This Much I Knew

tl;dr I’m publishing a book.

So Mr Dubber got all excited about using LeanPub a couple of weeks back to publish his Music in the Digital Age book as he’s writing it, and that was nice because Dubber is supposed to get all excited about new things and test them to destruction, but after working through my book idea last week I took another look, read the FAQ and the manifesto and had a good old think about what I needed and whether this was useful for me.

Today I decided it was probably what I needed and likely to be very useful for me.

The “sell it as you write it” thing is a little weird at first but it makes sense if you already sort of work that way, which I do.

I’ve decided to start with something easy, to warm myself up and give the Leanpub system a test drive. I’m taking my blog posts from 2008 to 2010, specifically those about the social media thing, and editing them into a book. I’m going to do this in stages.

1. Convert the posts into Leanpub-friendly text and collate the book.
2. Put the book on sale.
3. If there is significant revenue use that to put aside some time to work on the copy, making it more print-friendly, removing excess linkage, etc, helping the book stand alone from the web.
4. Republish the book.
5. If there is significantly more revenue put aside some time to write contextual footnotes and introductions.
6. Republish the book.

And so on. And if people don’t buy, or stop buying, the book I’ll simply stop working on it. Currently I’m investing time in figuring out the Leanpub system and that’s a useful investment. After that it’s all down to demand. I quite like that.

The book is called This Much I Knew – Missives from the awkward birth of social media 2008-2009.

I’m concentrating on that era because that was an interesting time for me. It was the height of hubris for the Birmingham Social Media scene and a lot of bollocks was being spouted as people were trying to figure out what it all meant, if anything. And Twitter was growing exponentially leading to endless posts about what Twitter was good for and what it all meant. It was the best of times, it was the most infuriating of times. And I wrote a load of stuff on my blogs.

While I’m hoping is that some of the content is still useful the main reason for publishing this is to get the narrative down. It’s an interesting arc as I move from dewey eyed utopian to the guy who wrote Death To Social Media before stropping off to become an artist.

Right now I’m working on converting those blog posts (actually fairly simple with Leanpub’s conversion tool) and deciding which ones will go in. The middle part is easy and I’ve chosen “Death To…” as the final piece even though I continued to write about the Internet and still do. The problem is choosing where to start. The moment I figured out what Twitter was for seems right but the writing around that time is flabby and vague. It doesn’t really get good until I started writing for ASH-10.com in May, but then it’s a little formal. Tricky.

Anyway, I’ll have the book on sale in a few days. In the meanwhile you can register your interest and I’ll email you when it’s ready.

The cover photo was taken by Stef at SXSWi in 2008, arguably where my personal social media rollercoaster gathered speed…