothing whatsoever to do with the book or its value. (I wrote a letter to the editor–no luck.) Why is this okay for a blog, never mind the paper of record? I don’t think it is. And the hate won’t go away, any of it, until enough people speak up.
Isn’t it sad that misogyny is so common that there’s even a word for it?
Ever since he was written up in the Times last week, No Impact Man has been causing shockwaves. Here’s a guy who, with his family, is going without… reducing his intake to local foods and his output to a tiny fraction of the typical American’s.
I was at the Union Square Market last week, buying some local eggs. A well-dressed woman marched up and handed two empty cardboard egg trays to the farmer, for reusing (a step better than recycling).
Suddenly, $40 an ounce for raspberries flown in from Chile isn’t so sexy any more.
Now, people look at someone driving a Chevy Suburban the same way they look at a fit person parking in a handicapped space. "Why," they wonder, "do you need to do that?" It’s sort of a mix of suspicion and pity.
The richest and best-educated people in our economy are shifting, and pretty quickly. They’re just as willing to spend money as they always were, but now it’s not focused on fancy organic stuff at the Whole Foods Market or giant bulletproof cars from Germany or private jet travel. Instead, the market is trying as hard as it can to spend time and money without leaving much of a trace.
I think this story has legs and is going to be around for a long time. Zero is the new black.
The cab drivers in my little village are an angry and bored lot.
It doesn’t matter where you are going, they’ll find a shortcut. Back roads, vacant lots… they’ll drive two miles out of the way to miss a light.
I thought about this when I read a blog post describing the best way to get the most out of a Squidoo lens. The author said you should make sure that the keywords and title are perfect and limit outbound links so that you can be sure that people will only do what you want them to. Others spend time studying the algorithms of Google and Yahoo to figure out the very best way to jump ahead in the rankings for their blog or corporate site. Is it reciprocal links or careful metatags? What if I create some sort of ring so that the spider won’t realize the scam?
Hey. It’s not so hard. If you make great stuff, people will find you. If you are transparent and accurate and doing what’s good for the surfer, people will find you. If you regularly demonstrate knowledge of content that’s worth seeking out, people (being selfish) will come, and people (being generous) will tell other people. It turns out that it’s easier and faster to do that than to spend all your time on the shortcuts.
There are some airlines that spend all their time dreaming up ways to lobby the government and others that spend all their time making flying a better experience. There are restaurants that dream up ways of charging more for bottled water, and others that work hard to create an experience worth bringing a group to enjoy.
All I know is that the cab drivers in my town are still angry about that light.
You can see which books cite a book you like.
Try doing that at the local library…
(or a dime). Right?
That was the chant I expected to hear from the street fundraiser yesterday in New York. Over and over again, she chanted, "A penny, a nickel, a dollar…" and then just when the meter demanded "a dime," she said, "a quarter."
It was wrong. All wrong.
And it worked. Precisely because the rhythm didn’t work, the pitch did.
