Recently, I was speaking with a consultant who is writing her first book.  Since I found myself rambling and ranting, I knew I had some bloggable material.  Below, I present some of what I learned on the editor’s side of the wall:

• First of all, don’t worry about marketing strategy unless you’re sure that you can channel 100% of your creative energy into the book itself.  All else follows from the richness you put into the book or whatever portion you’ll submit with proposals.  I think you’ll produce something more timeless by following your energy rather than trends.  (Coming soon: Notes on Gerald Weinberg’s “Energy Principle,” from Weinberg On Writing.)
• See who publishes the books you admire – identify ways you’d like your book to be similar or different; study the publishers’ other books; then contact those publishers with your proposal.
• Try to target editors by name and mention their recent work.  (Check the front matter and acknowledgments, articles from the industry or about the book, and publisher newsletters and/or press releases.)
• Follow the publisher’s proposal instructions strictly (and watch out for mentioning the wrong publisher in copies of your proposal – this happens!).  Avoid calling editors – they’re too busy (as a broad generalization :)
• Try to contact the authors you admire and tell them about your manuscript.  Comment on their work, but only if you can offer something that’s informed and authentic.  Authors are experts in their work – they have canine-quality olfaction when it comes to sniffing out phonies.
• Study the way authors  promote themselves.  Look at the best and/or most popular authors in your field and other fields.  Add some techniques and channels to your own (planned) marketing platform.  For example, right now, I am enthralled with studying the way Gary Vaynerchuk – wine expert and motivational social media genius – uses Twitter, Ustream, Facebook, Tumblr, events, and other channels to promote his October 2009 release, Crush It!
  
• Don’t forget to search for small presses with well-regarded, well-produced books:  These publishers may be easier to approach and sign with, and they may devote more attention to your project.  Study the membership of small press organizations, especially IBPA.  Watch for award-winners inside the small press world.
• In your book proposal, emphasize competitive analysis (why you’re different, but also why you’re similar to authors/books that have succeeded recently – especially in terms of the target publisher’s books), trends (try to estimate your audience size and/or topic popularity and how these dimensions are growing), and marketing (try to list ways that you can promote the book – writing articles, blogging, speaking, teaching, etc.).  You want to make it easy for someone inside the company to pitch your book.
• Only consider self-publishing if you’re sure that no one will publish and market it for you – and if you’re sure that you have an established process for fulfilling orders, stocking the book, and promoting it.  Working with an established “vanity” press may be better than simply printing the book and hoping for the best – a lot depends on your own abilities as an extroverted salesperson or social media mogul.  (My plug for Wordsupply is that we can help authors and publishers edit and promote their books in traditional and social media!)

I will continue with a number of these points soon – especially the virtue of working with a small press.  (That’s the world I came from – where editors generally interface with authors directly, rather than through agents.)

What would you add?  If you’re writing your first book or one of many published, let us know your strategy for approaching (or eschewing) publishers.  How would you tailor this list to target agents instead of editors?

Following a discussion on LinkedIn, copywriter and editor Ragini Werner mentioned one of my articles, on her blog: http://needser.blogspot.com/2009/06/cross-word.html.

The article, “Benchmarks for Estimating Editing Speed,” presents an admittedly unscientific survey of some leading editors’ rules of thumb. It was published in Corrigo, the newsletter of the technical editing SIG of the Society for Technical Communication. (Let’s call it the STC TE SIG!) I’m gathering new data from editors (contact me with your benchmarks).

Ragini, founder of NEEDSer, is a native-English copywriter and editor who specializes in helping Dutch writers banish Dunglish (English with a Dutch accent) from their writing. Her blog, The Bashful Blagger, is a lively read, full of honest and humorous details about the wordsmith’s life, mixed with some videos and references that extend the conversation.

On Friday, May 8, Chris Hughes spoke at NYU Stern. Hughes, 25, is a cofounder of Facebook and was a driving force behind Obama’s online campaign juggernaut My.BarackObama.com.

He sat on a dais for one and amiably answered questions from Stern professor Jeffrey Carr and the audience. The luncheon was hosted by the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship and sponsored by Stern alum Norman Himelberg, of Himcor Group and Reisel Management LLC.

My chief takeaways:

• Michelle and Barack Obama are just as friendly and smart as they seem on TV.
• On election night, Chris knew Barack had won when Fox called Ohio for Obama.
• He does not foresee going into politics himself, but admires people with those skills. He noted how different political campaigns are from businesses – teams form for several months to compete for an absolute win or lose on a single day, so efforts on process improvement have a much shorter, terminal scope.
• For entrepreneurs, a focus on product is even more important than a plan’s emphasis on market size or team make-up.
• He reminded the entrepreneurs in the audience that choosing an accountant or lawyer isn’t for life - what’s important is to make that first choice.
• He sees good opportunities in location-based mobile applications; separately, he sees a need for an open source platform of social media applications that most or all social entrepreneurs would need. Imagine Obama’s site, my.barackobama.com, saved as a template or generic architecture for other social causes.
• As an Entrepreneur in Residence at General Catalyst Partners, Chris meets with entrepreneurs and other smart folks, reviewing plans and developing his own ideas. General Catalyst helped launch sites such as Kayak.com and Upromise.
• Noting what sociologists call “weak ties” (social connections that are valuable but less deep than those with one’s closest friends), Chris cited [sorry - missed the name :o) ] as a powerful app for enabling Facebook users to direct communications to the most appropriate “bucket” of friends (i.e., college chums vs. office mates).
• He also cited Facebook Connect as one of the most valuable parts of Facebook, since it saves people the trouble of filling out new profiles on other sites, makes it easier for sites to get people registered, and helps users promote the other sites as their activity is reported to their Facebook friends.
• An occasional Twitter user, he sees Twitter and other sites as part of a complementary ecosystem of sites with different audiences and uses. Going forward, these sites will evolve with more focus.
• The power of Facebook was reaffirmed to him recently. As he ended a tour of a remote village in Senegal, his guide asked if he and his friend were on Facebook. Besides making tangible the fact that Facebook has more than 200MM members worldwide, the friending made it easy for them both to get to know each other (the guide must have had a shock when he realized who Chris was :) but also extended Chris’s knowledge of and resources in Senegal. So “weak ties” can be rich and valuable.

Beyond all of this, Chris was approachable and downright friendly. He travels quite a bit, speaking with and coaching young entrepreneurs.

Cheers to Chris, the Berkley Center, and Mr. Himelberg!

I found myself wanting to share a video (below), but then realized that the pathway I took in discovering the video demonstrates the value of having a Twitter presence that’s coordinated with a Website presence.

In calling it a “relay,” I’m inspired by my daughter’s recent field day activities – slapping hands or handing off a baton as runners trade-off each leg of the race.

The first half of the Twitter-Site-Blog-Twitter Relay was run by the publisher; the latter half is in my court. Right now, I’m running the Blog leg.

Here’s the full case history …

I’m starting to Tweet on writing topics @Wordsupply, and @girlgetstrong4 followed me. So, I visited http://www.girlgetstrong.com.

Once there, I found this College Humor short showing an “unplugged” version of Twitter – walking around the city and shouting Tweets instead of texting:

So, I decided to return-follow @girlgetstrong4 and write this post. A Tweet will be the next leg of the relay …

And don’t forget the baton: Dan Gurewitch (@dangurewitch) and College Humor (@collegehumor). Dan has at least one new fan, and the relay race is free.

My goal with Wordsupply is to help folks move the baton. Let me know how you’re running.

Skittles.com splash/home page

Skittles stirred up quite a bit of chatter this week by outsourcing most of its Website to major social networking sites.

In a move that is presumably acceptable to Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, and Facebook (even though it reminds me of framing external sites within one’s own site, a technique long frowned upon since it traps visitors), Skittles sends visitors to its discussion pages on major sites. The “Chatter” link brings a Twitter search for all entries with “Skittles” mentioned in them; the “Friends” link brings Skittles’ fan page on Facebook.

A small red Skittles dashboard hovers over the external pages, unmovable in Firefox.

I’m impressed with this campaign because with the openness of its trademark rainbow (okay, maybe that’s too generous), Skittles is encompassing (okay, maybe coopting) communities where its consumers live – rather than trying to compete with them.

True, Skittles could build an island where people would discuss Skittles – but do you think people would go there? I assume that earlier versions of the site had some community experiments … assuming those grew slowly, if at all, can we blame Skittles for embracing communities where they’ve grown organically?

The same risk of heckling is there, but it’s housed within external sites. The challenge will be for Skittles to Tweet and engage within the communities it’s embracing. It may find that islands are easier to control, but in the long run, engaging with consumers where they live is bound to increase Skittles’ share of mind.

Whether your site links to an external social network or encompasses it within a Skittles-style dashboard, your firm has to engage these communities on their own turf.

P.S.: Note that Skittles asks for your age before giving access to its dashboard – and you must accept “terms and conditions” that aren’t disclosed through a link or pop-up – just outlined in the window’s text (see the orange box in the screenshot above). Perhaps one term is to allow tracking of one’s Tweets, Facebook activity, and YouTube commenting … only Skittles knows … UPDATE: Once signed in, there’s a link to a privacy policy.

In December 1999 (almost ten years ago), I wrote a piece about e-mail newsletters, for the Publishers Marketing Association’s newsletter (now called The Independent, by the org now called the Independent Book Publishers Association, http://www.ibpa-online.org).

“The Promise and Pitfalls of E-mail Newsletters” told the story of Paul and Freddie, small press editors who accidentally sent a newsletter with recipients exposed in the To field rather than hidden in the BCC field. Worse, they accidentally sent an apology e-mail three times.

As I refresh the Wordsupply site, I was tempted to archive this essay. Trouble with e-mail newsletters seems so quaint now.

But then, last week, one of the most talked-about Web 2.0 start-ups misfired a mass e-mail. (No point in mentioning its name – the point is that the times have not changed.)

Sending an HR rejection e-mail, the company accidentally revealed all recipients in the To field – including some who no doubt were applying confidentially. (The CEO apologized by e-mail – tactfully, and only once :o)

No matter how technologically sophisticated we become, we’re prone to human error. The same management safeguards apply – adding oversight that’s commensurate with the risk of misfiring the message. As our tools get more powerful, that risk will increase.

As I wrote in that pre-dot-com-bomb piece, I have certainly suffered my own communications doozies, and will again, for sure. In the meantime, I will leave that essay online.

Kudos to Andrew Savikas of O’Reilly Media’s TOC Conference for sharing inspiring videos from Rutgers English Department Chair Richard E. Miller.

Take a moment to view one or all of these videos. View them with thoughts of how your business ideas and research can also spread virally through the convergence of text, audio, video, and the Internet.

What ideas are you promoting as a consultant or author or service provider? How can your customers be better educated and better served through this media rather than a text-based FAQ or paper manual? Wordsupply’s presentation scripts and presentation text can knit your rich media together.

Here is Professor Miller’s two-part presentation:

Learn more about Professor Miller here:
http://english.rutgers.edu/faculty/profiles/millerr.html.