OMG OMG OMG

Being on the Blog to Book panel was more amazing than I could imagine. I was so nervous, but it seemed to go well. I’m writing this from the closing keynote where I’m half listening, half reading Tweets about what people thought of the session. The response was amazing, overwhelming, and most humbling.

For those who could not attend, you were missed. But you can view the transcript thanks to a very thoughtful live blogger.

For those visiting my site after the session, welcome.  This is a rather eclectic blog that isn’t necessarily all things to all people, but if you look at the tag cloud and the blog roll, you’ll probably find something that you’re looking for.  If you have a question I didn’t answer, ASK IT IN THE COMMENTS SESSION!  75 minutes have never went by so quickly, and I know we didn’t cover half of what we wanted to.  We did get some really good questions so I hope people found it useful.

 

He’s onto us…

Chris Anderson gives some real estate on his blog to “Blogging Heroes”, the new book coming soon from our group.  As he rightly points out, we did hope that the bloggers featured in the book would help promote it. It’s kind of a no-brainer - write a book about blogging, get people to blog about it, build awareness and hopefully purchasers. What’s become more of an exercise is getting the buzz that builds out of the echochamber that the blogospher becomes. There is no denying that you can get interest in a book online by soliciting bloggers and other influencers. But at some point, for true besteller status, you need to reach an audience that’s outside of that world. I think “Blogging Heroes”, despite it’s solid footing in the online world, is a book that is worthy of breaking out offline as well.

 

Is this a book for me?

 

I’ll answer that question in a moment.  But first, can you really tell a book by its cover?  And should you?

My boss is the head of marketing for all of our division, so he gets a copy of EVERY book we publish.  His assistant sits outside of my office, so when he goes through books and discards them there to be sent back to the warehouse, I’m like a Jewish mother hitting the racks at Loehmann’s.  Everything is free game!  Books, books and more books!  Free!  I definitely take more than I should, but I look at it as a service to keep M.C. from having to send more books back to the warehouse.

 I had seen this book once or twice in passing, but ignored it, categorized in my mind as “boring business book” and “big snore” - aka not for me.  But when you read the title, shouldn’t I be the target audience?  Isn’t this the type of thing that I spend my days doing? 

I’m not saying every book targeted to a woman has to be pink for us to pick it up.  But after reading the description and taking a quick peek inside, I really think this could be a book I could benefit from.  The cover doesn’t speak to me, sure, but I think I’m going to be glad that this one did end up on my desk.  The author is funny in parts, gutsy in others.  I’m going to be reading it at the same time as I’m reading The IT Girl’s Guide to Blogging with Moxie, so it’s going to be quite a juxtapostion.  I’ll post book reports as I go!

 

At last! IT Girls are here!!!

I have the joy and honor to say that I am holding in my hot little hands one of the first copies of “The IT Girl’s Guide to Blogging with Moxie.”

Let me give you a little background and explain why I am so excited.  About 2 years ago, our editorial teams gathered in Indianapolis for a 3 day meeting to talk about the industry and brainstorm new ideas.  One of the themes that came up repeatedly during this pow-wow was the lack of a truly female-focused series on technology.  Something that spoke to women, not down to them.  Books that made being a geek, well, chic. 

We left that meeting determined to define what made this customer, someone we affectionately dubbed an “IT Girl”.  It’s both a play on the concept of an “it girl”, someone new on the scene and making waves, and IT, for Information Technology (duh!).  While a typical “it girl” is a dime a dozen and lives for those 15 minutes of fame, our IT Girl was different.  IT Girls are intelligent, interested (and interesting), active, and educated.  They want to learn new skills or enhance existing ones, and are eager to use tech in their hectic and fast-paced lives, but want it on their own terms.

A working team of anywhere from 5-10 women and 1 man began meeting weekly to further refine the IT Girls concept.  We came up with profiles of who our customers would be.  Looking rarely further than the person in the next cubicle or the mom in line behind me at carpool, we talked about what the needs of these women were and how our series would work to empower them.  In the end, our concept was fleshed out and we were off to find authors to make these books a reality.

In the meantime, I left Wiley temporarily to create my little IT boy (aka my son).  When I returned, I was anxious to see where we were on the series concept.  In the time that I was gone, the team of aquisiton editors had rounded up some amazing authors to fulfill the dream as it were.  For our first book on blogging, I couldn’t imagine we could find anyone better than Joelle and Kathy to write this book.  Their fun and flirty style gives the perfect delivery to what in anyone else’s hands would be dry and technical information.  “Blogging with Moxie” is a fun, hip-how-to that I can’t wait to dig into.  In fact, in the next few days, I will be posting the top 5 things I learned from this book. 

There are so many people to thank for this, from editoral team members Katie Feltman, Katie Mohr, Melody Layne, Mary Bednarek and Willem Knibbe who worked tirelessly on coming up with the series concept.  Marketer Kelly Trent was a driving force from the beginning and led the team in my absense.  Andy Cummings, the publisher from the group that put out the blogging book is a true IT boy in my book.  There are so many others who I won’t name here, for fear of sounding like Julia Roberts at the Oscars, but trust me, I know who you are and I will never forget your support.   

“IT Girl’s Guide to Blogging with Moxie” is available in bookstores both physical and virtual.  Later this month, starting on about the 16th, it will be on promotion at Borders.  Just wanted to give them a little shout-out and thank them for their support.

 

LinkedIn Q&A

I recently posted my first question on LinkedIn.  Many articles about LinkedIn tell you that one of the best ways to raise your profile is to ask and answer questions.  Since the question at hand was about our proposed “LinkedIn For Dummies”, where better to post it than LinkedIn?

What did I learn?  Like any advice, the flavors range from so-so to pretty darn good.  For the most part, all the answers, public and private, had some degree of helpfulness.  The best answer was the one that had some common sense advice as well as some hints I had not thought about.  I’m putting it into this post as I thought it was worth sharing.  I must credit Eric Mariacher as the author of these.  I also included my gut checks after each item…

1st advice “Grow your network while you don’t need it” - absolutely right on target.  Like old school networking, the most important thing is to have your network ready to go when you need it. 

2nd advice “know why you want to network” - another good piece of advice.  For me, it’s about personal and professional visibility.  I want to be able to build traffic to my blog, to get my name out there as a social networker, and when appropriate, to help increase visibility of my companies products.  Check. 

3rd advice “get recommendations from current and past colleagues posted on your profile” - I did this after reading the list, somewhat hesitantly.  It was a little like asking for a prom date, or worse a “am i hot or not” ranking.  I only asked about 5 colleagues past and present, to minimize the possibility of rejection.  It was then very pleasing when I got two recommendations right off the bat.  This is something I will do, sparingly and thoughtfully, and will also work on giving more recommendations to others. 

4th advice “make heavy use of the Q&A feature (on LinkedIn) or post on forums” - Been there!  Done that!  Although you can see how this is easily abused.  The temptation is to post a lot of questions and give in a lot of answers, but you have to be very thoughtful about this to avoid overkill and irrelevancy. 

5th advice “never use standard boiler plate templates” when inviting people to connect -  I am totally guilty of this.  Wonder why I have a full page of unrequited invites.  I’ve resolved to stop this bad habit now. 

6th advice/fact “The more connections you have, the more time you must spend” - I haven’t found the logic behind this one, but I’m working on it. 

7th advice “join yahoo networking groups. You will learn a lot” - It’s quite silly that the best LinkedIn networking sites are not on LinkedIn.  I think LinkedIn is missing a huge opportunity here by sending this traffic to other sites.  As well, they are asking these groups to stop using the LinkedIn name, and are gaining the ire of members in these groups. 

8th advice “Read other 2 cents advices” - gotta work on this one more

9th advice “Do not forget other ways of networking” - Right on target.  None of these sites can be the basket for all of your eggs.  There are plenty of other sites worth your networking time.  As well, never forget the old school networking - conferences, seminars and other face time opportunities. 

 

Microsoft 2.0 : The Book

Many of you may have wondered why Mary Jo Foley is listed as a Wiley author when she has not as of yet written a book for Wiley.  “As of yet” is the key word in that sentence.

Today on her Microsoft Watch blog, she announced that she will be coming out with Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-Gates Era. 

She posted a brief description on her blog and revealed the cover.  This cover process was pretty easy, surprisingly.  The designed submitted several candidates, and when we saw this one, the lightbulb went off and we felt we had something pretty cool on our hands. 

All of us at Wiley are geeked about this book.  Mary Jo’s blog has been required reading for me for a while.   I’m very eager to get her take on what’s the current state of Microsoft and what she thinks it’s future direction will be.   Congrats, Mary Jo!

 

How would you make a “LinkedIn For Dummies”?

The Dummies team is working on a LinkedIn book.  At first, the response around the table was that LinkedIn is pretty easy and most people would not need a book to set up a LinkedIn account.  As the discussion evolved, people who have used LinkedIn for profile building, job hunting, and social networking started piping up with things they wanted to see covered.  I ended up calling the acquisitions editor after the meeting with a whole list of things I want to be able to do on LinkedIn but cannot figure out how to make them happen. 

 So I turn it over to others - what would YOU want to see in a LinkedIn For Dummies book?  What are you trying to do that you cannot figure out how to do, or what are you doing that you want to try and do better.  Use this opportunity to help shape a new book!