Work

Just in case nobody caught the change in the Amazon release date, Blog Marketing official comes out in 3 weeks: November 15th.

This is incredibly exciting to me. The book went to the printers 2 days ago (a day ahead of schedule), and is being published over a month early. This is largely because we wanted to be the first business book on blogging out there, and we didn’t want Naked Conversations to up their publication date and beat us.

In theory they still could, but at this point there isn’t much we can do to get it out there faster. The print run will be done soon, it will be shipped and then it will go on sale. The book has already been picked up by a number of international publishers and is being translated (as we speak, apparently) into several other languages. Deals have also been signed with retail chains, major online stores, schools and all kinds of things.

It’s incredibly exciting to watch the publisher spin up and do what they do best: create visibility for great books. Everyone that I’m working with at McGraw-Hill has been fantastic throughout this process. The entire team has been amazing – from my Acquisitions Editor (who stayed on through the whole project) to my Technical Editor, Reviewers, Copyeditor, Production Editor as well as the whole marketing team (I don’t want to name them unless they want to be named, though I’m incredibly proud and humbled to have worked with them).

Writing a book is one of the best and hardest things I’ve ever done. It’s a hell of a lot of work (more than you ever imagine), it’s frustrating, nerve-wracking stuff where you can go from the highest high to the lowest low in just minutes. I’d imagine this is more true for first-time authors, but either way writing my first book was an incredibly emotional experience, but also an incredibly rewarding one.

It has been my lifelong dream to write a book, and thanks to people like Mitch Tulloch and Sean who helped me realize I could do it, and to people like Neil (my agent) and Margie (my editor) for helping make it a reality.

There are more people to thank throughout this process than I have space for.

This book was really a labor for blogging, bloggers and the blogosphere as a whole. I first proposed the idea in May of 2004, at while point several people (including, ironically, Robert Scoble who’s now writing a competing book) said it was a stupid idea. Then in October when I started seriously thinking about it, it made a lot more sense.

Now it’s happening and, in many ways, the book is my way of saying “thank you” to bloggers everywhere. I wouldn’t be anything if people like Sterling Hughes and Jeremy Zawodny and Robert Scoble hadn’t inspired me to blog. I wouldn’t have even found business blogging or my own voice if it hadn’t been for friends in the business blogging community like Rob and Todd and Wayne who started blogging at about the same time as I did and helped mold me.

Ultimately I feel like I live an incredibly privileged life – not materially so much as in the amount of joy and peace and fun I have every day effectively doing “blogging” (writing, blogging, speaking, consulting, training, etc) for a living. And it’s thanks to every blogger out there that I can do this, that I was able to find a publisher for the book and ultimately that (hopefully) the book will do well.

I’m not going to be cheesy and say it’s every blogger’s duty to buy a copy, because that’s silly. And I’m not even going to ask for links (though I’m not going to turn them down). I’ve now done my “part”, and the rest is up to the quality of the work and the quality of the relationships I’ve made over the last 3 years. While I want the book to succeed, I don’t want it to do so simply because every blogger bought a copy.

Success for this book, to me, isn’t in how many copies are sold. It’s in how many companies are helped to understand blogging. So feel free to link, or to recommend the book to friends or to buy it for your company. I won’t mind. But the moment I’ll feel like this book is a success is the moment I get an email or a phone call or a letter from a company (or meet them in person) and they thank me for something the book said.

Because a book can’t be a success if it doesn’t actually bring value. So, fingers crossed that I managed to do the blogging community a service in writing this. It’s been a long, hard journey but one that has already been worth it to me, even if the book never sells a single copy.

My apologies to anyone who received a far-too “press releasy” email from my publisher today. It wasn’t meant to go out so soon, and definitely not the way it did. Sometimes even the most professional PR people with the best intentions slip up, and that’s what happened this time.

Rest assured that in spite of the learning curve that the publisher is going through, that they do value everyone as bloggers and as individuals.

Again, my apologies if the press release came across the wrong way. Wires were crossed and that wasn’t what was meant to go out.