The Author-izer

Posts Tagged ‘blogging’

These are my links for May 7th through May 16th:

• Publish your blog on Amazon Kindle in 10 easy steps | Blog | Econsultancy –
• Take my book. It’s free. / Giving away books as podcasts is new way to promote sales –
• Why Most Magazine Industry Metrics are Bogus – Henry Donahue – Blogs Consumer @ FolioMag.com –
• Who Needs A Manual To Write Real Good? : NPR –
• How to Clone Your White Paper for Different Audiences –

I haven’t written much about ghost blogging lately, though plenty of others have, and I’ve bookmarked their posts here. I didn’t think I had anything new to contribute to the topic.

Anyway, I seem to be doing less blogging and more writing of other kinds for my longstanding ghost-blogging client, so my authority as a confessed ghost blogger might not be as great as it was. I’m not particularly hip to the industry trends, as it were, though I’m well aware of the ongoing controversy.

I had heard that there were people outsourcing the writing of their blogs to workers in India and Malaysia who charged $4/hr. This seems a bit counter to the idea of ghost-anything: no one is likely to think you’re the one writing the posts if the blogger is manifestly sub-literate in English.

Of course, you only care about things like that if the purpose of your blog is to establish your credibility in your field. For most consultants and coaches, it is. But there are other uses for blogs. One is to provide “spider food” for search engines and attract visitors to your website where they will then take usefully income-producing actions.

If the purpose of your blog is to get people to come click on ads, then it hardly matters if the posts are scarcely-coherent clusters of keywords. That’s why “splogging” is so pervasive. It works.

But if you hire some poor slob from Elance to keyword-stuff your own custom splog in order to get money from Google and Amazon, I’d think the last thing you’d want to do is show the thing off to your colleagues, because there’s no possible way it can enhance your credibility.

Yet someone I will not name did just that not an hour ago, posting a link to one such article to a professional group on LinkedIn. Now, there is some actual useful content in that article and the others on the blog. It’s just that very nearly any other possible source of that same information would be more readable and more credible.

In fact, I hope for his sake that no one else on LinkedIn actually reads his article, or if they do, they resist the urge to comment in the group’s discussion section.

But I really, really want to tell this guy to stop being so cheap and hire a blogger who can write. Only not me. I can tell this one is a job I wouldn’t want, even if weren’t already obvious that the blog’s owner wouldn’t pay my rates.

I guess it doesn’t take that many clicks to support paying $4/hr. But what’s it really doing for your business?

These are my links for March 9th through March 16th:

• But ghostwriting Biz Is Good – Jane Genova: Speechwriter – Ghostwriter –
• The Impact of New Digital Formats and Technologies on Publishing : By Melissa Ward : Book Business –
• Printcasting | People-Powered Magazines –
• What Book Publishers Could Learn from Drug Dealers –
• This is not a newspaper: Why ghostblogging doesn’t work « Shannon Paul’s Very Official Blog –

There’s been a veritable storm of discussion in the blogosphere lately on the topic of ghost blogging. Despite the number of people weighing in on the subject, very little new is being said. The great bulk of commentators—many of whom are PR professionals who’ve made up quotes and attributed them to their clients without batting an eyelash—strongly oppose ghost blogging. A few others say that hiring someone else to write your blog is fine, as long as you disclose that fact clearly. After all, transparency is one of the key principles of the blogosphere.

The Story So Far

So, speaking of disclosure, I’ll repeat what I’ve said several times in other articles and in comments on blog posts. For the last two years (almost), I’ve been retained by a client who must remain nameless to ghostwrite blog posts.

The blog in question isn’t a “personal voice” blog. It’s not meant to be the CEO’s personal insights or reflections on the business. It’s what I think of as an “article blog,” one with posts about material relevant to what my client does. I’m not writing in any particular “voice” when I write these blog posts. Given the nature of the job, I don’t really have time to. Given the nature of the blogosphere, I’m not sure I’d want to.

If I remember correctly, the initial posting about the job was asking for bloggers, and didn’t mention anything about the attribution of the posts. It was clear enough by the time I got hired, however, that what I wrote would go out under someone else’s name and that I was not to disclose my relationship to the company. It’s kind of a pity, because it means I can’t point people to the blog, because I don’t feel I can endorse the company or its blog without disclosing my relationship.

I’ve suggested to them that it would be in their own interest to include a statement somewhere on the website that they get professional help writing their blog, but so far they haven’t chosen to do that. My concern is not publicity for myself: I wouldn’t benefit professionally by becoming known as an expert on my client’s subject matter, and I don’t want to be pigeonholed as “the X company blogger.” I just don’t want my client’s use of ghost bloggers (there are several of us, though I don’t know any of the others) to backfire on them if they get found out.

The Practical Problem

A couple of weeks ago, Tony Kontzner called to interview me for his Investors Business Daily article about ghost blogging. (The article has the rather provocative title “Writing blogs can be hard, so get help,” and does not quote me.) I told him what I tell everybody: that writing in someone else’s voice takes time and close collaboration, and it would be less work for CEOs to write their own blog posts and have someone else edit them for spelling and punctuation than to have a writer interview them every day for the blog and then have to go over what was written and correct any inaccuracies or statements that don’t ring true.

It seems not everyone shares my attitude to this. Kontzner’s article features a couple of web developers who hire teams of writers to produce posts for their clients, in response to an increasing demand. (It would appear that this demand is coming to PR agencies and web developers more than it is to writers themselves. Most people who contact me still want books written.)

But even they admit that if the blog is going to be convincing, the client has to participate and approve the posts. My ghost blogging client (and I only have the one) goes over every post I send and sometimes revises it a bit before publishing. They also answer their comments themselves.

Is There Really a Difference?

One question people like Mitch Joel are asking is whether there’s any practical or moral difference between hiring a speechwriter and hiring a ghost blogger. Or, for that matter, between ghost blogging and other forms of ghostwriting. After all, if there’s something innately reprehensible about hiring a ghost blogger, why should it be acceptable to hire a speechwriter? If authenticity is important, why are PR professionals still making up quotes from CEOs to put into their press releases? Why are celebrities paid millions for “autobiographies” they didn’t write a word of? Why should blogs get singled out?

As I said above, there’s a practical difference between writing blog posts and writing other things. Blogs, in general, are short, topical, and timely. That means less opportunity for the writer to convey the author’s real ideas or voice. It’s actually a much tougher job than ghostwriting a book.

But is there an ethical difference? Not that I can see. In all these cases, there’s a client who lacks either skill with language or time to write, and a professional who has both, and an exchange of value for money which is not noticeably different from paying someone else to clean your house rather than doing it yourself. Except for one thing, which is that most people don’t take credit for their housekeeper’s work.

Most ghostwriting clients don’t really take credit for the writing, either. The “ghost” gets credit somewhere, either on the front cover in an “as told to” byline, or in the acknowledgements using a euphemism like “I’d like to thank X for assistance with writing.” People who are experienced with the publishing industry know to look for these things.

The blogosphere is a fairly new arena of operations for businesses. It has different codes, standards, and conventions from the ordinary business world. It doesn’t have any established conventions for giving credit to ghostwriters, for instance. Dan York argues that this is likely to change: as more businesses enter the blogosphere, the definition of acceptable behavior will change, just as it did when businesses started putting up websites. He concludes by saying:

Those blogs will even “sound” human… just as good speechwriters today can create speeches in the style of the speaker, so too will ghost bloggers take on the style of the blog “author”. Blogs, podcasts, wikis, etc. will just be part of the communication plan… and in many cases will sadly spew out the same bland corporate drivel that caused so many of us to celebrate the changes brought so far by social media. I hold onto the perhaps vain hope that those blogs, podcasts and other vehicles that do speak with “authentic” human voices will rise to the top.

What Is Authenticity?

I happen to agree with those who advocate disclosure and even those who say that it’s best for the company if the CEO (or some other employee, if the CEO isn’t the best choice) writes the blog rather than hiring someone else to create the content. I’m definitely in favor of direct contact between the customers and the people who run the corporation.

But the fact is, a lot of CEOs do speak “bland corporate drivel.” That’s the way they’ve been trained to speak, and they never let down their guard. And there are plenty of “honest” blogs which are only of interest to the writer and perhaps a handful of friends. (And let’s not even mention the barely-literate blogs and the spewing-invective blogs and the “I just needed something to put next to the AdSense so I’ll steal random bits of other people’s writing” blogs.)

It isn’t the identity of the writer that makes the difference. It’s the writer’s ability to communicate. Above all, it’s the writer’s ability to listen. No one can ghostwrite competently without doing a lot of listening and asking questions in order to unpack meaning when something is unclear. The ghost’s job is to become a channel for the client’s thoughts—and sometimes a lens that focuses them. That means getting your own personality and your own writing style out of the way. It means studying your client the way an actor would study a part for a film or a play, and then interpreting your client for readers the way that actor interprets Shakespeare for an audience.

Putting the Audience First

Back in my former life as an academic, I used to translate Greek and Roman drama for the stage. We used to argue about what constituted an “authentic” performance of a Greek tragedy. Was it more authentic to attempt to reproduce the theater, masks, and costumes, and to use the original language, or to translate the play and adapt it to modern performance conventions?

I always came down on the side of trying to achieve the same impact as the original performance. Sophocles, after all, was writing in a language his audience understood, about subjects his audience knew well, using stagecraft that they took for granted. When he produced his plays, he used those conventions to make a connection. A modern performance which tried to duplicate the original exactly wouldn’t make the same connection, because a modern director can’t duplicate the ancient audience.

Ghostwriting is a lot like translating for the stage. The writer needs to make a connection between the client and the audience/readers/customers, and to do it while being true to both parties. The resulting document, whether it’s a speech, a book, or a blog post, has to present the client’s real thoughts and ideas—in a way that the audience can understand them.

Not many brilliant scientists are brilliant at speaking to the general public. Specialists (including ancient theater professors) are accustomed to talking primarily to their peers, and use a lot of jargon. They also tend to assume that people already know things, because those things seem so obvious to them.

Business is not always too different: the engineers who build the product may not be the best people to explain why the customers should buy it. But if the customers can’t understand what the product can do for them, the engineers have no reason to build it. If they don’t know how to put the benefits into words, they need to find someone who does.

So How Does This Relate to Blogging?

Even though I work as one, I don’t think hiring a ghost blogger is the best strategy for a company that wants a blog. There are too many viable alternatives. An articulate employee who isn’t the CEO can write the blog and become the voice of the company. (That’s what Robert Scoble did, after all.) The company can hire a freelancer to write the blog in her own name. (Stonyfield Farms did.) A CEO who hates to write or is dyslexic might choose to podcast instead.

After all, there’s no law requiring companies to blog. As for the love affair search engines have with blogs, a company will get just as much Google juice out of publishing unattributed articles using blog software as it will by having the CEO blog. You don’t need to hire a ghostwriter just because you want content; you can go to any of the article banks on the Web and get it for free.

If you really want a blog, at least try writing it for yourself. But don’t assume that hiring a ghostwriter automatically precludes authenticity. If you don’t look at what I wrote and say “That’s exactly what I meant, but I didn’t know how to say it,” I haven’t done my job. Ghostwriting at its best preserves the author’s authentic voice while it translates it into a new medium. And that should be true whatever form the writing takes: books, speeches, and yes, even blogs.

In “Blog + Book = Opportunity,” I talked about different ways to turn a blog into a book, also called a blook, or using a blog to write a book. This isn’t the only possible relationship between a book and a blog, however. You can also market an existing book by serializing it in a blog. Or you can create a blog about your book, including some selections from it, providing the back story, posting reviews and tour dates?and, of course, providing links so that readers can purchase your book.

The Other Kind of Blook

Nineteenth-century authors like Henry James and Charles Dickens didn’t publish their novels all at once. They sold them to magazines in serial form, a chapter or two per issue. Only after the serial had succeeded did a bound book appear. They did their writing and their market research at the same time.

Blogs provide a 21st-century means to do the same thing—easily and immediately, with direct feedback from readers via comments. The best-known example of this is Thomas Evslin’s serialized murder mystery at www.Hackoff.com, scheduled for print release in 2006. The online version includes some features it will be difficult, if not impossible, to include in the print version, like a website for the fictional company whose name gives the book its title, and a wiki version where readers develop the story in the direction they want to see it go.

Won’t I Lose Sales?

Sales of your printed book are actually more likely to increase if you serialize your book in a blog. Sure, there will be some people who take what they need online and don’t buy their own copy of the book, but they’re the same people who would just have checked the book out of the library anyway.

Even if they don’t buy the book themselves, online readers will tell other people about it. Having your book online means more people will know it exists, and the more people who know about it, the more people will buy it.

A printed book is still easier on the eyes, easier to carry around, and usable in more conditions than a blog or an e-book. And, given the cost of ink cartridges and paper, it’s less expensive for a reader to buy a bound book than to print your book from your blog. Besides, it’s hard to get an autographed copy of a blog post.

What if I’m Already Published?

Just because your book is already published doesn’t mean you can’t serialize it on your blog. Lots of authors are turning to blogs to market their books, and one good way is to use the blog to provide free samples along with back story or reader Q&A sessions. A blog also lets you provide color illustrations, which are expensive to print, and additional resource material, particularly links. It can takes as little 15 minutes each week.

What if I’ve Never Blogged Before?

Dont worry: blogging is easy. That’s one reason it’s so popular. You sign up for a blog account at one of the services listed below or install the blogging software on your web server, pick a template, and away you go.

If you have an existing business website, you can host your blog there. Your blog should match the look and feel of your website and include your logo and other branding. Customizing the template is the hardest part of setting up a blog, and you may want to hire a professional to make sure you get it right.

But you don’t need any special skills to post to a blog. If you can use a word-processing program or send an e-mail message, you can create a blog post.

Going from Book to Blog

There’s a Blogger plugin for Word which lets you publish directly to your blog from within a Word document. (Blogger is a free, easy-to-use blogging tool owned by Google, which also provides free blog hosting at Blogspot.com.) For serializing an existing book, Blogger is fine, but because it doesn’t provide more sophisticated features like categories, it’s not the best platform for writing a book, and doesn’t allow readers to view sections topically.

So you may find yourself doing a plain old cut and paste from a section of your book into your TypePad or WordPress or other blog. However, since you’ll only be posting a short section at a time, this won’t be too much of a hardship.

A Blog of its Own

If you’re already blogging, you may want to create a second blog for your book, just as it’s a good idea to buy a domain name and create a home page for your book. Host your book blog on the book domain, and name the blog after the book. This will help both search engines and humans to find it.

And don’t forget to include the “Buy this book” links!

Blog Hosting Services

Blogger/Blogspot (free, lacks some features)

Blog Harbor (30-day free trial; plans from $8.95/month)

LiveJournal (free or paid; paid plans start at $3/month):

TypePad (good features, but starting to suffer from its own popularity; basic plan costs $4.95/month)

WordPress (free tool, may be provided by your ISP; highly customizable) or sign up for the new blog hosting service at WordPress.com

Movable Type (for the more technically advanced; free for a single-user license)

Blog.com (features multi-language support; free version is ad-supported, but has most of the features of the paid version, which starts at $2/month)

Blame blogger Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine for adding “blook” to the proliferation of Internet-related neologisms.

So what the heck is a blook and why would you want to write one? A blook is one of two things: a blog (short for “Weblog”) created by serializing a book, or a book created from, or at least based on, a blog.

Jarvis coined the word “blook” in November of 2002 to describe the book of blog posts which Tony Pierce was preparing to self-publish. Pierce was sufficiently taken with the word to use it for the title, and is now the author of three blooks.

The Blooker Prize

It’s this kind of blook which has recently attracted media attention on account of Lulu.com’s 2006 “Blooker Prize.” Lulu produces and sells print-on-demand books and no doubt hopes to attract new business by means of this contest, which will award $1000 first prizes to winners in each of three categories: fiction, non-fiction, and comics or graphic novels. Entrants must submit three printed and bound blooks for the three judges (all well-known bloggers and authors). Non-Lulu blooks are welcome. (Tony Pierce published his two most recent blooks, which will not be competing, through CafePress.)

Blogs as Writing Tools

Time was, if you wanted to write a book you’d sit down with a pen and a piece of paper. (I wrote three never-published novels that way when I was an undergraduate.) Then word-processing came along, making it much easier to move and change the material in your book.

Many people think of blogs as “online diaries” or associate them primarily with political commentary, but blogs are really low-cost, easy-to-use content management systems. This is “content” as in “digital information.” If you’re a writer, your content will probably be in the form of text.

While blogs are not sophisticated word-processors, much less typesetting/layout programs like Quark or PageMaker, they allow authors to create, arrange, and publish all in the same place. The informal nature of blogging helps non-writers to get their ideas out there and create a first draft and let it evolve organically, then collect related materials together by means of the “category” function.

Getting from Blog to Book

Suppose you’re a blogger and you want to take your own shot at the Blooker Prize. Can you just export your blog into Word and send it off to a publisher? Well, no, it’s not quite as easy as that.

Blogs appear in reverse chronological order, with the most recent post first. Even if you sort your posts by category, the most recent will appear on the top of the page. If you want readers to start reading where you started writing, you’re going to have to reorganize the material before you send it off to the printer.

There are companies like Blurb.com working on creating software and services which will automatically import the contents of blogs and convert them into books. If you enroll in Denise Wakeman and Patsi Krakoff’s self-paced, open enrollment Blog to Book course, you get to beta-test Blurb, which is not yet available to the public.

Or you can hire a company like The Friday Project, a British publishing house which specializes in turning blogs and websites into books.

Manual Blook Creation

If you want to design and format your own blook, you’ll need to spend some time cutting and pasting. How long this will take depends on the amount of material you have. As of this writing, my FileSlinger™ Backup Blog has some 136 posts, mostly fairly long (600-1200 words), for a total of about 65,000 words. It took me about two hours to copy and paste the contents from the blog pages into the Word template I’d adapted from Dan Poynter’s New Book Model example, and another couple of hours to tweak the formatting to something more appropriate for a 6″ x 9″ book. Because the blog is based on a weekly column, I’ll have at least 9 more entries of that length before I finish at the end of December, so I can expect the final blook to be about 75,000 words, a respectable length for a business book.

What Makes Blooks Distinctive?

If you want your blook to retain the look and feel of your blog, you’ll have to put some effort into page design, or hire a designer who can create an appropriate layout and choose fonts and visual elements. You might prefer a square or landscape format book to mimic the layout on a computer screen, rather than a standard 6″ x 9″ business book. You might even want to produce the whole thing in color, particularly if photos are an important part of your blog, though that could result in an expensive blook if it runs more than 100 pages.

It’s a good idea for blook authors to reread their material carefully in order to correct mistakes and remove redundancies, even if they choose not to make any substantive changes. You may also need to get permission before reprinting comments left by readers, unless you already have a statement on the blog to the effect that anyone posting a comment is granting such permission.

Blooks vs. Books

In discussing the Blooker Prize, journalists have pointed out with some reason that a book which exactly duplicates a blog rather than reworking the blog’s content into a tighter structure could prove tedious reading. But this depends enormously on the nature of the blog, the blogger, and the blogger’s material.

The informality and the chronological arrangement may be part of a blook’s attraction. Replacing chapters with journal entries has proven effective both for fiction and nonfiction works of various kinds, and a blook of short entries can be ideal for reading during coffee breaks—or as a bathroom book, for that matter. If the blogger writes well and has something interesting to say, blooks will be just as enjoyable to read as traditional books, and possibly more so.

When Is a Blog-Based Book Not a Blook?

If you’re using your blog primarily as a way to generate a first draft or collect raw material for your book, the final book which results from your blogging efforts will bear about as much resemblance to the blog as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel does to the charcoal sketches Michelangelo made before painting it. You probably don’t want to produce a blook at all if you’re after, not the $1,000 Blooker Prize, but the bigger prize of a sale to a major publishing house and a substantial advance. Even the “A-list” bloggers who’ve been approached by publishers have created books which are more than just a compilation of blog posts.

Why Publish a Blook?

Though the $1000 Blooker Prize is more than many POD authors make from book sales, money isn’t necessarily the best reason for bloggers to create blooks. The real value of a blook is much the same as that of any business book: it’s what one of my clients calls “The thud factor.” A blook is a demonstration that your blog has added up to something substantive. It also gives you a chance to show people your blog when you’re away from computers. If you’re a professional blogger, a blook helps give your prospective clients an idea of what a blog can do for them. (Professional bloggers might want to create several full-color blooks.)

In other words, a blook is a blogger’s portfolio. And who knows? People might even want to buy it for its own sake.

Links and References:

Jeff Jarvis coins “Blook” in his BuzzMachine Blog

Tony Pierce’s History of Blooks (Busblog)

The Lulu.com Blooker Prize

Lulu Print On Demand

CafePress

The Blog to Book Course

Blurb.com (currently operating in stealth mode; e-mail egittins@blurb.com for more information)

The Friday Project

Dan Poynter&rquo;s Book Layout Template

Blog Hosting Services

Blog.com

Blogger/Blogspot

LiveJournal

TypePad

Weblogs.us

Want to write a book but can’t seem to settle down to it? Denise Wakeman lists some common reasons books don’t get written in her Next Level Biz Tips blog.

You can also sign up for the Blog to Book program which Denise is teaching with Patsi Krakoff of Customized Newsletters. The basic course costs $149 if you register by June 15; after that the price doubles.

Read From the Blog to the Book for some examples of authors who wrote their books by blogging.

And don’t be afraid of the technology—if you can type, you can blog.