Devoured by maggots: why and how I created Tweet this Book!

On Saturday I was privileged to be the opening speaker at one of my favourite conferences: WordCamp NZ, in Wellington.

The topic of my talk was “How to publish a best seller without being Alison Holst.” Non-New Zealand readers could insert “Nigella Lawson,” I guess, albeit a somewhat more experienced and less finger-licking version.

A more comprehensive title would have been “why and how” to publish a book; about half of my short talk was about my motivations, my hesitations and my ultimate decision to burst into pixels. The talk seemed to be well received, so if you were following the tweet stream, or if you were at Wordcamp NZ and hadn’t woken up properly by the time I’d finished speaking, here’s long version, as recollected a day or so later.

Why publish a book?

1. A book is an idea virus. For thousands of years, compiling your thoughts in book form has been a powerful and potent way to get an idea from one head and into many. Books are complete, digestable and portable. Despite every advance in digital technology, the book is still one of the best ways there is to infect lots of people with your thinking.
2. A book has credibility. I’m not sure everyone at an event centred on open source blogging platform WordPress would agree with that, but “read my book” has opened a lot more doors for me than “read my blog” or “read my tweet.” As a business owner, credibility is important to me, and publishing a book has helped with that.
3. A book focuses your thinking. If the whole point of a book is to share your ideas with others, an essential step in writing one is to define what those ideas are. You can be vague in conversation or in a tweet and possibly get away with it. You can’t be vague for 10 chapters and still produce a book people will read and recommend.
4. Because you feel compelled to. I illustrated this point with an image I found of a crapping elephant. I know that when I have an idea for a blog post bouncing around in my head, I’m not satisfied until it’s written and shared with the world (or the small slice of the world that chooses to read my stuff). A book is like that, only the dissatisfaction’s of a far higher order. I read once that when a female blowfly’s maggots are ready to be laid, she needs to do it ASAP or the little bastards will start devouring her insides as their first meal. That’s how the compulsion to write a book felt to me. Writing and publishing a book is a big job, so I’d recommend not bothering unless you feel the maggots are about to hatch. So to speak.

Of course, I had some reservations about writing the book. If you’ve read it, you’ll be familiar with these, and I possibly shared them in the introduction more than I needed to. The main one was a case of what psychologists call “who the fuck am I?” – as in, who am I to claim any degree of expertise in social media and write a book about it. Not just “a” book, either. Tweet this Book! was New Zealand’s first book on the subject.

Two things got me across the line on this. The first was that in a field as new as social media, there is no expertise. There are no qualifications, no objective measures and no telling who’s worth listening to and who’s not.

The second thing that convinced me I was as worthy as anyone else to write this book was my experience of marathon and ultramarathon running. One of the many things it taught me is that, for 99.9% of competitors there will always be someone in front of you, and someone behind you. And if someone’s in front of you, they probably have some useful advice to share. (And if you can convince them to share the advice during the race, the talking might slow them down enough so you can overtake them and snaffle that coveted 493^rd place!) You don’t have to be the champion to have something worthwhile to say.

I like Venn diagrams, so used one to sum up the three things I reckon you need in order to create a worthwhile book:

• Know your shit. Not be the world’s expert, but know a little more than most people who will read your book.
• Have an opinion. Facts on their own are boring. The Telephone Directory is the most authoritative , accurate and fact-filled book you’ll find anywhere. It’s also as boring as batshit. A book based on a strong opinion is likely to be interesting because it will challenge people’s thinking.
• Tell your story well. Unless you can afford a ghost writer, there’s no way around this. I have a background as an advertising creative director and copywriter and while I admit that there’s a difference between “Huge sale on now!” and a readable book, I like to think I know where the apostrophe goes.

How I built Tweet this Book

I got a bit of slack about this. Once I’d decided to self-publish a book, I started looking around for a tool to lay it out. InDesign was out of my price range, and nothing I looked at online seemed to offer quite what I wanted. In the end, I settled for a tool I already owned, knew roughly how to use, and could handle words, pictures and pages and spit out a presentable PDF at the end of it.

I created my book in Microsoft PowerPoint.

The more interesting part, though, was how it was distributed. I’ve seen how hard it is to get even a brilliantly written book in front of readers via the traditional publisher-bookstore model. Coincidentally, the day I gave this presentation, New Zealand’s biggest and oldest chain of bookstores was placed in administration (a step on the way to receivership, as far as I can make out.)

The heart of my publishing and distribution system was some code called “Pay with a tweet,” created by a US-based German advertising creative team called (I shit you not) Innovative Thunder.

To get Tweet this book! out, I created a Posterous blog with one post for each chapter. I included the entire text from each chapter, but none of the formatting and very few illustrations – this was intended as a “try before buy” preview so I deliberately kept it lo-fi. On each page I put a “Pay with a tweet” button.

When a reader hit the button, she was invited to log in via her Twitter or Facebook account. Once she’s done this, a prepopulated Tweet or update appeared, ending in a link back to the Posterous page. Readers can edit anything they like except the link.

Once the Tweet or update is sent, the reader is sent to the Dropbox site where the PDF is available to download.

Did it work?

It seems to have. Over 15,000 people have been to the blog and I have had downloads from all over New Zealand and around the world. (One of the unexpected pleasures of this project has been seeing someone tweet their download in, say, The Netherlands, then see more tweets ripple out from that in the same part of the world.) Publication has helped establish my business, and pointing people to the book has been a powerful way to confirm what little credibility I have in the area.

What didn’t work

I wish I’d put better metrics in place so I could track the exact number and location of downloads (not sure if that’s even possible). Posts associated with Facebook-linked downloads are invisible to me, which means I’ve probably seen only 10% of the download messages. My biggest surprise and disappointment though, was that the Posterous posts didn’t lead to the degree of criticism and discussion I was hoping for. Usually when I post something controversial, the comments are as interesting and illuminating as the post itself. Most messages this time, though, were pretty much back-slaps. Which is nice, but doesn’t move the discussion forward much.

And that’s that. New Zealand’s first book on social media, published, promoted and distributed using the same tools it talks about.

And if you haven’t read it (like a journalist who called to interview me about it the other week!), please do. Here’s the link.