Six Reasons for a Book Blog

I received some email today from Deb Owen, someone I do not know, whose primary interest in me was my connection to Cape Cod.  But in her email she also wondered why anyone could possibly decide to blog about a book. In the past several months, I have wondered the very same thing. As we come to the last two chapters and 5000 words of this saga, I've given this matter a good deal of thought.  I know that I will be starting my next book as soon as I recover from this experience and that I most certainly will use a book blog again.

Here are my reasons:

1. A Wealth of Insight and Information. Bloggers have pointed us to at least a score of the cases we cite in Naked Conversations.  They have pointed us to facts, statistics and provided balanced views on a great many subjects. I

2. Dynamic fact checking. While it is never a pleasure to have your mistakes pointed out to you, it is very valuable in writing a book. I will confess a dirty little secret. In early chapters, when we were well behind schedule, we tossed a few things out, in the faith that the blogosphere would correct it.  They did a vigilant and superior job of it. Naked Conversations is a more accurate book thanks to our audience.

3. Word of mouth engine. If you read our early chapters you know that we think that blogging's miracle is that it takes word of mouth, the best marketing technique and scales its reach and speed. The blogosphere has generated a great deal of word of mouth on behalf of this effort and we hope that will tranlate into sales when we actually go on the shelf in January 2006.

4. Publisher's Auction. Early in the book blog's history, four book publishers found us. This led to competitive bids for publishing rights. We have no doubt that this increased our advance of royalties payments significantly. The book blog gave us options that we otherwise would not have had.

5. Increased my Perceived Authority. When we started, Robert was already sought by the media for comments in articles on blogging but I was not. Now, as we near completion, I am interviewed by the press approximately once weekly and speaking inviations have started to come in. I say "perceived" authority, because I have played a role of the reporter in this book writing process and the real authorities are indeed Robert and all the remarkable people I got to interview in the preparation of this book.

6. A chance to share. JD Lasica, David Weinberger and Dan Gillmor all influenced this experiment by completing book blogs before this one. That inspired and shaed what we have done here.  By injecting intervie notes and content regarding the experience of writing a book, we'd like to think we've broken a few inches of new ground. We hope it helps the next aspiring author who will take book blogs beyond what we have done so far, and thus make it easier for whoever follows her or him.

My thanks to nearly all of you who have helped us so much along this unfinished journey. I have to say "nearly," because there have been a few who chose to contribute unkind and nonconstructive comments.  This low ground tone seems to be on the rise in recent weeks, and I personally hope that it is just indicative of transitional pains caused by the untrammeled growth of this remarkable new medium. More about that later.