The experience I have had interacting with the blogosphere on this book, particularly the Overview and TOC sections has been amazing so far, and this journey has just begun. I also continue to get as much feedback as I can from professionals, authors and people knowledgeable about this book writing business.
One is an agent, who may or may not become mine. But whenever I talk with him, I walk away thinking he has helped me write a better book.
He looked over my TOC and Overview and felt that I had a lot of book contained in it. This is not necessarily a good thing. The most successful books usually have a single, simple idea with powerful repercussions. This is what publishers love best, particularly from new guys like me. It's what you have in The World is Flat, Freakonomics, Blink and Wikinomics, not to mention The Long Tail and my personal favorite Naked Conversations.
Global Neighborhoods is about a great many things that relate to social media. It has many ideas that can be expanded upon at great length. In fact, this expert, suggested it has too many books.
Publishers, like so many institutions, like products that fit into boxes. In their case, those boxes are the sections on a bookstore shelf, such as Business, Technology, Biography, etc. If you are selling the book into Barnes & Noble, you would talk to a diffeent buyer to get your book onto the Business shelf, than you would onto the Computers & Technology shelf.
Global Neighborhoods, as I have summarized it fits partly onto too many of those shelves and squarely onto few of them.
I've been reflecting on what this guy had to say and the fact is that he is absolutely right. I'm covering too much ground to try to cover any ground very well and I need to do some rethinking on that the book is about.
At the heart of the book I want to write is to write about how the world changes pretty significantly when the online generation comes of age and replaces the Boomer generation in the marketplace and at the helm of most businesses. What I need to work on is: do I want to write a sociology book, an economics book, a business book or what.
I open this question to you.
Remember, pick one--just one.
I think most of what I have gathered will still be usable. But the emphasis and structure will change according to what single point I hope to drive home to millions of inquiring minds.
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