Archive for the 'Books' Category
Blog Blazer Fridays
Like I said I will start posting an interview a week from the book I published called Blog Blazers (seen above). However I decided to first have an introductory post today to give you a list of the bloggers that were interviewed (in alphabetical order as they are presented in the book). As well I thought it would be good form to add a link back to the introduction on every post for people who join later on as way for them to quickly catch up. This way they can have a starting point.
First the details for anyone interested in purchasing the printed book, you can buy it on Amazon here as well as a digital copy from the website here. The main difference is that you can click on the links in the digital book where as the printed book you have to type them in. Other than that the printed book and digital books are identical. In any case, I will be publishing all the interviews here so you can also just read them here and click on the links here. The printed book is really more for people like myself who prefer printed books, or the digital book for people who want everything together in one nice file for their iPad, Nexus, Kindle, and so on. Also please note that you can also subscribe to receive emails of the interviews by entering your email in the form in the top right corner or entering your email in the form on this page.
That being said, the book was published about 5 years ago, back in 2008. So over time some things have changed, but the interview questions were intentionally selected to be as timeless as was possible and while making it interesting and offering the reader a lot of actionable items. I also tried to ask everyone the same interview questions so that the book would make it easy to study how different people succeeding at blogging. You want to know the secret to blogging success, there is NO ONE SECRET! Different bloggers succeeded in very different ways. The biggest hurdles to blogging success are number one starting and number two stopping. There is no one single way to succeed or a single secret recipe for success. Different bloggers have succeeding in different ways using different techniques.
Back to the book, and before I go ahead and list the bloggers interview, if anyone wants to peek ahead and read the individual blogger’s bios, you can read their bios here. Warning of shameless plug: Also if you’re interested, you can find the reviews about the book here.
Now, as I was about to say before, deciding who to include in the book was very very hard. I wanted to not only include successful bloggers, but also up and coming bloggers, bloggers that weren’t mainstream yet. I wanted to include bloggers for different subjects and niches. There seems to be more technology related blogs than other niches. I also tried to include bloggers that I believed would be around for some time, at least 5-10 years. When it comes to blogging, most people are notorious for only blogging a short time, from a few months to maybe a year, so I wanted to avoid bloggers that were going to be gone shortly.
So without further ado, here is the list of bloggers interviewed in alphabetical order:
- Aaron Wall of SEOBook
- Abdylas Tynyshov of AdesBlog.com
- Al Carlton of Coolest Gadgets
- Alex Papadimoulis of The Daily WTF
- Andy Brice of Successful Software
- Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends
- Asha Dornfest of Parent Hacks
- Ben Casnocha of The Startup of You
- Benjamin Yoskovitz of Instigator Blog
- Bob Walsh of 47 Hats
- Dan Lyons of The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs
- Dane Carlso of Business Opportunities Weblog
- David Armano of Logic + Emotion
- David Seah of DavidSeah.com
- Dekek Semmler of Derek Semmler
- Dharmesh Shah of On Startups
- Erik Sink of Eric.Weblog()
- Ian Landsman of Ian Landsman
- James and Alex Turnbull of Google Sightings
- JD Roth of Get Rich Slowly
- Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror
- Jeff Clavier of Jeff Clavier’s Software Only
- Jennette Fulda of Pasta Queen
- Jennifer Perry of 101 Reasons I Hate Being Fat
- Jessamyn West of Librarian.net
- Joel Cheesman of Cheezhead
- Jonathan Snook of Snook.ca
- Manolo Blahnik of Manolo’s Shoe Blog
- Neil Patel of Quick Sprout
- Pamela Slim of Escape from Cubicle Nation
- Patrick McKenzie of Kalzumeus
- Penelop Trunk of Brazen Careerist
- Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You To Be Rich
- Rob Walling of Software by Rob
- Rohit Bhargava from Influential Marketing Blog
- Seth Godin of Seth’s Blog
- Stephane Grenier (me) of FollowSteph
- Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion
- Trent Hamm of The Simple Dollar
- Yaro Starak of Entrepreneur’s Journey
As you can see the list of bloggers interviewed is quite large and substantial. At the time some were just starting out and have now reached new heights of success!
I’ll be posting an interview a week for almost a year, for 40 weeks in all! It will be called Blog Blazer Friday.
Thankfully the vast majority of the bloggers I invited to be interviewed in the book have lasted the test of time, at least in blogging time (5-10 years). Almost all of the blogs are still alive, all but just 2 blogs!! The ones without the links are the two that are no longer online. A few more do have their blogs online but aren’t actively posting anymore. But overall the vast majority are still very active bloggers and have only grown more since the book was published! Overall I have to admit I’m pretty happy with the results 5 years later.
There’s definitely a lot of good information and details in the interviews and I hope you enjoy reading as much as I enjoyed compiling them.
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The Big Book of Canadian Trivia – Book Review
Before I begin, I’m going to disclaim that I’ve used Randy Ray’s PR services for my company LandlordMax in the past (he’s one of the authors of the book The Big Book of Canadian Trivia).
That being said, if you’re into trivia, especially Canadian trivia, you’ll want to check out Randy Ray and Mark Kearney’s latest book The Big Book of Canadian Trivia. I have to admit when I first received it, I wasn’t prepared for the sheer size of it. I definitely didn’t expect it to be telephone book sized. Yes, you read that right, telephone book sized! Although it doesn’t have as many pages, and the font size is much more readable than a phone book, it’s just as thick. Hopefully that gives you an idea of just how much trivia this book contains.
Because this book is a trivia book, what’s interesting is that you don’t have to read the one page after another. You can jump in anywhere and start learning right away. And because you can just jump in anywhere, you can focus on the topics that are more interesting to you (and there are a lot of topics).
The only problem I have with this book is I find it harder to write a review for it because it is a trivia book. Most books are focused on a specific topic or ideas whereas a trivia book is about much more random and short topics. Compared to most trivia books I’ve seen though, The Big Book for Canadian Trivia offers a lot of value for your dollar. I can’t imagine the amount of research and information gathering that went into this book. Even just perusing through this book you’ll learn something.
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How To Be Invisible – Book Review
If you’re looking for a book on how to LEGALLY protect your assets and your privacy then you absolutely have to read How to Be Invisble by J.J. Luna. I strongly recommend it. I generally don’t mark up my books, but I can’t say that for this book. It’s bookmarked, highlighted, you name it. The only thing to note is that this book is NOT about tax avoidance. Neither I, nor the author, recommend tax avoidance in any way. This book is about protecting your assets and your privacy from the public.
Why would you want to protect yourself? For several reasons. To use some examples from the book: you suddenly win a lottery ticket, you physically look just like the bank robber that was highlighted in the evening news the night before, you’re innocently related to the wrong person, you have a significant amount of money, someone faked their identity as yours, you have a stalker, you accidentally cut someone off on your way home and they want to come after you, and so on. There are a lot of reasons of why you might want to protect your assets and your privacy.
How do you protect yourself? That’s the topic of the book How to Be Invisible. J.J. Luna covers this topic in amazing detail and he offers a wealth of information. Not only that, but he also explains how there are different levels and layers of security. He goes from the simple basic security precautions you can take all the way to some very advance and high level privacy measures you can implement. What I especially liked is that he not only covered how to protect your privacy, but also how to protect your assets.
Being a computer geek, I generally find that most sections on technology are pretty superficial, and too often just plain wrong. In many cases the authors doesn’t really get it, and there are glaring holes in their information. Not so with this book. I actually learned new things from the technology section of a non-tech book! Assuming the rest of the book is as accurate as the technology section, well let’s just say I have no fear trusting the information in this book. Although I always recommend doing your own due diligence, because after all you can only blame yourself, I’m very confident in the information in this book.
Something else I really liked about the book is how several times the author asks you how you would find someone given a specific set of limited information. At the beginning of the book, and I hate to admit this, I really didn’t know how. But as I progressed through the book, I got smarter and smarter. There’s some amazing examples of how easy it can be to find people and their assets, so it pays to know if you want to protect yourself. It also makes you more aware of your surroundings, which is very valuable in all situations, not just when you want to protect your privacy.
Overall I strongly recommend the book How To Be Invisble. It’s a great book with lots of useful information. Although you may not choose to implement the highest levels of security, I have no doubt you’ll at least implement some of the techniques the author suggests. I know I’ve already changed the way I do a few things.
You can find the book How to Be Invisble on Amazon by clicking here. You can also find further information at the website HowToBeInvisible.com and at the author’s blog Invisible Privacy.
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How to Publish Your Own Book – POD (Print on Demand) – Part 3
Continuing on our series on how to publish your book, we’re now going to look at POD (Print on Demand) publishing. It’s the next step up in terms of effort and costs from publishing an ebook, and it’s definitely a lot less than self-publishing and being published through a traditional publishing house.
Print on demand (POD) is a technology for publishing smaller quantities of books, sometimes even as small as just one copy at a time. It basically allows you to print your books as you sell them, requiring no inventory. In other words, the initial attraction of POD versus self-publishing and traditional publishing is that you can get your book published for a lot less money. You don’t need to have a run of 1000-3000 books, you can print only those books you sell (as you sell them). However it’s not as simple as that, and often (not always but very often) POD books aren’t as polished as self-published or traditionally published books.
Something that is often forgotten with POD books is that you still need to heavily market your book to make it a success. This is true with all four of the publishing techniques I’m discussing, but for some reason lots of POD authors forget this fact. Did you know:
“According to estimates from the three big players, the average POD author sells 100 to 200 copies. Who’s the biggest buyer? You sitting down? According to Xlibris, 64 percent of those copies are purchased by the authors themselves, and the numbers elsewhere are probably similar.”
But even more than that, Peter Bowerman author of the book The Well-Fed Self-Publisher writes:
“I remember a much-heralded celebration they had that same year after paying out their one-millionth dollar in royalties. Let’s see . . . $1 million over 7,000 titles comes out to an average royalty of $149 each (and I’m being generous here by counting that $1 million as payment for just one year’s sales rather than for cumulated sales). I promise you, they charged every author far more than that to “publish” their books.”
And I absolutely agree with Peter that they charge much more than that. When I initially tried POD, I was quoted over $2000 for what I wanted. And don’t be fooled by the entry level prices of $500, it doesn’t really offer much if you want to be serious author. For this article, I’m going to use iUniverse as my example since I dealt with them directly. There are lots of other POD publishers, but I preferred iUniverse for a few reasons (which I’ll discuss later). In any case, they offer 4 publishing packages ranging in price from $599 to $2,099. And I can guarantee you will need to spend more than what they list, even with their high end package, assuming you plan on producing a book of decent quality.
The other big difference with POD versus ebooks and self-published is that you deal with royalties instead of profits and expenses. In other words, with POD you get a percentage of the sales straight out. For most companies it’s about 10% of the sale price (I’ve seen it as high as 20% but 10% is more the norm). With self-published and ebooks, you have to pay to get the book published and then you make profits afterwards (minus your on-going expenses. In other words, POD is front-loaded (pay upfront with only revenues later) whereas self-published and ebooks have the profits on the back-end (costs up-front with revenues after costs are taken into account afterwards).
Forwarning: You will find I’m biased against POD, although I will concede it has it’s merits. In some situations, POD is the way to go. I’m just biased because it’s being sold as a really good alternative to self-publishing and traditional publishing when it’s not. It’s more of an alternative publishing option for vanity authors, authors who don’t plan to sell more than a few hundred copies and are doing it more for themselves and their families and friends. But more on that later.
Pros
No need to get accepted by a publishing company
POD and self-publishing are the only two methods to publish a PRINTED book without having to go through a publishing company. And this is the greatest benefit of POD, you don’t need to have anyone accept or approve your book for publication, you can print anything you want. Almost all POD companies will accept any book, be it the next Steven King multi-national bestseller to your personal diaries and memoirs. With POD you can print anything, good or bad.
This means that you can also print books that have smaller niches since more big publishing houses aren’t interested in books that can’t potentially sell thousands and thousands of copies. It also means that you can try new things with books. For example with my book Blog Blazers I tried a new interview format. Instead of interviewing each person differently with their own custom tailored questions, I asked everyone the same questions. I believe this makes the book richer as it allows you to compare oranges to oranges and apples to apples versus oranges to apples. Of course since this isn’t your normal/standard format, most traditional publishing houses aren’t that excited about it. It doesn’t mean you can’t, Seth Godin’s latest book Tribes (great book by the way) is the first book I’ve seen without chapters that I can remember. Of course he’s an international bestseller with over a dozen books so he can get away with breaking the rules compared to new authors.
Cheapest printed method
POD is sold as being the cheapest publishing method available, and I have to agree it is the cheapest way to publish a printed book. BUT it’s not as cheap as they make it out to be. For example, I’ve seen countless POD ads stating that you can publish a printed book for about $500 or less. Yes it’s possible, but you wouldn’t want to do that. I can also buy a brand new car for about $2500 USD but would you want to? Is it worth it?
If I just want to print my own book to give to my friends and family and I don’t want to sell millions, or even thousands of copies, then POD is great. It’s the most affordable route to go. Plus you can skimp out on some of the additional services since it really doesn’t matter as much (for example who cares if your book has an index if you’re only printing 20-50 copies for your family and closest friends).
The thing to note is that although the POD industry is advocating that publishing with POD is the cheapest printing method, it’s not that cheap. Especially if you factor in all of the other costs such as printing promo copies, who owns the rights to the book, and so on.
No need to create a company
A great benefit to POD is that you don’t need to do anything special, you don’t even need to form a company. The POD company will handle all those details. They’ll take the orders for your book and give you your cut (your royalties). They’ll basically be your company for you.
The thing is that creating yo