Scott Berkun's Blog, page 65

The age of the platform: lessons on self-publishing from 4 time author

My friend Phil Simon, author of Why New Systems Fail and The New Small, is about to self-publish his fourth book, The Age of the Platform. Unlike people who talk about writing books but never do it, Phil bootstrapped himself, and started a writing career all on his own.

With his new book about to release, I asked him about his process, to share with other aspiring authors.

SB. You're publishing your fourth book. What made you decide to start?

I started because it seemed a good release of knowledge. I amassed experience in IT and had strong opinions. What better way to get them out? And to avoid spending a bunch on shrinks. That's why I started in 2008.

I also enjoy writing—and the challenge of longer-form texts. I like to blog, but books are major challenge to pull off properly. Plus, when you write, you can see yourself evolve and improve. It's a rush to watch yourself get better. I had also seen the success friends had in writing. That demystified the process. When a friend of yours has written books, it somehow personalizes it. That doesn't make it easy; it just makes it possible.

Next, books are just good business. Non-fiction works can be big, thick business cards. They confer expertise. They can also generate passive income. Finally, I have great respect for the written word. I've always been a reader and want to add to the collective body of knowledge out there.

SB. What are the biggest mistakes you've made in self-publishing? Would you recommend it?

The first edition of Why New Systems Fail was a great learning experience. I assumed I could do everything myself. I did—and the book suffered. I learned you have to hire professionals to produce professional work. This includes a cover designer, design person, proper editor, indexer, and proofreader. Just because you can do these things yourself doesn't mean that you should. The New Small was the first book from Motion Publishing and I was pleased with the results., although I should have hired a professional indexer.

As for self-publishing, I do recommend it —with reservations. If you don't know what you don't know, then go with a traditional publisher first. Then you can learn the ropes—even if from the outside. You can also use subsidy presses like Lulu, but you don't have the same control as being on your own. If you self publish, do it properly—and don't be afraid to spend money. Don't put out a book of poor quality.

SB. Your upcoming book, The Age of The Platform, is your second book developed using Kickstarter. How has that helped you work without a publisher?

For one, it mitigates financial risk. If you're going to publish you should raise as much money and awareness as possible—beforehand. Many people focus so much on the writing they forget to concentrate on what to do after the book comes out. The last thing you want to hear is crickets after months and months of hard work on your magnum opus.

SB. Haven't platforms been around for a long time? Microsoft, Apple, and AOL all had developer platforms where they sold services and created business opportunities for 3rd parties. What has changed?

The notion of a platform isn't new—and I discuss that in the new book. So, what's changed? Technology has become democratic. Thousands of companies are piggybacking off of platforms created by The Gang of Four: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. Bezos, Zuckerberg, and others realize that they can make more money and innovate faster by partially outsourcing innovation. It's not buying or crushing other companies; it's trying to work with them to grow the pie. Open APIs and development kits make innovation arguably easier than it was the closed source era of the 1990s.

I'm an example. I'm a small business of one. Yet, I am an Apple partner. I make money—as does Apple—when people buy my books for the iPad. I also created with a development company an app based on the last book. I make money when people buy my books on Amazon and I can use Google to monetize my site via AdSense. Look at what Zynga does for Facebook—and vice versa. The possibilities are limitless.

These days, many entrepreneurs and startups are either building their own platforms or trying to be planks in existing ones. The platform is now a business model—and an incredibly important one.

Check out The Age of Platform, now out on amazon.com.

 

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Countdown begins: Mindfire book launch in 6 days

This thursday, Nov 3rd, will be the extreme awesome unprecedented universal grand premier of my new book, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds.

The book is the definitive best of collection of essays, blog posts and articles, curated, polished, and gloriously refined for your digital and print edition reading pleasure.

Starting Monday I'll be giving away free copies, unleashing a backlog of awesome new posts, as well as prizes, entertainments and surprises, all in countdown to Thursday night's party. Plan on stopping by every day – you won't be disappointed.

Please mark your calendar for Thursday 11/3  - make sure you stop by this blog to help celebrate the book and participate in the fun.

Also, expect more twitter activity next week – if you don't follow me head over to @berkun and remedy that oversight right now.

 

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Is Philosophy the Most Practical Major?

Edward Tenner has an article in the Atlantic, where he suggests Philosophy might be the most practical major. He wrote:

One of the many small surprises of the recession has been a significant growth in the number of philosophy majors, according the the Philadelphia Inquirer. It has slightly exceeded the growth of enrollments in the last ten years; many other humanities and social science fields have just kept up. At the University of California at Berkeley, despite or because of the state's economic turmoil, the number of majors has increased by 74 percent in the last decade.

What makes philosophy different? It can seem self-absorbed; philosophers themselves joke about Arthur Koestler's definition: "the systematic abuse of a terminology specially invented for that purpose." But it also is a tool (like history and religious studies) for thinking about everything else, and every profession from law and medicine to motorcycle maintenance…

It is true that philosophy majors' salaries aren't especially high. On the other hand, when they do set out to make money, they often make lots of it, from George Soros and Carl Icahn to Peter Thiel

Having a Philosophy degree, I've thought about this often. Here's my opinion:

The statistics aren't that strong. A high percentage increase in a department notoriously small doesn't indicate a significant trend.  Philosophy departments are among the smallest major programs in many universities and schools.

Even so, calling a degree 'practical' when if offers little value for being hired for most jobs is a mistake. A degree in computer science, or a vocational degree in car mechanics, have direct practical value in applying for specific kinds of jobs.  Philosophy as a degree offers as little value towards a specific career as an English degree does. Sure, this is only one kind of practicality, but to omit it at a time when America has near 10% unemployment is an important oversight.

Lastly, hand picking Soros, Ican and Thiel, and offering their exceptional wealth as being connected, or caused by, their Philosophy degrees is a very weak claim based on an exceptional sample. We could find 3 people of exceptional wealth with any degree, not to mention having no degree at all.

I do agree that knowledge of philosophy is important for anyone that wishes to understand and interact successfully with people in the world. But I am not convinced that the best way to achieve that knowledge is in a philosophy department in a university, where its common for most professors to interact with the rest of the world as little as possible, in favor of obsessive study of esoteric details of particular theories.  Elitism is rank in academic philosophy and its a poison pill against the love of wisdom. You can read a great deal of philosophy books, and have rote mastery of who wrote what, and what ideas lead to what other ideas, and still have absolutely no wisdom at all. And sadly, many philosophy departments are staffed by figures like this, and who wish to train students to follow in their footsteps under the banner of 'Philosophy'.  Socrates is surely turning in his grave.

What do you think? How does Philosophy compare to other majors for its practical value?

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Will the E-Book Kill the Footnote?

I'm a fan of footnotes. Most of my books have 40 to 50 of them, and some fans have told me one of their favorite things about my books are how fun and enhancing they are to their experience with the main text.

Years ago, I asked my readers which they preferred, endnotes or footnotes, and a long, opinionated conversation ensued. Readers care more about form that you'd think.

For several reasons, e-books are less kind to footnotes.  Some e-book creation services, like bookbaby, relegate footnotes to endnotes, which few people read.

Alexandra Horowitz has a good article in the NYTimes about the history, and the future, of the footnote. She writes:

The footnote jousting could soon be moot, as the e-book may inadvertently be driving footnotes to extinction. The e-book hasn't killed the book; instead, it's killing the "page." Today's e-readers scroll text continuously, eliminating the single preformed page, along with any text defined by being on its bottom. A spokesman for the Kindle assured me that it is at the discretion of the publisher how to treat footnotes. Most are demoted to hyperlinked endnotes or, worst of all, unlinked endnotes that require scrolling through the e-reader to access. Few of these will be read, to be sure.

When we change mediums, content changes as well. If you watch a movie in a theater vs. on television, many nuances designed for one medium don't convert well to the other.  It's always worth asking someone who was bored by a movie you found fascinating if they watched in on a theater or on TV (or even worse, on an airplane) .  Cinematographers design shots and lighting to work in one form, and conversion to another is something they may never have considered. Old school writers who write footnotes, write the main text assuming those footnotes are there. Move the footnote, and you've change something important about how the text will be read.

I think Kindle, iPads and all digital book formats can support footnotes better than they do. But there is so little pressure to do it that I suspect Horowitz is right. It won't happen all at once, but as the popularity of digital books continues to rise to majority status, we'll see footnotes continue their slide into esoterica.  Perhaps we'll see more parentheticals  (like this) or hyperlinks to specific notes, but that will never be quite the same form of expression as the footnote is.

Read the full article: Will the E-Book Kill the Footnote? – NYTimes.com.

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Seattle: Mindfire Book Launch Party (Nov. 3rd)

I'm proud to announce the launch date for the new book, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds, is Thursday Nov 3rd.If you live in the Seattle area, you're invited to come help celebrate.

What: Book launch party for Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds

When: Thursday Nov 3rd, 7pm

Where:  Sole Repair,  is located at 1001 E Pike

Party details:

Doors open at 7pm, Thurs Nov 3rd. 2011
Free copies of the book for first 50 people + signing
You'll need a ticket (they free!) to get in
Great food/drinks by restaurant Zoe / Quinn's Pub
Meet cool people who are my friends and fans
I'll give a short and entertaining talk at 7:30

To attend, you'll need a free ticket. It's fine to bring a guest. Get your tickets here.

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Redesign the news: an invitation to Seattle

It's common for everyone these days to bemoan how biased, superficial and misleading news reporting is. And the fall of major newspapers in the wake of the web is oddly seen an achievement. Yes, seeing old things fall can signify change, but it does not guarantee progress.

Are you a developer or designer who cares about news? Who believes quality reporting and information is key to a stable and long-lasting democracy? Do you wish there were better tools for finding, creating and verifying the information we share about the world?

If so, I invite you to sign up for Hacking Seattle News. An event next weekend (10/14-10/16), sponsored by King5 news:

JOIN US! We're hosting a weekend hackathon with the goal of creating a social-savvy, aggregated news site for Seattle that YOU want to use.

The news industry is ready for a new idea and we're coming together to build one. In a weekend. Want more social sharing built-in to the news process… or a better way of surfacing content you want to see? Let's build it.

We'll be brainstorming, creating, and coding a new news site for Seattle. The winning team will get a cash prize.

All used and created platforms will be open source. Registration is free. Designers and Developers wanted.

Register here.

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Why Jobs is No Edison

An excellent and historically thorough comparison of Thomas Edison's and Steve Job's accomplishments:

Some 130 years after Edison's remarkable creation of the electricity system, there still remains no doubt about the fundamental and truly epochal nature of his contributions: the world without electricity has become unimaginable. I bet that 130 years from now our successors will not be able to say the same about Apple's sleek electronic devices assembled from somebody else's components and providing services that are not fundamentally different from those offered by competitors. I have no doubt that the world without iPhone or iPad would be perfectly fine.

From Why Jobs Is No Edison — The American Magazine, by Vaclav Smil.

It's a solid, well researched piece – something rare in innovation / tech articles.

The major critique I have with the core comparison is the same problem that surfaces when sports fans try to compare great players from the 1950s to players from today. There are too many variables to make a fair analysis.

In defense of Jobs, electricity was already invented when he was born. He had no choice but to make use of it and a thousand other inventions that predated his birth. And Thomas Edison did precisely the same thing, as he did not invent paper, pens, desks, laboratories, chemistry, etc. Alternatively, If Edison could have used cheap 3rd party sources from China for components in his products he probably would have, given the business sense it would have made.  The fact workers in his lab invented everything is more a factor of necessity than ability.

Despite which person you place on a higher pedastal, they were both passionate pragmatists who cared about shipping good products, rather than some abstract ideal for what innovation is or is not. This distinction is comically lost on many executives who worship the mythology of these great businessmen, but not their focus on product design, or hard work, or true passion for making good things.

I've critiqued worshipers of Jobs' for overlooking how little Apple has invented (in the most rigorous definition of the word), a point Smil makes in the article. Mice, PCs, phones and digital music players were around long before Apple got to them. As brilliantly designed as their products are, that's not the same as invention, a fact born out by how many licenses and patents Apple pays for from other companies.

Anyway, read the article. Despite the pitfall laded era-crossing comparison, it's a solid and informative read.

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How to give a perfect demo

There is a moment in bad product demos when everyone knows the speaker is in trouble. We watch them move their mouse, and click a button, and see the uncertainty in their eyes. Will it work? And when it fails, they fall into the downward spiral of live troubleshooting in front of a crowd. How sad. These are often smart people, representing decent websites or products. There is a better way.

Most demos fail for the same reasons. While it's true demos are a public speaking challenge, with a few pointers anyone can do it well. Here's a list of the most common mistakes – if you work to avoid them a solid demo experience awaits:

Don't trust wifi. When you practice you are likely in your nice office, with great bandwith. Most demos are done in unfamiliar places, where you are sharing web access with dozens or hundreds of people. Plan for slow or no-bandwith. Have a contingency demo that requires no web access at all.
Really, don't trust wifi. Even in a great venue, 100 iPhone users can eat all available bandwith. Some venues provide a seperate router for speakers, or a Ethernet cable at the lectern, but most don't. Ask for it. If they don't provide it, consider bringing your own (Its worth $200 to your company to ensure your demo does not suck).
Have a video of you doing your demo. Your default contingency plan for any demo is to have a screencapture of it on video, on your laptop. This means that no matter what goes wrong, you can show the video of the demo. You'll lose points for it not being live, but people will get to see the demo work properly, which is what they want to see. Your primary goal is to guarantee they get to see something, even if it's canned.
Keep it short (Don't confuse the steps with the payoff).  If it takes 10 steps to add a widget to your web app, do you really need to show them all? All the audience wants to see is a couple of steps, and then the payoff. You can skip many of the individual steps. Write a script. Get a developer to make you a custom version that preloads some data. Avoid the dead air of filling out long forms, or waiting for things to load. Keep the demo short and use time to answer questions, or do extra impromptu demos based on questions people have. The key parts should be live code, but not every single step has to be.
Have a clear, and real, problem to solve. There is a big difference between demoing what a product can do, and showing a working solution to a problem the audience cares about. Know who you are speaking to and pick an example problem they care about it to use in the demo. Don't resort to just showing off a list of features, that's an inventory, not a demo. Watch an infomercial (e.g. Shamwow) – behind all the shtick, good infomericals define clear problems and demo how their product solves them.
Don't make them watch you type. Typing takes time. Typing is boring. No one wants to watch you type. Find ways to avoid typing and to either fake or skip steps that are simply you typing in a password, a URL, or anything (If you must have things that are typed, have them in copy/paste, or on a sheet of paper so you don't need to remember them). It's very hard to type and talk at the same time, and you should be providing commentary as you go through the demo.
Practice in the venue. Ask the organizer to find you 10 minutes during the day, or the day before, to do a test run. Odds are good you'll find a few small problems you can work around, but that you'd be blindsided by if discovered for the first time during the actual demo.
Have a backup machine. For high profile demos, have an entire backup laptop or cellphone ready to go. This level of redundency will protect you from internal problems (conflicting code, bugs, etc.) but not external problems (wifi, power outage, etc.)
Never troubleshoot in real time. It is cringe enduing to watch somewhere debug their demo live in front of a crowd. Don't do it. 45 seconds is the most I'd spend. With everyone watching, your debugging skills will be severely compromised. If you can't fix it in that time, drop it. Never ask anyone for help unless you are certain of what the fix is. Instead, just fall back to your video (#3).

 What other common mistakes do people doing demos make? What other advice should they hear?

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Last chance to pre-order Mindfire (my 4th book)

On October 3rd the kickstarter page for the book will officially close – which  means there are only 5 days left to pre-order the book.

There are still some special offers available:

Pre-order the book for kindle
Buy an hour of time on skype with me (rent my brain) + 5 copies
I will write a blog post about a topic of your choice + 5 copies
Hire me for a lecture at your office or town at a super discount

Go to the Mindfire kickstarter page for all the details.
The book is set to release end of October – only a few more weeks to go.

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Buy an hour of my time, dirt cheap (and support Mindfire)

You can kill two birds with one stone.  Throw in some cash to help support my upcoming book, Mindfire, and you can get:

A blog post on the topic of your choice* written by me + 5 copies of Mindfire
A one hour Skype chat (use my brain however you like) + 5 copies of Mindfire

Most of the other prizes have been acquired – but these are good deals.

Is this dirt cheap? Sure, if the the dirt is filled with diamonds. The money goes towards promoting the book, which you'll be among the the first to get copies of.

The post is going for $150, the Skype chat for $350.  If you think that's insane, that's fine. I'm insane. But I know some of you have always wanted to know what I think about X or Y, or want me to sit in and chat with you and your team and advise (albeit virtually).  For you, this is a bargain.

Go here for details before these special offerings are gone.

If you want to be notified when the book is out, join the mailing list.

(* I will not write an advertisement for your product. I will, however, write any  nearly topic, or answer any question you wish. I will, of course, review a product, but you no guarantees on what I'll say about it.)

 

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