Publishing and E-Publishing

How Blogging Helps Your Career #12 – The Garden

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(The roundup for the “How Blogging Helps Your Career Series” is here)

Last week I wrote about how you could use your blog as a rough draft for your work.  It’s a pretty great way to try things out and find out what works.

The flip side of this is in that many cases your blog already has a lot of great material.  This of course,is because your awesome, or at least because I assume you are, run with it.

Think of all the material you made as part of regular blogging.  Think of the posts, analyses, and charts.  Think of what you can do with that.  Think for a minute about how much you may have forgotten, or how much you did.

You’re out there planting seeds all the time, almost haphazardly.  Any one of those can grow into a book or a class.  A lot of them could be bundled together in a publication.

Your blog is a garden.

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Channel A: The Life of a Card Game

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(A guest post by Ewen Cluney)

494bb2c8ce284dcb939e61f3f268ce41_largeI hit on the idea for Channel A during the ridiculous rush of inspiration that came from discovering Cards Against Humanity. I’d had tremendous fun playing CAH with my friends, and being that rare creature, a tabletop RPG fan who isn’t much into board games, I desperately wanted to explore this new design space of card games that are more about words and social interactions. I also wanted to make something that was less Cards Against Humanity (“A clandestine butt scratch.”) and more in keeping with my own shiny anime-inspired aesthetic.

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You Know, Sometime I Want To Say “Enough”

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I love e-publishing and self-publishing.  Don’t get me wrong, I love Lulu, and Nook, and I own a Kindle.  I’m glad I can sell books via e-Junkie.  I’m even glad to take a look at Ganxy, the new e-pub/promote service (look for a review).

But know what?  It’s now getting just a little insane.  OK insaner.  I had a lot of tolerance for all these options, but I think that we’ve reached the point where, unless you dedicate a lot of time figuring out what the best way to publish your book is, you’re taking shots in the dark (or spending all your time formatting, not writing).

Every time I look at my next book or my plans for minibooks, I find some new service, some new question, some new issue to address.  Sure I can experiment with all of them – in fact that’s part of what I do for here – but it’s getting a little frustrating by now.

I’d like to find a clear way to get distrubition, a clear way to format, some way to manage to get this all done without having to use 3 or 4 services, or how that service-to-service opportunities don’t mangle your book.  I’d like some sanity.

But as our own Serdar told me when we discussed this, that was called “A bookstore.”

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.