Author-ized Articles

These are my links for June 14th through July 2nd:

• How to Write Like You Talk — SkaareWorks -
• Top Ten Things to Think About Before You Go With Print on Demand -
• First Draft Secrets: Five Simple Steps -
• EFA: Resources: Booklets -
• Is Amazon Taking Over the Book Business? - TIME -

These are my links for June 5th through June 11th:

• There’s an art to writing on Facebook or Twitter — really - USATODAY.com -
• Publishers’ Assistant — Business management software for publishers -
• Dunn-Transform.pdf (application/pdf Object) -
• George Foster book cover design -
• Recession-Proof With a Book? | The More Clients Blog -

These are my links for May 17th through May 29th:

• FOB: Firms Out of Business -
• The Long Goodbye? The Book Business and its Woes -
• Author sues book reviewer over bad review and wins « Book Marketing Buzz -
• The Google settlement, answering some of the questions about the windfall - The Shatzkin Files -
• Robert McCrum: Will books mirror the decline of papers? | Books | The Observer -

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 -

These are my links for April 23rd through April 26th:

• US book sales outpacing UK | theBookseller.com -
• Exorcise the Ghost in Book Ghostwriting « Randy Lewis Kemp -
• Author Marketing Experts, Inc. » Powerful Podcasting -

These are my links for March 27th through April 21st:

• BBC NEWS | Politics | LGA banned words - full list -
• What I Wish I Had Known Before Writing My First Book - by Joanna Penn | The Creative Penn -
• Toward the end of paper | Michigan Today -
• Hardback slump drives fall in sales | theBookseller.com -
• Six Lessons From The Ghost Twittering Saga | davefleet.com -
• When Stars Twitter, a Ghost May Be Lurking - NYTimes.com -

These are my links for March 18th through March 23rd:

• Guy Kawasaki Discloses Ghost Writers, Defuses Issue | davefleet.com -
• BookPage: The Author Enablers answer questions about writing and publishing -
• WordFlood 2.0 -

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?

On the morning of Friday the thirteenth, I got a call from a client saying “Drop everything—we need copy for two sales brochures by Monday.”

If I don’t have an unbreakable commitment (like the BAIPA conference I’m recording on Saturday), I’m perfectly happy to take calls like this, because it means I can add a drop-everything-and-work-all-weekend surcharge.

So after an interview with the sales team that would be using the brochures, I got to work on the copy, first for the enterprise product and then for the family product. We went through some revisions based on input from the team, tracked down some statistics, and made some suggestions about the layout and images, though I found to my startlement that the designer was working entirely in Photoshop, which is an extremely clumsy tool for handling text.

The client loved it and I was feeling pretty pleased with myself, hence my desire to show it off to all and sundry.

But as gratifying as it is to have people tell me how well I write, it’s much more useful when people point out the areas that need improvement. And my colleague Baylan Megino of White Light Associates pointed out something very important about these two documents.

They have too much text to work as companion brochures for use during a salesperson’s call. A better approach would be to condense the text into bullet points and leave room to take notes, so the prospect could write down his or her own most critical data.

What these documents really amount to is a script for the sales force. In this situation, that’s a valuable thing to have, because the sales team comes from outside the company and is brand new. But it would probably be a good idea to go back and revise both these documents after further consultation with a few people who didn’t spend all weekend immersed in producing them. (Not to mention getting print-resolution graphics instead of images from the web.)

Now to actually tell my client that part!

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 -