Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love) gave a a talk on Creativity and dealing with following up after a huge personal success.  She points to Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, where people believed that Genius didn’t come from within, but was a spirit that visited them to help further along the creative process.  If the end result was brilliant, you would be humble, because you had help.  If the result bombed, well then, it wasn’t entirely your fault.

Stephanie Anderson from Word Brooklyn and I had chatted briefly about Gilbert, when I told her that EPL was my literary Sex and the City.  I’ll explain:  I’ve never seen an episode of SATC and stubbornly refuse to do so, out of the ridiculous need to be original and contrarian.  I was in the process of dubbing this highly successful novel the same title; everyone’s read it, it’s now a Julia Roberts fantasy, and the hype is too big for me to have that same existential moment that one gets from falling in love with a book they’ve ‘discovered’.

Stephanie suggested I watch Gilbert’s TED talk and if I don’t think she’s an incredibly smart and insightful person by the end of it, then, no worries, just don’t read the book.  See?  This is why she’s a good bookseller.  She’s earwormed me without the hard sell.

The talk is below.  I’m not revealing whether I’ll read the book now or not, because it’s been hyped up enough and frankly, it’s your call.  Let me know what you think.

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So the question remains, of course: what next? Well, I’m delighted to announce that starting on 23 April, I’ll be taking on the role of Interactive Producer at Open Road Integrated Media, working on all sorts of wonderfully interesting and exciting new projects (which I can’t talk about publicly. Alas. But take my word for it, they are exciting, and they’re very interesting).

Open Road exemplifies some of the key attributes that I think are going to be crucial for publishers to not simply weather the years to come, but to thrive in this brave new digital world: a small, lean, nimble operation with an iconoclastic and focused leadership, a willingness to branch out beyond traditional print publishing disciplines and meld them with other media, and the fearlessness necessary to embrace new technology and techniques in order to spread the word about the authors that they’re passionate about.

I’m very excited to be embarking upon this new phase in my career, and really looking forward to doing my part in helping craft Open Road into one of the paragons of sleek publishing.

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When I first transitioned from publicity to a digital marketing department, there were a lot of mistakes. A LOT. Here are the top four things no one thinks to tell you when you first make the switch to digital.

Teach yourself HTML already

One of the best presents I ever received—aside from a perfectly torn, vintage Krokus t-shirt, which is another blog post entirely—was a tip about this book: Head-First HTML with CSS and XHTML. Yes, there is a sassy blond on the cover. Yes, there are really dorky exercises. Yes, I promise it will teach you HTML in a month. You’ll be surprised the amount of backend stuff that falls into place after you finish.

Trust Google

A lot of publicity factoids (what major bookstore fiction buyer has a mother who loves books about Texas? Which New York Times reviewer is a secret geek that loves hard science in her fiction?) need to be earned the old-fashioned way, by years in the trenches and good old-fashioned experience. But most of your everyday digital marketing questions are more technical in nature, and can pretty often be solved by light Googling. Video editing questions, solutions to Dreamweaver drama, what HTML tag you need: answers to all of these are usually just a few keystrokes away.

Try it. Literally just type in the question that you have, and click on the first search result. I promise everyone will be impressed by the breadth of your knowledge.

It’s probably under the ‘preferences’ tab

Lest you duplicate my experience of being busted by a co-worker in the act of flipping off a laptop and swearing (this happened after an epic two-hour code-digging session in which I was merely looking for the way to turn blue header text to purple and could not find it)—when trying to change the look on your out-of-the-box blogging software, just begin at the preferences tab, and then work your way into the code.

Don’t get too dazzled by the technology

Yeah, it’s really cool to be able to build a neat-looking website. And the second I heard about QR codes, I wanted to run out and try them, too. There’s a PR advantage to being the first group out of the gate with a new product, but if you’re not creating something that’s genuinely unique and interesting, even the exposure from being first will likely be limited to the book vertical. Don’t get so taken with technology that you execute something half-baked—just because you can technically pull something off, that doesn’t mean that you should.

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For me, I’ve been asked more than a few times ‘well, how did you get into digital publishing?’  And the answer’s never fun.  Because you don’t want to be an asshole and say ‘I just read stuff.’ But that’s actually 75% of it.  The other 25% is having a passion for the digital side of things, but I’ll get to that later.

You really don’t want to read about my background.  Trust me, I’ll fall asleep typing it.  But maybe you are interested in hearing about how pretty much anyone with enough testicular fortitude (tm Mick Foley) can be that Digital Evangelist without specifically beginning your career as such.

It’s not for the weak-hearted.  Nor for the wallflower.  But it does come down to a few simple rules:

1 – Be A Sponge.  To be a digital whatever*, you have to absorb every bit of material pertinent to the industry.  Read every pundit blog post (yes, even Godin).  Read Twitter feeds of smart publishing people.  Read Tech blogs, especially those outside of publishing.  Attend every conference your budget will allow, especially those outside of publishing.  There are free webinars, tweet-ups, networking lunches, working groups, party lines, soul trains, world of warcraft meetings…ok, getting carried away.  Just be there and be ready to learn.

2 – Try Stuff Out.  Don’t have an iPhone?  I hear ya, they’re expensive and AT&T sucks.  But you probably know someone who does, so go find them, ask them to download that eReader app you wanted to try out and buy them lunch to let you play with the phone for an hour.  Don’t have a Kindle?  You could hit up your old friend Techie McGadgety and see if he’ll let you take it for a weekend.  OR you could go on YouTube and watch a bunch of user demos to get an idea of how these things operate.  The important thing is to be familiar with how your readers are finding your content.

3 – Make Friends with the IT department.

4 – Work Your Ass Off. Sorry, there’s no short cut.  You’ll be up most nights reading Gizmodo’s latest review of the Atari eReader 5000**, or debating the unicorn with your new friends on Twitter, or trying to remember the formula for Pecha Kucha while signing up for Thursday’s webinar.  This is where the ‘Passion’ I’d mentioned comes in.  Look, we don’t have the answers, but we’re so excited to try to solve the digital business model mystery that we’re spending countless hours doing it.  If you’re just as jazzed about it, you should definitely hop right in!

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First, check out the new blog. I’m launching The New Sleekness with other smart, bookish types to fill a hole in publishing punditry: voices from the boots-on-the-ground folks actually working directly in that sweet spot of publishing and technology. I hope you’ll add us to your RSS Reader.

And second, YES! I have a shiny new job. I’ll be starting as director of business development at AdaptiveBlue on January 18th, working with a product you may already be using: Glue.

Glue provides an entirely new of way of connecting authors and books directly to readers (aka, one of the smartest things we publishing geeks can be doing). You know all that discussion about the need for curation and how authors and publishers must build direct-to-consumer relationships? Glue has enormous implications for both.

Before taking this new gig, I thought a lot about what it meant to leave big-house publishing (or ‘legacy publishing,’ as we’ve taken to calling it around here). Since it’s the only field I’ve ever worked in, it was a particularly hard decision to make. True, the challenges facing the industry now are serious, but it’s clear to me that publishing is chock-full of smart people who are all doing their best to keep things afloat. I love this business, and I have no doubt that it will find its way.

But I’ve realized that at least for the next few years, changes that affect the issues most important to me and to readers—DRM, rights, pricing—are going to be coming from the top down, not the bottom up. As much as I’d like to be able to say I’ve been in a position to impact decisions in these areas, a lot of them, by necessity, are made way outside of my pay grade and without any input from this peanut gallery.

As someone looking to fool around with the way that publishing works, this has been hard for me. One of the things I admire about tech companies is their willingness to try experiments quickly, evaluate the data, and then decide what’s worth pursuing and what should be ditched. Legacy publishers are learning to do this, but for the time being, it can be slow going. AdaptiveBlue offers me an opportunity to find a new way to connect readers and books. And man, does that make me excited.

So, I hope all of you will keep visiting this space to talk about ideas and experiments that are making you excited about the next few years in publishing, or feel free to contact me about them directly. I’ll certainly be putting mine up here. And maybe together we can try some of them out.

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