Influential Women in Publishing

I always face this moment when I’m supposed to be blogging about the great and wonderful world of publishing. There are so many out there that speak so eloquently and engagingly that I have a hard time thinking my writing stands up in comparison. There is, however, one area that no one has yet entered [...]

Why is The Huffington Post Important to Today’s Publishing Reality?

Three years ago The Huffington Post, barely out of its incubator, was brushed off as a casual, digital hobby of Arianna Huffington.
By February 2010 The Huffington Post had 3.7 million unique visitors (Nielson Online). Technorati, the premiere blog search tool, has the Huffington Post as the second most linked to blog, second to TechCrunch.
The Huffington [...]

Online Games as eLearning Strategy

Anyone who has an account on Facebook knows about the games: FarmVille, Farm Town, Cafe World, MafiaWars, FishVille, YoVille, and so on. The opinions about the games are quite polarized, ranging from “I hate those stupid announcements. Ban the games.” to “I love those stupid announcements cause I get free prizes”. Of course, all interaction [...]

Book Model Variant 2

Collaboration has been around since the first stories were told out over the campfire. Each story teller said over the basic story, history, morality play, and then added his own interpretations to the mix. It amuses me when people talk about book collaboration today as if it is a new idea, new invention. What’s different [...]

Life Cycle of a Book: Understanding the Basic Book

Books on a Shelf

So many book models exist today. From the traditional write-and-publish to the eBook, with everything in between, the variations are staggering. This post is about the basic book model. Once the book life cycle is described I can then talk about the variations on the model. By enumerating the book models I [...]

Doom and Gloom or New Beginning?

Everyday I receive an article talking about the demise of this publisher or that book store chain. This morning The Independent out of the UK lamented the Borders UK non-agreement-that-would-save-the-day. The managers’ buyout does not seem to be happening, or they are too little too late – Borders UK is not taking online orders. It [...]

An Author Platform Sells the Author

I heard an interesting statistic the other day from another publisher. They were trying to setup an online store with one of the leading online bookstores, but were being frustrated in their attempts because they could get no support from the online store. Every time they called or emailed they got the same response: “I’m [...]

First Books Published

My first ever publishing experience was in grade school. I learned how to make paper. Then I learned how to bind it into a book using thread and glue. Only after the book insides were ready was I allowed to draw, color, paste, and print my story. It was kind of backwards, creating the book [...]

Information Brokers

Chris Brogan in his three hour talk at the Tools of Change 2009 Conference made several thought provoking statements. Aside from being a very funny guy Chris pointed out the obvious. It is so obvious that it escaped my attention. And if he had to remind everyone in the room of the same fact, it [...]

Open Access and Print on Demand Model

At the beginning of 2009 I worked for a technical writing company. We, the staff, started a blog ostensibly to tell the world about technical writing. Each contributor added entries about topics that tickled their fancy. I stumbled on the Open Source philosophy in my search for inspiration. At that time I dipped my toe [...]

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