This blog is a companion to the book ‘Public Relations and the Social Web’. It will be published in a couple of weeks. Last week as a first time author, I got to see my book in printed, hard copy form for the first time. For me at least, writing the book was a long held ambition, I found myself on garden leave with some free time but even when the book was accepted for publication it seemed unreal. There are various stages that make the unreal, real; the point when I stumbled across it on Amazon was one, but getting hold of the physical manifestation was the real milestone.
If you have a book struggling to get out or you are in an early stages of the process of getting your first book out here are a few things that I wasn’t prepared for;
- The publisher decides what it looks like, as a first time author you have no experience of what works and your views or wishes won’t count for much.
- You write, edit, re-read and proof read. An author will read their own book four or five times in its entirity before publication.
- Reading your own book when it is printed sometimes feels like you are reading someone else’s book. I suspect that in the months between submitting and publication you start to forget some of the 60,000+ words. I really felt when I dipped in to the published copy that some of it was new to me (and I found it interesting!)
- When you’ve finished writing, the writing doesn’t stop, there are blogs, guest posts and articles that all need to be written. Time consuming but if you were never sure whether you were a writer or not, the confirmation is right there.
If you are interested in reading it too it’s available to order from the publisher Kogan Page and from Amazon.
Derek Draper has recently returned to the Labour fold to champion their social media offensive after many years of absence. He is a spin doctor of the old school who seems incapable of ditching the smoke and mirrors. He has been building a following on twitter but his account was suspended yesterday as a result of unusual activity, which usually means you have been breaking twitter rules in terms of the number of people that you are trying to follow. In effect spamming.
Scottish actor Ewan McGregor is the latest victim of 
In the last 24 hours Barack Obama’s Twitter has been 
How do you promote sales of a new album in a world where few people buy albums any more? Radiohead broke new ground with ‘In Rainbows’ when they invited fans to pay what they liked for the downloads (on average $4.64 apparently). 
