David Amerland's Blog: David Amerland on Writing, page 3
March 3, 2016
The Purpose of a Book Explained by a Writer
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.” That’s how R. R. Martin explains books in “A Dance With Dragons”. In the age of the internet when trillions of web pages, each full of its own brand of insights and wisdom, are within arm’s reach of us at all times reading a book, in whatever format, seems a little antiquated.
As a writer you’d expect me to instantly tell you to read more and buy more books, often but that’s not quite what I will do here. After all, this is the age of transparency where social media has created a level playing field for us all. A writer is also a reader at some point and then his choices of what to read and when, become every bit as eclectic and dictated by need and circumstances as that of any other reader.
So, on World Book Day, I will readily admit that the question of “why should a reader buy a book” is one I have struggled with often. Writers write books for as many reasons as there are writers. Some write the books they would like to read. Others write books because they are compelled by a burgeoning force inside them that feels like a demon clawing at their innards, itching to get out. Others still write because a book is something that they find compelling. Its length and ability to form a deeper binder for their content than say a web page or an article that comes out in print. All serious writers write to make a living.
So, whether the book is fiction or non-fiction, whether it has been written due to an insatiable force that demanded its creation or was the result of something a little more planned, in order to work, each one has to answer the same question: does it have real value? Does it answer a question? Solve a problem? Open up the reader’s mind to greater possibilities?
Because a book has some length, out of necessity it also needs depth. Depth adds weight to it (and I am being a little metaphysical here) which means that whether it is fiction or non-fiction, without a structure that provides a progression which can lead to a revelation of sorts for the reader (the aha! moment all writers strive for) a book would collapse.
Consider that it’s fairly easy to carry an argument, any argument over the space of 1,000 words. This is what makes articles so easy to read and so great to engage with. Anything presented within them has been curtailed and shaped to some extent. The writing and editing that creates them speaks, at times, of blind spots and omissions or unarticulated knowledge and wide assumptions. This is as it should be. An article can move a reader to tears or have her screaming with frustration but it should never be just consumed with indifference. That would be a waste of time on both the reader’s and the writer’s part.
A book on the other hand is more balanced. There is plenty of space within its length for the scope of the arguments that support it and the ideas which gave it birth to be examined from every angle. So, if an article is reader-bait, a tease intended to make a reader, struggling with information overload, react; a book is a full treatise. The writer performs open-cranium surgery. He delves deep within his thoughts and ideas and instead of pulling some out to package and present, he carves a path and invites the reader deep inside his innermost territory.
Dr Seuss described this well when in “I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!” he wrote: “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.” Bearing in mind just how lonely an enterprise writing can be and how the writer who’s truly invested in his readers works hard to find ways to render the immaterial nature of his thoughts visible a book is also a vehicle of deeper communication. Readers get to know the writers they read, understand what’s important to them, feel their thoughts and get a sense of their priorities and, because the world of today is truly connected, that in itself helps break down barriers and forge new connections. Readers who Tweet to their writers or find them on Facebook or Google+ create a direct, immediate layer of feedback that for the writer, who usually works in the vacuum of his craft, can change everything.
In Shadowlands, William Nicholson wrote: “We read to know we're not alone.” It’s great to know that now we also write for that same reason.
The Sniper Mind: Eliminate Fear, Deal with Uncertainty, and Make Better Decisions
As a writer you’d expect me to instantly tell you to read more and buy more books, often but that’s not quite what I will do here. After all, this is the age of transparency where social media has created a level playing field for us all. A writer is also a reader at some point and then his choices of what to read and when, become every bit as eclectic and dictated by need and circumstances as that of any other reader.
So, on World Book Day, I will readily admit that the question of “why should a reader buy a book” is one I have struggled with often. Writers write books for as many reasons as there are writers. Some write the books they would like to read. Others write books because they are compelled by a burgeoning force inside them that feels like a demon clawing at their innards, itching to get out. Others still write because a book is something that they find compelling. Its length and ability to form a deeper binder for their content than say a web page or an article that comes out in print. All serious writers write to make a living.
So, whether the book is fiction or non-fiction, whether it has been written due to an insatiable force that demanded its creation or was the result of something a little more planned, in order to work, each one has to answer the same question: does it have real value? Does it answer a question? Solve a problem? Open up the reader’s mind to greater possibilities?
Because a book has some length, out of necessity it also needs depth. Depth adds weight to it (and I am being a little metaphysical here) which means that whether it is fiction or non-fiction, without a structure that provides a progression which can lead to a revelation of sorts for the reader (the aha! moment all writers strive for) a book would collapse.
Consider that it’s fairly easy to carry an argument, any argument over the space of 1,000 words. This is what makes articles so easy to read and so great to engage with. Anything presented within them has been curtailed and shaped to some extent. The writing and editing that creates them speaks, at times, of blind spots and omissions or unarticulated knowledge and wide assumptions. This is as it should be. An article can move a reader to tears or have her screaming with frustration but it should never be just consumed with indifference. That would be a waste of time on both the reader’s and the writer’s part.
A book on the other hand is more balanced. There is plenty of space within its length for the scope of the arguments that support it and the ideas which gave it birth to be examined from every angle. So, if an article is reader-bait, a tease intended to make a reader, struggling with information overload, react; a book is a full treatise. The writer performs open-cranium surgery. He delves deep within his thoughts and ideas and instead of pulling some out to package and present, he carves a path and invites the reader deep inside his innermost territory.
Dr Seuss described this well when in “I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!” he wrote: “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.” Bearing in mind just how lonely an enterprise writing can be and how the writer who’s truly invested in his readers works hard to find ways to render the immaterial nature of his thoughts visible a book is also a vehicle of deeper communication. Readers get to know the writers they read, understand what’s important to them, feel their thoughts and get a sense of their priorities and, because the world of today is truly connected, that in itself helps break down barriers and forge new connections. Readers who Tweet to their writers or find them on Facebook or Google+ create a direct, immediate layer of feedback that for the writer, who usually works in the vacuum of his craft, can change everything.
In Shadowlands, William Nicholson wrote: “We read to know we're not alone.” It’s great to know that now we also write for that same reason.
The Sniper Mind: Eliminate Fear, Deal with Uncertainty, and Make Better Decisions
November 7, 2015
Writers, Readers, Editors and … Trust
Every book is a journey. It’s a conjunction of influences, ideas and knowledge. When the idea for it is first aired a writer is prepared to give up ownership of it. First it gets picked at and reshaped by editors, then it is looked at and changed by marketers and finally it is read and owned by readers.
You notice in this long chain of events that the writer who actually thinks up and creates the book in the first place is never mentioned. Nor is he taken into account in the end, though his role in making it happen is critical. There is a good reason for that. Writers are often thought to be creators and in a way that’s true we take a bunch of pages or, more often than not, a certain amount of disk space, that’s blank and we fill it with content.
We make something appear where nothing existed before. That’s the magical part. But before the magic even happens a whole lot of other things must happen. The idea, obviously, but also we, as writers do actually need the validation of an editor who is not a writer. An independent, corroborating our belief that there is a market, that this book and the effort involved in birthing it, will actually be useful.
And though readers may seem a bit of an afterthought, tacked into the sequence of events right at the end because the ultimate form of validation is, indeed, the willingness of someone to fork up some money and buy a book, they really feature throughout the process.
The writer is thinking of readers when he first comes up with the idea. The editors are actually thinking of readers when they say “I think there is a market, here”. And readers themselves are, these days, an integral part of the writer’s journey as the book itself gets written.
Funnily enough, trust plays a key role in the entire process. Each of us trusts in the benevolence of everyone involved. When an editor rejects an idea about a book by saying they do not think there is a market for it, the author has to trust that what they are saying and what they want is the same thing as the author: a book that will resonate with its audience and actually help them in some way.
When editors buy a book based on an outline, a few phonecalls and a handshake they too place trust in the author’s ability to deliver a final product of sufficiently high quality that will do as expected.
Without that sense of trust throughout, none of this would happen. Authors would try to second-guess and argue with editors all the time. Editors would get so stifling in their double-checking that the book is being written for an author to be unable to write and, should anything publishable be produced under these conditions, the reading public would wonder just what is the hidden agenda behind the publication of the book? Who is secretly trying to manipulate them and thought-control them?
This trust in other people’s benevolence and an overall benevolent universe is what makes it possible to get anything done, at all. In writing "The Tribe That Discovered Trust" I had to navigate the usual tangle of complicated choices. Which research did I include? What did I leave out? Trust is a quality that’s defined both by our actions and belief system. As such, it is something that makes us very human.
It is that humanity that I somehow needed to capture as I worked on the book. The story that comes in the beginning contains many clues regarding human behavior and motivation. Working your way through it and the workbook afterwards is a necessary part of the realization of what it is exactly that drives us every time we say “I trust you”.
Give then fact that the articulation of a willingness to trust has to acknowledge the existence of its opposite, any “I trust you” moment must be preceded by an inherently untrustworthy situation, otherwise why say it at all?
It is these paradoxes that made the research and writing of the book so intensely rewarding. Trust is something we are only now beginning to look at. Here’s to understanding it well enough to make better use of it.
The Tribe That Discovered Trust: How Trust Is Created Lost and Regained in Commercial Interactions
You notice in this long chain of events that the writer who actually thinks up and creates the book in the first place is never mentioned. Nor is he taken into account in the end, though his role in making it happen is critical. There is a good reason for that. Writers are often thought to be creators and in a way that’s true we take a bunch of pages or, more often than not, a certain amount of disk space, that’s blank and we fill it with content.
We make something appear where nothing existed before. That’s the magical part. But before the magic even happens a whole lot of other things must happen. The idea, obviously, but also we, as writers do actually need the validation of an editor who is not a writer. An independent, corroborating our belief that there is a market, that this book and the effort involved in birthing it, will actually be useful.
And though readers may seem a bit of an afterthought, tacked into the sequence of events right at the end because the ultimate form of validation is, indeed, the willingness of someone to fork up some money and buy a book, they really feature throughout the process.
The writer is thinking of readers when he first comes up with the idea. The editors are actually thinking of readers when they say “I think there is a market, here”. And readers themselves are, these days, an integral part of the writer’s journey as the book itself gets written.
Funnily enough, trust plays a key role in the entire process. Each of us trusts in the benevolence of everyone involved. When an editor rejects an idea about a book by saying they do not think there is a market for it, the author has to trust that what they are saying and what they want is the same thing as the author: a book that will resonate with its audience and actually help them in some way.
When editors buy a book based on an outline, a few phonecalls and a handshake they too place trust in the author’s ability to deliver a final product of sufficiently high quality that will do as expected.
Without that sense of trust throughout, none of this would happen. Authors would try to second-guess and argue with editors all the time. Editors would get so stifling in their double-checking that the book is being written for an author to be unable to write and, should anything publishable be produced under these conditions, the reading public would wonder just what is the hidden agenda behind the publication of the book? Who is secretly trying to manipulate them and thought-control them?
This trust in other people’s benevolence and an overall benevolent universe is what makes it possible to get anything done, at all. In writing "The Tribe That Discovered Trust" I had to navigate the usual tangle of complicated choices. Which research did I include? What did I leave out? Trust is a quality that’s defined both by our actions and belief system. As such, it is something that makes us very human.
It is that humanity that I somehow needed to capture as I worked on the book. The story that comes in the beginning contains many clues regarding human behavior and motivation. Working your way through it and the workbook afterwards is a necessary part of the realization of what it is exactly that drives us every time we say “I trust you”.
Give then fact that the articulation of a willingness to trust has to acknowledge the existence of its opposite, any “I trust you” moment must be preceded by an inherently untrustworthy situation, otherwise why say it at all?
It is these paradoxes that made the research and writing of the book so intensely rewarding. Trust is something we are only now beginning to look at. Here’s to understanding it well enough to make better use of it.
The Tribe That Discovered Trust: How Trust Is Created Lost and Regained in Commercial Interactions
August 5, 2015
Working On a New Book
Well two actually. I am working on two books. I am in the process of carrying out editorial changes in one and putting together a complex, expanded outline in another that is part of the requirement for the discussion on it. So, why am I writing this? Why, at 3.00am when I have had a long day that started with a business meeting and has been followed up by over ten hours’ of writing, am I doing more writing as a break?
Well, because this is my mental recharge. The brain gets tired, like a muscle. It gets tired not from working (because unlike a muscle it never stops) but from working in a certain way, thinking about specific things, going over grooves it has already worked on again and again.
Structured work and order, it seems, the things that make our civilization functional are anathema to our brains. And this writing I am doing now is about as far from structured work as writing can get. Instead of starting out with something to say, some meaning to confer I am using it as a data dump of a sort. Unforced writing that allows me to see what I think which in a way also makes me aware of how my mental equipment functions.
I know it sounds a little clinical and probably more than a tad insane but when you work inside your head for hours and hours at a time you forget that there are processes taking place there which make what you do possible. But because your work relies on them, hooking them, occasionally and dragging them to the surface makes it all the more possible to refine them and actually make writing (and thinking) better.
When you work on a book and you have planned everything out and you are putting flesh to an idea and a surmise that before was mainly bones something funny happens. Your brain goes into an altered state where the words you write are not quite the words you want but rather the words dictated by the task at hand.
I know it sounds weird to say that as an author I don’t quite control the words that are supposed to be part of my job but what I’ve noticed is that afterwards, when I am editing, when I go and read what I’ve written I am as surprised by the insights or the points being made as, I suspect, the reader is when they first read them. It’s not that I don’t know what’s being said, after all the stuff has been inside my head, but some neurochemical configuration inside my head has made it possible to express it in ways that are novel even to me.
That’s why I am writing all this now. Capturing a snapshot of the writing mind is what writers always aspire to in the hope that we will, somehow, recreate the state of it, at will. Well, we shall see. In the meantime, the next book? All to be revealed in a few days.
SEO Help: 20 Semantic Search Steps that Will Help Your Business Grow
Well, because this is my mental recharge. The brain gets tired, like a muscle. It gets tired not from working (because unlike a muscle it never stops) but from working in a certain way, thinking about specific things, going over grooves it has already worked on again and again.
Structured work and order, it seems, the things that make our civilization functional are anathema to our brains. And this writing I am doing now is about as far from structured work as writing can get. Instead of starting out with something to say, some meaning to confer I am using it as a data dump of a sort. Unforced writing that allows me to see what I think which in a way also makes me aware of how my mental equipment functions.
I know it sounds a little clinical and probably more than a tad insane but when you work inside your head for hours and hours at a time you forget that there are processes taking place there which make what you do possible. But because your work relies on them, hooking them, occasionally and dragging them to the surface makes it all the more possible to refine them and actually make writing (and thinking) better.
When you work on a book and you have planned everything out and you are putting flesh to an idea and a surmise that before was mainly bones something funny happens. Your brain goes into an altered state where the words you write are not quite the words you want but rather the words dictated by the task at hand.
I know it sounds weird to say that as an author I don’t quite control the words that are supposed to be part of my job but what I’ve noticed is that afterwards, when I am editing, when I go and read what I’ve written I am as surprised by the insights or the points being made as, I suspect, the reader is when they first read them. It’s not that I don’t know what’s being said, after all the stuff has been inside my head, but some neurochemical configuration inside my head has made it possible to express it in ways that are novel even to me.
That’s why I am writing all this now. Capturing a snapshot of the writing mind is what writers always aspire to in the hope that we will, somehow, recreate the state of it, at will. Well, we shall see. In the meantime, the next book? All to be revealed in a few days.
SEO Help: 20 Semantic Search Steps that Will Help Your Business Grow
June 2, 2015
The Writer’s Flow State
Writing is very much like golf or athletics. It takes a lot of hard training to lead to the performance that is a book. And just like in golf you can’t turn out a world class performance at a moment’s notice or break an Olympic record while training in your back yard, a book is the result of a culmination of states that an author is subjected to.
So, how does a book happen? How do you get from the act of writing squiggles on a screen (these days) to suddenly putting together sentences that resonate in the minds of readers sufficiently to not just make sense to them but allow them to use them as scaffolding of their own for their minds to reach higher?
This is the area where writers, golfers and athletes agree. To do what each does takes talent, inclination, will power, persistence and the ability to synthesize everything that is part of what does in a way that effaces the self and allows the act itself to surface. Golfers and athletes call this feeling “being in the zone” and it has given rise to an entire branch of psychology where the concept of Flow is closely examined and the conditions of its emergence analyzed.
MRI scans of the brain, caught in the act of performing at that level, show areas of it lighting up that normally wouldn’t which suggests that what really happens is that many of the obstacles we generate ourselves (the critical monologue inside our heads, the self-doubt, the uncertainty) vanish under the pressure of external circumstances that suddenly require our full attention.
Provided you have a modicum of writing skill and have spent the endless hours required to do your research, think about it, analyze its impact and see where the dots you’ve joined lead you, you’re still not quite done. Writing, like everything else, requires all the false starts where the writer has to forget about what he is and focus on what he is doing, and usually, just as fatigue, desperation, the pressure of deadlines and the tyranny of word counts pile up, the magic kinda happens.
Whatever part of the brain was busy getting in the way, just stops. Exhausted, it shuffles out of the way and what is suddenly left is a writer and his words. A clear road being formed to a conclusion, things falling seamlessly into place seemingly from nowhere: a book being written.
I’ve discussed this with writer friends countless times and it is always the same. Whether you’re writing fiction or non-fiction, the process requires that sense of pressure, the focus, that feeling of the world falling away and the vision of the book coming into crisp, clear focus.
So, next time you’ve written your thousand words and feel sorry that you have to scrap them. Or, when you hit a wall and have written yourself into a corner, think that really it’s part of the process. There is a work that needs to somehow be formed. The elusive state of mind required needs to be worked at, to arise.
So, how does a book happen? How do you get from the act of writing squiggles on a screen (these days) to suddenly putting together sentences that resonate in the minds of readers sufficiently to not just make sense to them but allow them to use them as scaffolding of their own for their minds to reach higher?
This is the area where writers, golfers and athletes agree. To do what each does takes talent, inclination, will power, persistence and the ability to synthesize everything that is part of what does in a way that effaces the self and allows the act itself to surface. Golfers and athletes call this feeling “being in the zone” and it has given rise to an entire branch of psychology where the concept of Flow is closely examined and the conditions of its emergence analyzed.
MRI scans of the brain, caught in the act of performing at that level, show areas of it lighting up that normally wouldn’t which suggests that what really happens is that many of the obstacles we generate ourselves (the critical monologue inside our heads, the self-doubt, the uncertainty) vanish under the pressure of external circumstances that suddenly require our full attention.
Provided you have a modicum of writing skill and have spent the endless hours required to do your research, think about it, analyze its impact and see where the dots you’ve joined lead you, you’re still not quite done. Writing, like everything else, requires all the false starts where the writer has to forget about what he is and focus on what he is doing, and usually, just as fatigue, desperation, the pressure of deadlines and the tyranny of word counts pile up, the magic kinda happens.
Whatever part of the brain was busy getting in the way, just stops. Exhausted, it shuffles out of the way and what is suddenly left is a writer and his words. A clear road being formed to a conclusion, things falling seamlessly into place seemingly from nowhere: a book being written.
I’ve discussed this with writer friends countless times and it is always the same. Whether you’re writing fiction or non-fiction, the process requires that sense of pressure, the focus, that feeling of the world falling away and the vision of the book coming into crisp, clear focus.
So, next time you’ve written your thousand words and feel sorry that you have to scrap them. Or, when you hit a wall and have written yourself into a corner, think that really it’s part of the process. There is a work that needs to somehow be formed. The elusive state of mind required needs to be worked at, to arise.
February 7, 2015
Making a Book Stand Out from the Crowd
Every book is an enterprise in the fullest sense of the word. It starts off with the same cadre of dreams, passions, expectations and intellectual justifications that every business does. It has an expected target audience that helps shape its content, a delivery vehicle that defines the product and it goes through, prior to publication, the same business plan vetting process that a start-up is subjected to (though we call it editorial selection).
All of these elements create a blueprint which ought to make the job of writing (the execution stage), easier. It doesn’t. Just like any business, in the process of getting the idea from the dream stage to the market reality a whole lot of decisions need to be made and a truckload of compromises will have to be accepted.
Is the ‘packaging’ going to be blue or red? Is the content going to be sophisticated and high-brow or conversational and matter-of-fact? Do we need each chapter to be a fixed length or can we vary each as necessary (chapter homogeneity is employed to establish reader familiarity with navigation). Do we need to have questions? Do the answers have to be prescriptive? The list goes on and on and on and the choices made, at each point, betray the writer’s prejudices and passions, his (or her) understanding of the audience needs and the willingness to take on the editorial machine that wants a product that comfortably fits in within all its other corporate products because, damn it, the publisher also projects branding through each book in a series.
Of course the way out of all this is ‘easy’: make the guiding principle the reader. Think of the reader’s needs first and let that be the ultimate litmus test. The fact that (just like businesses) some books fail and other books succeed more than the rest suggests the dynamic is different each time, when it comes to implementation.
At the so-called ‘ground level’ where you make things happen perspective is easily sacrificed to expediency. In order to get something done, the closeness of action (the act of writing, the setting up of a business) involve its own set of pressures. How you solve that has to come down to each writer, each time, each business person, in each business, every time it is set up. But there are some key takeaways that are universal and can help.
Decide your core guiding principles from the very start. What is it you want your business to really do? What is this book intended to address? You need to exercise honesty to achieve that. Within the confines of your head, when you are drawing up plans, everything sounds perfect. Nothing can be perfect all the time. Externalize the core principles (in writing SEO Help: 20 Semantic Search Steps that Will Help Your Business Grow, for instance I had to print out a card that said: “Practical application is key. The theory isn’t.”. As much as I want to explain how I arrived at a particular set of practical principles and how exciting the concepts behind it are, I didn’t. Or rather, to be truthful, there were chapters when I did and then I had to go back, cut all that out and rewrite them.
It takes a lot of discipline to go back and undo work you have wrought with loving care and attention. It requires you to have a split personality inside your head, with a voice that acts as an overseer and tells you: “This is great but … this is not what we have set out to do.”
You have to overcome fatigue. Writing a book (or setting up a business) takes a lot of energy and effort. When you are in the thick of it, about halfway through, you begin to lose focus. Suddenly you becomes conscious of the fact that you have as far still to go as you have travelled. You begin looking for shortcuts. You start wondering whether anyone would really notice (or if it matters after all) if this part here or that small part there is not pitch-perfect when, after all, it kinda does the job anyway.
We all know the answer to that of course. The things we invest ourselves the most in are the ones that do best. Value is always the result of hard work. Highly structured processes require an attendant decrease in entropy in any system.
How you get through that patch is where the magic lies. I give pep-talks to myself (yeah, nothing very dysfunctional in that, really). Businesses try to have an independent observer, an adviser or some kind. Ultimately however it comes down to those basic principles which means that the really hard work in terms of thinking is done before anything even begins.
And just like a business will, thrive or fail based upon its success of finding customers so will a book, ultimately, work or not by finding (and keeping) readers.
All of these elements create a blueprint which ought to make the job of writing (the execution stage), easier. It doesn’t. Just like any business, in the process of getting the idea from the dream stage to the market reality a whole lot of decisions need to be made and a truckload of compromises will have to be accepted.
Is the ‘packaging’ going to be blue or red? Is the content going to be sophisticated and high-brow or conversational and matter-of-fact? Do we need each chapter to be a fixed length or can we vary each as necessary (chapter homogeneity is employed to establish reader familiarity with navigation). Do we need to have questions? Do the answers have to be prescriptive? The list goes on and on and on and the choices made, at each point, betray the writer’s prejudices and passions, his (or her) understanding of the audience needs and the willingness to take on the editorial machine that wants a product that comfortably fits in within all its other corporate products because, damn it, the publisher also projects branding through each book in a series.
Of course the way out of all this is ‘easy’: make the guiding principle the reader. Think of the reader’s needs first and let that be the ultimate litmus test. The fact that (just like businesses) some books fail and other books succeed more than the rest suggests the dynamic is different each time, when it comes to implementation.
At the so-called ‘ground level’ where you make things happen perspective is easily sacrificed to expediency. In order to get something done, the closeness of action (the act of writing, the setting up of a business) involve its own set of pressures. How you solve that has to come down to each writer, each time, each business person, in each business, every time it is set up. But there are some key takeaways that are universal and can help.
Decide your core guiding principles from the very start. What is it you want your business to really do? What is this book intended to address? You need to exercise honesty to achieve that. Within the confines of your head, when you are drawing up plans, everything sounds perfect. Nothing can be perfect all the time. Externalize the core principles (in writing SEO Help: 20 Semantic Search Steps that Will Help Your Business Grow, for instance I had to print out a card that said: “Practical application is key. The theory isn’t.”. As much as I want to explain how I arrived at a particular set of practical principles and how exciting the concepts behind it are, I didn’t. Or rather, to be truthful, there were chapters when I did and then I had to go back, cut all that out and rewrite them.
It takes a lot of discipline to go back and undo work you have wrought with loving care and attention. It requires you to have a split personality inside your head, with a voice that acts as an overseer and tells you: “This is great but … this is not what we have set out to do.”
You have to overcome fatigue. Writing a book (or setting up a business) takes a lot of energy and effort. When you are in the thick of it, about halfway through, you begin to lose focus. Suddenly you becomes conscious of the fact that you have as far still to go as you have travelled. You begin looking for shortcuts. You start wondering whether anyone would really notice (or if it matters after all) if this part here or that small part there is not pitch-perfect when, after all, it kinda does the job anyway.
We all know the answer to that of course. The things we invest ourselves the most in are the ones that do best. Value is always the result of hard work. Highly structured processes require an attendant decrease in entropy in any system.
How you get through that patch is where the magic lies. I give pep-talks to myself (yeah, nothing very dysfunctional in that, really). Businesses try to have an independent observer, an adviser or some kind. Ultimately however it comes down to those basic principles which means that the really hard work in terms of thinking is done before anything even begins.
And just like a business will, thrive or fail based upon its success of finding customers so will a book, ultimately, work or not by finding (and keeping) readers.
January 25, 2015
Who Died and Made You a Leader?
Writers have never been leaders in the conventional sense of the word, but writing has always lent itself to the propagation of ideas. An effect that has turned writers sometimes into heroes and sometimes into villains. Would Martin Luther really have changed the world had he not written his The Ninety-Five Theses, criticizing the selling of indulgences, in 1517? Would Hitler have achieved his notoriety had he not written Mein Kampf in 1925.
It is ironic perhaps that I have chosen, for my example, the two people who most lend the lie to my opening sentence. It would have been way easier to talk about Karl Marx whose Das Kapital, first published in 1867, precipitated an entire ideology that became a global political movement, or Charles Dickens whose writings not only may have helped seal the ideas of the French Revolution (in A Tale of Two Cities) but also helped create broader social reform in Great Britain through A Christmas Tale and Oliver Twist.
The point is that writers do not work in a vacuum. We are always actively involved in the perception of the development of society both in terms of where it is and where we may ideally desire it to go. And therein lies the reason which made me choose Luther and Hitler to begin with, for the “we” which writers choose to point to is very rarely identical to the “I” they may personally believe when alone, inside their heads late at night.
Martin Luther may have wanted to start a dialogue around the questionable practice of selling indulgences that retro-actively pardoned the sins of already dead relatives but a revolution which would lead to a schism was probably the furthest thing in his mind. Hitler wanted to make enough money from the sale of his book to get himself out of debt but leading to the Holocaust, at the time, may not necessarily have figured on his mental horizon. Charles Dickens was very much part of the establishment he was criticizing in his writings and Karl Marx came from a well-off middle-class family whose values he upheld.
So, were they lying? Are writers schizophrenic? Do we present views and ideas in our writings that may not necessarily agree with what we really believe in? Here I can only lay down the evidence of experience, both my own and that of fellow writers I have discussed this very same issue with.
While we do not necessarily lie, our writing, always, is shaped by an awareness that we act as a filter for our audience. We reflect back at them what we see and hear and feel in them. We create the paths that point to the world we all want to head towards to, rather than the ones we want it to head to. The Reformation took place not because Martin Luther wrote a pamphlet but because the world around him was ready to make it happen. He just filtered their desire, subconsciously acting as their beacon. Nazism rose to power because Germany was struggling under the yoke of incredible fines and restrictions imposed by the victorious allies after WWI. Marxism happened because Capitalism was inherently brutal and unjust. The catechism goes on and on and on and each time, its point is that the change that happens is the change that must happen. The writing then becomes the articulation of pressures barely felt and desires that are left unvoiced.
Like diviners, writers are sensitive to context and produce content that distils the essence of the trigger points that make them write. Because we believe in our writing we can then, mostly successfully balance the contradiction of personal beliefs that do not always countenance the theses we present.
Do we worry that we’re sometimes wrong? Or that we take on too much? Do we obsess over the correctness of our perception? All the time. It makes us irascible, inherently insecure, inwardly unstable. At the same time it serves to keep us humble. When your opinion, ideas, thoughts and insights are bandied around by thousands like gospels. When memes are made out of what you said and quotes are passed around, it can go to your head.
It is always worth remembering that ultimately, as writers, we are only as good as our ability to listen to the whispering voices of the millions around us. To mentally eavesdrop on their thoughts and read their concerns. The moment we lose that, we become just instruments. Maybe we can write well. But we are no longer writers. And just for the record, we are never really leaders.
It is ironic perhaps that I have chosen, for my example, the two people who most lend the lie to my opening sentence. It would have been way easier to talk about Karl Marx whose Das Kapital, first published in 1867, precipitated an entire ideology that became a global political movement, or Charles Dickens whose writings not only may have helped seal the ideas of the French Revolution (in A Tale of Two Cities) but also helped create broader social reform in Great Britain through A Christmas Tale and Oliver Twist.
The point is that writers do not work in a vacuum. We are always actively involved in the perception of the development of society both in terms of where it is and where we may ideally desire it to go. And therein lies the reason which made me choose Luther and Hitler to begin with, for the “we” which writers choose to point to is very rarely identical to the “I” they may personally believe when alone, inside their heads late at night.
Martin Luther may have wanted to start a dialogue around the questionable practice of selling indulgences that retro-actively pardoned the sins of already dead relatives but a revolution which would lead to a schism was probably the furthest thing in his mind. Hitler wanted to make enough money from the sale of his book to get himself out of debt but leading to the Holocaust, at the time, may not necessarily have figured on his mental horizon. Charles Dickens was very much part of the establishment he was criticizing in his writings and Karl Marx came from a well-off middle-class family whose values he upheld.
So, were they lying? Are writers schizophrenic? Do we present views and ideas in our writings that may not necessarily agree with what we really believe in? Here I can only lay down the evidence of experience, both my own and that of fellow writers I have discussed this very same issue with.
While we do not necessarily lie, our writing, always, is shaped by an awareness that we act as a filter for our audience. We reflect back at them what we see and hear and feel in them. We create the paths that point to the world we all want to head towards to, rather than the ones we want it to head to. The Reformation took place not because Martin Luther wrote a pamphlet but because the world around him was ready to make it happen. He just filtered their desire, subconsciously acting as their beacon. Nazism rose to power because Germany was struggling under the yoke of incredible fines and restrictions imposed by the victorious allies after WWI. Marxism happened because Capitalism was inherently brutal and unjust. The catechism goes on and on and on and each time, its point is that the change that happens is the change that must happen. The writing then becomes the articulation of pressures barely felt and desires that are left unvoiced.
Like diviners, writers are sensitive to context and produce content that distils the essence of the trigger points that make them write. Because we believe in our writing we can then, mostly successfully balance the contradiction of personal beliefs that do not always countenance the theses we present.
Do we worry that we’re sometimes wrong? Or that we take on too much? Do we obsess over the correctness of our perception? All the time. It makes us irascible, inherently insecure, inwardly unstable. At the same time it serves to keep us humble. When your opinion, ideas, thoughts and insights are bandied around by thousands like gospels. When memes are made out of what you said and quotes are passed around, it can go to your head.
It is always worth remembering that ultimately, as writers, we are only as good as our ability to listen to the whispering voices of the millions around us. To mentally eavesdrop on their thoughts and read their concerns. The moment we lose that, we become just instruments. Maybe we can write well. But we are no longer writers. And just for the record, we are never really leaders.
November 30, 2014
The Fear of Writing
For a writer, writing is an extreme sport filled with fear. It has the adrenaline high of ascending new heights, diving into territory inherent with risks and coming out feeling fine, and the post-adventure mood dips of a work being over, a book having been completed, a ‘chapter’ survived.
But there is a little more to it than just that. Because writing is a synthesis of ideas the moment you commit them to paper you also stamp them with your personality. They become an indelible part of who you are, elements to your identity that you cannot shake off, or replace without leaving fatal holes behind.
The fear of committing all that to ‘paper’ for the world to see is counterbalanced by the fear of the ability that defines you, which no one fully understands (not even yourself), vanishing. Evaporating one day. Disappearing as mysteriously as it appeared.
In the days when the struggle of writing took place in the dark, away from prying eyes, writers wrestled with these inner demons and found solace in drink and drugs and other vices. Activities that writers as diverse in subject and style as Hunter S. Thompson, Philip K. Dick and Hemingway would use as springboards: when you touch upon the lowest depths of your human frailty you find the resolve to make one more push, rise one more time, to the heights of the vision granted by your mind’s eye, until you really cannot any more.
These days are a little different. A writer writes in a very public way. Not only are works and thoughts and ideas shared with their readers but the readers themselves become part of the complex construct that guides a writer. And the fear then intensifies. What if my next book, story, chapter is not liked? What if I cannot see the next trend? What if my readers desert me? What if I simply cannot write any more?
Implicit, within that last question is the acknowledgement of the difficulty of defining what writing really is. It’s not the ability to spell, nor the skill to string words and sentences in a grammatically correct order. It’s more like the ability to see something beneath the surface of the world, abstract it, and then render it in a code that increases access to it, by those who see it.
Because no one really knows how this is accomplished, no one can tell you how to avoid losing it. So writers live in fear. Fear that the next work may be their last, fear that their skill is driven by the consumption of a perishable commodity they are busy using up. Fear that one day, they will wake up and be writers in name only…
But there is a little more to it than just that. Because writing is a synthesis of ideas the moment you commit them to paper you also stamp them with your personality. They become an indelible part of who you are, elements to your identity that you cannot shake off, or replace without leaving fatal holes behind.
The fear of committing all that to ‘paper’ for the world to see is counterbalanced by the fear of the ability that defines you, which no one fully understands (not even yourself), vanishing. Evaporating one day. Disappearing as mysteriously as it appeared.
In the days when the struggle of writing took place in the dark, away from prying eyes, writers wrestled with these inner demons and found solace in drink and drugs and other vices. Activities that writers as diverse in subject and style as Hunter S. Thompson, Philip K. Dick and Hemingway would use as springboards: when you touch upon the lowest depths of your human frailty you find the resolve to make one more push, rise one more time, to the heights of the vision granted by your mind’s eye, until you really cannot any more.
These days are a little different. A writer writes in a very public way. Not only are works and thoughts and ideas shared with their readers but the readers themselves become part of the complex construct that guides a writer. And the fear then intensifies. What if my next book, story, chapter is not liked? What if I cannot see the next trend? What if my readers desert me? What if I simply cannot write any more?
Implicit, within that last question is the acknowledgement of the difficulty of defining what writing really is. It’s not the ability to spell, nor the skill to string words and sentences in a grammatically correct order. It’s more like the ability to see something beneath the surface of the world, abstract it, and then render it in a code that increases access to it, by those who see it.
Because no one really knows how this is accomplished, no one can tell you how to avoid losing it. So writers live in fear. Fear that the next work may be their last, fear that their skill is driven by the consumption of a perishable commodity they are busy using up. Fear that one day, they will wake up and be writers in name only…
October 30, 2014
Why The Writer is not a Salesman
Before the web came along a writer used to write and then rely on his publisher to do the marketing for his book. The publisher would usually set up a few book signing opportunities but the bulk of the selling would be done through the trusted sales channels developed by the publisher over the years. The writer was there to, well, write.
It was a relationship that was apparently made in heaven because, just like in the best relationships, it divided the labor of love required to maintain it and bring its purpose into fruition. Just like the best of relationships, beneath the surface, nothing was what it seemed. Publishers, with their team of sales people and distribution deals, worked on the path of least resistance. They sold books that turned a profit for themselves but did not work hard to help the writer increase his sales. Writers, content to do what they loved and get paid, did the bare minimum. They appeared at the book signings and interviews set up by the publisher but did little work to promote themselves or their books beyond that.
Relationship on the Rocks
What’s brought about a change, as always, are circumstances that made it impossible to pretend that the relationship, as it was, worked. Publishers, strapped for cash and looking for quick gains seized on social media and pushed writers to the front. Writers, tired of not selling beyond their usual audience, thought the time had come to reluctantly step into the limelight.
And this is where things get interesting.
Without a doubt, social media has changed everything. By stripping away the traditional barriers that kept writers and readers away from each other it has made the complex marketing mechanism publishers had in place, redundant. Suddenly the writer has become the publisher’s best marketing aid.
Considering that marketing also helps the writer this should not much change things except it has. For a start it allows the writer to use his place on the web to talk directly to his readers (which is why Google Semantic Search: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques That Get Your Company More Traffic, Increase Brand Impact and Amplify Your Online Presence became a best-seller before publication. It then allows the writer to realize that writing is not quite as unique an ability as he may think it is.
This stripping back of layers of misconception is not without its problems. A writer close to his readers enjoys their ear, partakes in their concerns, gets their opinion, becomes (in the social media sense of the word) their buddy. The closeness changes the traditional alchemy of the roles. A writer who listens closely to his readers is attuned to their needs and understands what they like but, at the same time, he is influenced by their opinions and becomes subject to their direction. That is problematic.
A writer is at his most valuable when works not to write a book (that is a byproduct) but to realize a vision. Whether that vision is a non-fiction book that becomes a handy aid, a fictional masterpiece that sets popular culture on fire or a technical tome that documents a subject, it is something that resonates deeply with a perceived audience need and becomes, in the hands of the reader, a catapult that will launch them into a new orbit.
When a book does its job, it enables the reader to feel, think, act or analyze differently. It is the trigger than unleashes the reader’s superpower. That’s why writers, ultimately, write and why readers buy their books.
The ability of social media to bring writers and readers closer to each other is certainly seductive and it is both desirable and appealing. But it should always be the channel through which a writer explains his vision rather than the means through which he transformed into a salesman peddling his wares.
It was a relationship that was apparently made in heaven because, just like in the best relationships, it divided the labor of love required to maintain it and bring its purpose into fruition. Just like the best of relationships, beneath the surface, nothing was what it seemed. Publishers, with their team of sales people and distribution deals, worked on the path of least resistance. They sold books that turned a profit for themselves but did not work hard to help the writer increase his sales. Writers, content to do what they loved and get paid, did the bare minimum. They appeared at the book signings and interviews set up by the publisher but did little work to promote themselves or their books beyond that.
Relationship on the Rocks
What’s brought about a change, as always, are circumstances that made it impossible to pretend that the relationship, as it was, worked. Publishers, strapped for cash and looking for quick gains seized on social media and pushed writers to the front. Writers, tired of not selling beyond their usual audience, thought the time had come to reluctantly step into the limelight.
And this is where things get interesting.
Without a doubt, social media has changed everything. By stripping away the traditional barriers that kept writers and readers away from each other it has made the complex marketing mechanism publishers had in place, redundant. Suddenly the writer has become the publisher’s best marketing aid.
Considering that marketing also helps the writer this should not much change things except it has. For a start it allows the writer to use his place on the web to talk directly to his readers (which is why Google Semantic Search: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques That Get Your Company More Traffic, Increase Brand Impact and Amplify Your Online Presence became a best-seller before publication. It then allows the writer to realize that writing is not quite as unique an ability as he may think it is.
This stripping back of layers of misconception is not without its problems. A writer close to his readers enjoys their ear, partakes in their concerns, gets their opinion, becomes (in the social media sense of the word) their buddy. The closeness changes the traditional alchemy of the roles. A writer who listens closely to his readers is attuned to their needs and understands what they like but, at the same time, he is influenced by their opinions and becomes subject to their direction. That is problematic.
A writer is at his most valuable when works not to write a book (that is a byproduct) but to realize a vision. Whether that vision is a non-fiction book that becomes a handy aid, a fictional masterpiece that sets popular culture on fire or a technical tome that documents a subject, it is something that resonates deeply with a perceived audience need and becomes, in the hands of the reader, a catapult that will launch them into a new orbit.
When a book does its job, it enables the reader to feel, think, act or analyze differently. It is the trigger than unleashes the reader’s superpower. That’s why writers, ultimately, write and why readers buy their books.
The ability of social media to bring writers and readers closer to each other is certainly seductive and it is both desirable and appealing. But it should always be the channel through which a writer explains his vision rather than the means through which he transformed into a salesman peddling his wares.
January 6, 2014
What Happens When You’re no Longer Invisible?
Writers, despite appearances, hate the limelight. We usually have our ideas alone, at moments we least expect them. And we write alone. And struggle with whatever inner demons stop the purity of our thoughts from making it to the page. And then, when we’re done. When we have fought the good fight and convinced our agents and publishers and editors and the book’s all done. The last thing we really want is to step onto a public stage and shout out about it.
It’s kinda ironic given than fact that I am writing this on a very public platform with the expectation of achieving the exact opposite of invisibility. I shall get to the why, in a minute. But first the how. Because we, as writers, always write from conviction, the outcome, whether it’s a book of fiction or non-fiction, always contains large chunks of us in it. Writing is the one area where we cannot hide.
Writing is also the one profession where distancing yourself from the outcome of your labours, though desirable, is practically impossible. Everything a writer writes is personal. From the phraseology to the syntax, from the grand ideas to the little asides. As a result, when the book we worked on finally comes out we want to have nothing to do with it. We consider that, as writers, we’re done. The work really needs to speak for itself.
If it’s great, it’s a job well done. We don’t want to know beyond the sales and the reviews readers post. Constantly receiving praise makes us feel awkward (though it is always appreciated). The tiniest form of criticism devastates us (we take it way too personally). If it’s not well received we really want to curl up and die somewhere. Preferably deep underground.
None of these feelings change. But the world has. We’re now more connected, more transparent and more visible than ever before. Even if we do not blog readers can reach us through email, they can follow us on Twitter, stalk us on Facebook and connect with us directly on G+. As writers, ideally, we still want the world to go away and leave us alone (oh yes, and read our books too). Transparency and connectivity however now demand a presence.
Traditionally a writer has been an unknown quantity. If he was uber-popular there was a sense that at least he was writing something decent (never a total guarantee). If he wasn’t, the odds of knowing what he was about were small. Either way a reader took a chance buying a book. The fact that so many readers were willing to take that small leap of faith is more indicative of our lack of choices when buying a book than anything else.
In the new world that’s rising writers are way more visible (or they ought to be). If we really want our voice to be read then we have to make sure that it can also be heard and social media provides an incredible platform to do just that. It also begs the question of what happens when we’re no longer invisible as a writer? When readers ask our opinion, lavish praise upon us, want to know when our next book is coming out and recommend us to their friends we find ourselves on a platform where we have to work out entirely new ways to behave.
Writers act as either filters or guides (and frequently there is an overlap here). We either act as a kind of collective subconscious, filtering reality in a way that most people think it should be (or wish it should be) or we take readers forth into brave new worlds, showing the way things will work and how they shall function, helping them synthesize new ways of behaving.
The argument has been that this process is done best when the writer is left alone, fighting whatever inner struggle is necessary to get the job done. The idea behind this inaccessibility was that the moment a writer is visible he also becomes self-conscious and the potential of attention to destroy his ability to write (which has given rise to the myth of writer’s block) rises.
Well, there is an old-fashioned British expression that I think beautifully sums up my ideas on that argument: “poppycock” (and you’ll have to Google the etymology on that one). Certainly working in plain sight is challenging. Responding to praise or criticism is a skill in itself. Becoming accountable for the efficacy of your art is damn hard. At the same time the labour of writing, shared with your readers, becomes way less burdensome, the struggle with inner demons lessens and a writer and his audience become, to some extent, co-creationists, informing each other’s worldviews and opinions.
Writers get to know first-hand who their readers are. Readers experience a writer’s sense of values, drive and personality. Visibility, as it happens then, increases a writer’s ability to act as a filter or a guide, rather than just the opposite. It makes the part of being a writer a little harder but by banishing isolation it turns the writer from the solitary creature of the industrial age to the troubadour of the community that he’d always been in the past. That is a win for everybody in my book (pun intended).
Google Semantic Search: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques That Get Your Company More Traffic, Increase Brand Impact, and Amplify Your Online Presence
It’s kinda ironic given than fact that I am writing this on a very public platform with the expectation of achieving the exact opposite of invisibility. I shall get to the why, in a minute. But first the how. Because we, as writers, always write from conviction, the outcome, whether it’s a book of fiction or non-fiction, always contains large chunks of us in it. Writing is the one area where we cannot hide.
Writing is also the one profession where distancing yourself from the outcome of your labours, though desirable, is practically impossible. Everything a writer writes is personal. From the phraseology to the syntax, from the grand ideas to the little asides. As a result, when the book we worked on finally comes out we want to have nothing to do with it. We consider that, as writers, we’re done. The work really needs to speak for itself.
If it’s great, it’s a job well done. We don’t want to know beyond the sales and the reviews readers post. Constantly receiving praise makes us feel awkward (though it is always appreciated). The tiniest form of criticism devastates us (we take it way too personally). If it’s not well received we really want to curl up and die somewhere. Preferably deep underground.
None of these feelings change. But the world has. We’re now more connected, more transparent and more visible than ever before. Even if we do not blog readers can reach us through email, they can follow us on Twitter, stalk us on Facebook and connect with us directly on G+. As writers, ideally, we still want the world to go away and leave us alone (oh yes, and read our books too). Transparency and connectivity however now demand a presence.
Traditionally a writer has been an unknown quantity. If he was uber-popular there was a sense that at least he was writing something decent (never a total guarantee). If he wasn’t, the odds of knowing what he was about were small. Either way a reader took a chance buying a book. The fact that so many readers were willing to take that small leap of faith is more indicative of our lack of choices when buying a book than anything else.
In the new world that’s rising writers are way more visible (or they ought to be). If we really want our voice to be read then we have to make sure that it can also be heard and social media provides an incredible platform to do just that. It also begs the question of what happens when we’re no longer invisible as a writer? When readers ask our opinion, lavish praise upon us, want to know when our next book is coming out and recommend us to their friends we find ourselves on a platform where we have to work out entirely new ways to behave.
Writers act as either filters or guides (and frequently there is an overlap here). We either act as a kind of collective subconscious, filtering reality in a way that most people think it should be (or wish it should be) or we take readers forth into brave new worlds, showing the way things will work and how they shall function, helping them synthesize new ways of behaving.
The argument has been that this process is done best when the writer is left alone, fighting whatever inner struggle is necessary to get the job done. The idea behind this inaccessibility was that the moment a writer is visible he also becomes self-conscious and the potential of attention to destroy his ability to write (which has given rise to the myth of writer’s block) rises.
Well, there is an old-fashioned British expression that I think beautifully sums up my ideas on that argument: “poppycock” (and you’ll have to Google the etymology on that one). Certainly working in plain sight is challenging. Responding to praise or criticism is a skill in itself. Becoming accountable for the efficacy of your art is damn hard. At the same time the labour of writing, shared with your readers, becomes way less burdensome, the struggle with inner demons lessens and a writer and his audience become, to some extent, co-creationists, informing each other’s worldviews and opinions.
Writers get to know first-hand who their readers are. Readers experience a writer’s sense of values, drive and personality. Visibility, as it happens then, increases a writer’s ability to act as a filter or a guide, rather than just the opposite. It makes the part of being a writer a little harder but by banishing isolation it turns the writer from the solitary creature of the industrial age to the troubadour of the community that he’d always been in the past. That is a win for everybody in my book (pun intended).
Google Semantic Search: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques That Get Your Company More Traffic, Increase Brand Impact, and Amplify Your Online Presence
December 16, 2013
The Writer As A Product
The writer has always been the product. If you happen to come across a book that you’ve never ever heard of before (and it’s paper) you check out the cover and you read the blurb and then you check out who wrote it. You want to know a little about them, who they are. What makes them tick. Today, you also do a search.
In the days before the web writers were a carefully packaged product. They were allowed to get close to their readers through stage managed events: book signings, talk shows, celebrity appearances and the odd presentation to particular groups.
Just like any other product the way they connected to their audience was governed by Jerome McCarthy’s 4Ps of Product, Place, Price and Promotion. They produced a combination that was paradoxical: they raised awareness of a product without ever intimating about its value. In the best tradition of outbound marketing it was always a case of “we shout the loudest, hence we must be the best”.
Readers wanting to try out a book (and its writer) were obliged to take all the risk. They picked it up, paid for it and hoped that they would like it. It was akin to having to decide to go and see a film full of unknown actors just by looking at the glossy posters advertising it. It could happen but your expectations were low and the chances that you’d be queuing in the streets with your money in hand, unlikely.
The entire way we shop is changing. From the 4Ps that created a behavioural model where we needed to be flooded with advertising in order for a new product to stand out sufficiently for us to then feel we could go ahead and try it, we are transitioning, fully, to a world of 4Es where Product, Place, Price and Promotion are being replaced by Experience, Everywhere, Exchange and Evangelism.
The writer who is not being “experienced” by his potential reading audience (his thoughts, his ideas, his personality and his writing style, even) will now find it hard to break through, regardless of how much advertising he may enjoy. If he is not being encountered “everywhere” (magazines, videos, podcasts, articles and across social media platforms), he is going to find it hard to capture the attention of his audience. If he cannot clearly explain the exchange taking place when his readers part with their money (what is “in it” for me?), he will not find it easy to convince an audience that is well-informed, mobile and empowered, that he is a good bet to take a small risk on and read.
The final transition is the trickiest one. The writer of this new age of ours who has successfully transitioned from Product, Price and Place to Experience, Everywhere and Exchange, will then find that Promotion happens automatically. In the new economy Evangelism occurs because those who have experienced a writer, before even buying into his books, become the writer’s best means of promotion. Their word of mouth, their recommendations, their reviews across online bookshops, become the points through which the writer now finds a fresh audience.
In terms of how things used to happen this is truly disruptive. We have gone from a centrally controlled point of presentation of a writer and his books, where we used to be told that this was indeed, “the best thing, since sliced bread” to a place where a writer and his readers share an aligned purpose: the exploration of similar themes. Concerns that resonate and meet on the common space provided by a book. That makes the writer a true creation of his audience, rather than believing (like we used to) that he would be a fully-formed product in search of an audience.
There is a revolutionary retooling of value in this approach that is in total keeping with our experience of the 21st century world: we used to be told a writer was ‘great’, ‘a must-read’, ‘unmissable’, because his publisher (who would use their own detailed, exhaustive, selection process to discover a writer) told us so. We used to be told. And now we decide for ourselves based on the value of the writer and his books to us. The smartest writer in the world, writing the most technically proficient book is worthless if what he does is of no value to the reader, and that value now, must be provided by the former before the latter gets to the point of reaching out and purchasing a book.
Google Semantic Search: Search Engine Optimization (Seo) Techniques That Get Your Company More Traffic, Increase Brand Impact, and Amplify Your Online Presence
In the days before the web writers were a carefully packaged product. They were allowed to get close to their readers through stage managed events: book signings, talk shows, celebrity appearances and the odd presentation to particular groups.
Just like any other product the way they connected to their audience was governed by Jerome McCarthy’s 4Ps of Product, Place, Price and Promotion. They produced a combination that was paradoxical: they raised awareness of a product without ever intimating about its value. In the best tradition of outbound marketing it was always a case of “we shout the loudest, hence we must be the best”.
Readers wanting to try out a book (and its writer) were obliged to take all the risk. They picked it up, paid for it and hoped that they would like it. It was akin to having to decide to go and see a film full of unknown actors just by looking at the glossy posters advertising it. It could happen but your expectations were low and the chances that you’d be queuing in the streets with your money in hand, unlikely.
The entire way we shop is changing. From the 4Ps that created a behavioural model where we needed to be flooded with advertising in order for a new product to stand out sufficiently for us to then feel we could go ahead and try it, we are transitioning, fully, to a world of 4Es where Product, Place, Price and Promotion are being replaced by Experience, Everywhere, Exchange and Evangelism.
The writer who is not being “experienced” by his potential reading audience (his thoughts, his ideas, his personality and his writing style, even) will now find it hard to break through, regardless of how much advertising he may enjoy. If he is not being encountered “everywhere” (magazines, videos, podcasts, articles and across social media platforms), he is going to find it hard to capture the attention of his audience. If he cannot clearly explain the exchange taking place when his readers part with their money (what is “in it” for me?), he will not find it easy to convince an audience that is well-informed, mobile and empowered, that he is a good bet to take a small risk on and read.
The final transition is the trickiest one. The writer of this new age of ours who has successfully transitioned from Product, Price and Place to Experience, Everywhere and Exchange, will then find that Promotion happens automatically. In the new economy Evangelism occurs because those who have experienced a writer, before even buying into his books, become the writer’s best means of promotion. Their word of mouth, their recommendations, their reviews across online bookshops, become the points through which the writer now finds a fresh audience.
In terms of how things used to happen this is truly disruptive. We have gone from a centrally controlled point of presentation of a writer and his books, where we used to be told that this was indeed, “the best thing, since sliced bread” to a place where a writer and his readers share an aligned purpose: the exploration of similar themes. Concerns that resonate and meet on the common space provided by a book. That makes the writer a true creation of his audience, rather than believing (like we used to) that he would be a fully-formed product in search of an audience.
There is a revolutionary retooling of value in this approach that is in total keeping with our experience of the 21st century world: we used to be told a writer was ‘great’, ‘a must-read’, ‘unmissable’, because his publisher (who would use their own detailed, exhaustive, selection process to discover a writer) told us so. We used to be told. And now we decide for ourselves based on the value of the writer and his books to us. The smartest writer in the world, writing the most technically proficient book is worthless if what he does is of no value to the reader, and that value now, must be provided by the former before the latter gets to the point of reaching out and purchasing a book.
Google Semantic Search: Search Engine Optimization (Seo) Techniques That Get Your Company More Traffic, Increase Brand Impact, and Amplify Your Online Presence
David Amerland on Writing
Writing has changed. Like everything else on the planet it is being affected by the social media revolution and by the transition to the digital medium in a hyper-connected world. I am fully involved
...more
- David Amerland's profile
- 199 followers
