The question in the title is somewhat misleading. I don’t think magazines and newspapers will join the 8-track. There’s a place for print in our lives, and while the content companies who publish magazines and newspapers have brighter futures if they embrace a digital direction, printed media will remain part of our lives forever. To what extent is the big question.
What the Iraq War coverage did was make blogs prominent because many dared to touch on the sobering reality of a disastrous war while the mainstream media turtled.
History is written by the victors, it is said, and usually, the victorious side can exert control on the media in the nation. With blogs, this is not as simple and obvious to do.
Blogs have been around since the late 1990s, but blogging like we see today is definitely “in,” everyone’s doing it: the President of Iran’s got one, for the love of all things holy. Like everything else, there will be some kind of regression to the mean where less incremental people will turn blogging (in other words, growth will slow down), or those who do blog will probably blog less frequently.
In recent weeks, there has been growing talk about the potential slowdown of the blogosphere. For our previous comments click here.
As I was reading all of the discussion, I wanted to see if there were any stats on number of books that are being published per year. I’d estimate that it’s somewhat related.
Many would-be authors turn to blogging. Of course, blogging allows for many unknown authors to be discovered. That’;s why I wrote the two are related, and not inversely related. In fact, many will jump at the opportunity to get some offline credibility: look at Amanda Congdon moving to ABC and Wonkette’s Ana Maria Cox writing for Time magazine.
When it comes to books though, something is happening in the blogosphere that I fear will make some would-be books never be written. We’re not talking about fiction, just non-fiction, and in fact, mainly business or any other topic that becomes timely and dated.
It’s one thing to run an online magazine, it’s quite another to run a blog (let alone a blog network). But one derivative of blogging is that a writer can get the same satisfaction that he or she would from being published, and then some.
Apart from the satisfaction of knowing that people read your thoughts, blogging yields far more personal gratification in many ways: the timeliness, the feedback, etc.
Think about it: when you get published, you are usually relevant for a month or two; then the book publisher moves to promoting the next batch of books it publishes. One percent of 1% of authors go on to become super successful and can pump out book upon book and remain relevant perpetuously. However, with a blog, you can essentially remain relevant so long as you choose. The author takes control of the publishing cycle.
Admittedly, most writers don’t care much for marketing or administration, hence the value of a publisher. But even the least business-savvy writer will tell you that using blogging technology is pretty seamless. As for marketing and what not, it’s not rocket science either. You also can choose which shelf and section to be in, proverbially speaking.
It’s a matter of time: I started writing my third book, Context is King. As I was researching it, I got a lot of the ideas that became the foundation of Mojo Supreme. The blog network in the company, the search engine, etc. all have a “context is king” application. A lot of what would have ended up in the book morphed into this very same blog in question.
In all fairness, books and blogs are very complementary. Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail and John Battelle’s SearchBlog being two examples of people using blogs to promote books but who eventually let the blogs become something unique and, well, self-standing. Over the course of history, I am sure the blogs will prove more important and arguably, lucrative, that the books themselves. I could be wrong on this, because a successful book can make you a multi-millionaire.
The key thing is, right now: content is worth more online than offline. I personally took the entire content of my first two books and created websites out of them. Now, they are “sub-categories” in the greater network. Here are the introductions of book one (B-School advice for students) and book two (Alexander the Great’s “autobiography”).
The book’s official websites are here and here, but to me, I rather get people to read them for free, than pay for the books. That’s not the artist me in talking, it’s the businessman: we’re seeing what I describe as the 25/5 divide: 25% of people’s time is spent online, yet 5% of marketing budgets are spent online. This creates a massive opportunity to shift content online and make money from advertising. My books are in most bookstores (assuming our distribution company is doing their job), I sell a few books here and there in each bookstore. But as much as people buy books online, most people online read content for free. Why should I not target those too?
My decision was a gut feeling that the content would help me grow our network of sites faster. My second book went to a second print, I had nothing to prove. I was fortunate that I did not need the money from each book sale, I wanted to unleash the content before more people, to increase traffic, time spent on the site etc. Online was where the growth was. To me, it was a simple decision.
More or less using that same analogy, while I wrote my first book in a month and my second in a week (I was working full time mind you, running for sales for a company that eventually exited for $13.5M). Yet my third book, Context is King, is not advancing as fast as I thought. Of course, I am busy with Mojo Supreme, which has grown 2,500% since our first month and I am writing more than enough on our network of blogs, now accounting for 17 blogs, and roughly 10,000 posts since they launched.
If the growth is indeed online, then I expect more authors to put their content online too.
Any thoughts?
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