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We have a publication date for the book!

I met with my co-author Silvia Cambie and our editor, Annie Knight, from Kogan Page earlier this week to discuss the next phase for the book now that we were nearing the end of the writing process. I’ve got one more substantive chapter and then I need to go through my manuscript and prepare a smooth second draft. Silvia has a couple more case studies and a chunk of final writing to do and we then both need to get together to write a concluding final chapter. We are due to submit the finished manuscript at the end of November. Based on that timescale, the publication date for the book is set for 3rd July 2009.

It was exciting to sit down together for the first time in several months with Annie and Silvia and really talk through the detail of the book. The last time we did so was back in the autumn of last year when the project first came together and our book proposal was accepted. At that stage, we had an outline of our ideas and argument for the book. Now, 9 months later, we’ve done a lot of research and interviewed many business people and communicators internationally as well as putting it all together into a coherent narrative and I think we have something that’s going to be really fresh and thought-provoking.

So what’s the book about? Well, the working title has so far been New Trends in International Public Relations. Silvia puts the case for the rise of the till now non-dominant cultures in global business and the need for cross-cultural engagement to be at the forefront of any enterprise that wants to make waves internationally. Her experience as a business communicator means that she has drawn together a range of case studies on leadership communication, corporate social responsibility and cross-cultural communications from all over the world. My sections on the rise of social media as a recognised communications tool complement her part of the book, taking the reader on an in-depth guided tour of the virtual cultural landscape of the interactive web. The web is another country - to misquote H. E. Bates - with a culture and etiquette of its own and to engage succesfully in that landscape, communicators need to do so understanding those “rules” of engagement.

We may be tweaking the title of the book to New Trends in International Communications, which reflects more accurately the breadth of the content. If we do, it’ll play havoc with all my links and the URL for my research wiki - rats! But it’s important to get the title right so it’s a small price to pay to have to go back and reset my links etc… Stay tuned and I’ll let you know.

In the couple of months leading up to publication, we’ll be getting review and advance copies to send out to reviewers and also to take with us on speaking engagements at conferences etc. We’ll also be talking to the Marketing Executive in more detail about opportunities for promoting the book in the traditional real world way. We also hope to be able to offer additional online resources to our readers, perhaps via this blog and/ or the Kogan Page website eg links to the source material for my social media chapters, verbatim text from interviews, background research materials etc.

So, starting next week, my “honeymoon” is over and it’s back to hard work on the book to write the last chapter….

Do you have any ideas or suggestions for us about promoting the book? If you’re a writer or publisher, has there been a particular strategy that has worked well - or not so well? If you’re a reader, what kinds of activities would invite you take notice of our book - and even buy a copy…

I met Kieron Smith at The Bookseller’s Digitise or Die conference a couple of weeks back when we were both on the Digital Spaces panel and intrigued by his online social networking bookstore BookRabbit, I asked him to tell me more about it.

# What is BookRabbit?

BookRabbit is an online bookshop that dynamically connects readers, authors and publishers through the books they own.

Using BookRabbit, readers can share their passion for books, make recommendations to other readers as well as creating their own personal bookcase (using pictures of their real owrld book collections) and catalogues online – anything from medieval falconry, through bestsellers, to educational publications for schools. BookRabbit has a simple aim – to claim back book selling and book buying, enabling readers to discover the right books for them.

# How did you come to be involved / start BookRabbit?

I’ve worked in bookselling for many years for companies including WHSmith, Ottakar’s and Waterstone’s - I have felt for a while that online people don’t get the interesting and engaging side of discovering a new book to read. Instead they get one where books are commoditised and just about price. Although there are millions of titles available through the big bookselling sites, more and more it feels like we actually have less to chose from.

I was approached by an entrepreneur in late 2007 who asked me what I would do about this given a blank sheet of paper, I told him and he said he’d back me to do the lot - something of an offer I couldn’t refuse!

# For booklovers who are already signed up to buy books from Amazon, why should they move over to BookRabbit?

On the e-commerce side we’ve hopefully made it as painless as possible! We don’t require registration unless you want to take part in discussions or set up a profile, so no new passwords to remember! We’re cheaper than Amazon on the top 100,000 titles and take PayPal (as well as the standard cards) and have free delivery on everything.

BUT

I’d like to think you should give BookRabbit a go because browsing other people’s bookshelves and getting title matches with your own collection means you’ll discover something new!

# Is BookRabbit for UK residents only?

No anyone can use the site, we only have UK shipping at present but hope to add International as soon as we can.

# For those who have already got their libraries displayed on LibraryThing, why should they also sign up to BookRabbit? (This is my dilemma too!)

I wanted to avoid the whole painful data input thing - so you can start making useful and interesting connections from just a few books tagged on a shelf - give it a go and see who you match with!

# What are the benefits for authors for signing up?

There is an element of vouyeristic pleasure for authors in that they get to see what other books are sitting next to their own on people’s bookshelves - and if they wish start to interact on discussions. They’re also able to directly amend their title details on screen, including synopsis, jacket, catagory and even add YouTube videos all of which go live immediately.

# What are the kinds of discussions on BookRabbit?

We have discussions on three ‘areas’ they are either books, bookcases or categories and there is a summary of most recent ones on the homepage. It’s early days and we didn’t want to assume we would know what the community would discuss, but it seemed sensible to anchor them against a particular part of the site, rather than have one sprawling forum - we could be wrong though!

# I like the function for uploading a photo of your own bookshelf. What’s on yours?

I’ve got many, many bookselves, one of which can be seen http://www.bookrabbit.com/bookshelf/detail/bookshelfid/113 I’ve quite an eclectice taste in titles. We’ve a special offer on at the moment that if you upload a bookcase photo and tag at least five books then we’ll handpick you a free book and send it to you. You can see how we’ve been getting on with our selections at http://www.bookrabbit.com/help/showfaq/topicid/77/page/1 full details of the offer at www.BookRabbit.com/free

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been watching how video dramas have been taking off online and engaging audiences in a different way from how film or TV dramas have traditionally engaged viewers.

Up till recently, movies have relied on audiences going out and gathering at a given time at a given place and all sitting down together to watch a film, munching popcorn and drinking soda. TV dramas need their audiences to gather at a given time, though they can stay home to do this, in front of the telly, munching whatever comes to hand from the fridge. Technologies such as DVD and recording devices changed those behaviours to the extent that we can now choose the time we watch a film or TV drama but we are still bound to the place we do that ie usually a living room with a telly in it. We still settle down for a stretch of 40-90 minutes, sometimes more, to watch an episode of a TV drama or a movie - and it is sociable in so far as we are there in the same space with our friends or we talk about it later with our mates or we text / chat on the phone during the programme.

There are a number of online video dramas that are changing the rules of engagement. One example is Sofia’s Diary, which is being shown on the social network, Bebo.com. The episodes are uploaded twice a week and run for around 2-3 minutes. It’s an online soap opera around the life of a 17 year old girl, her family and friends with the occasional to-camera video diary. You don’t have to sign up to Bebo to watch it but if you do sign up, you can interact with the “Sofia” and the Sofia’s Diary network of “friends”. You can become a “fan” so you can receive email alerts when the site is updated eg with photos or another episode. You can opt to receive text alerts twice a week to be kept up to date with what’s happening. You can also add comments to each episode - many comments are inane but in respone to one episode where one of Sofia’s friends dies, many of her Bebo friends shared their own experiences of bereavement and grief.

The production quality is high - and, no wonder, as it is backed by Sony Pictures, developed from the original Portuguese online hit. The show is also the first online series to make the transition across from the internet to good old fashioned broadcast TV, having been bought by UK’s Channel Five.

I think that this is likely to be the future of drama series - not being tied to TV or film or the internet but across many platforms, including mobile (and books, too), with added features such as interactivity with the show, its characters as well as other fans. As the teens and young adults who are the current fans of Sofia’s Diary grow up, they will be used to this kind of interactive relationship with their entertainment and media, and no doubt come to expect it.

For writers and creatives, it’s becoming increasingly relevant to think beyond the medium you are currently used to working in, whether it’s print, TV, film or radio and to start experimenting with other media and to think about building in interactivity. For businesses who are interested in engaging with a public that is growing ever more multi-modal, it’s time to explore multi-platform, multi-media ways of grabbing - and holding - the attention of your customers and clients. Sure, not every different media is going to suit every kind of narrative or every kind of customer and certainly, a frenzied spray gun approach is not going to work either. But if you don’t explore new ideas and fresh ways of doing things in a strategic considered way, you could miss out on opportunities to expand the reach of what you have to say.

For more on interactive online dramas, take a look at What happens next…? where “Each of our show’s episodes ends with a decision for you to make and your vote determines the direction of the series itself.”

This post is part of my occasional series on Digital Narratives. If you are a fan of any online dramas or other digital narratives/ stories or if you’d like to share your views/ reviews of online storytelling, please add a comment and let me know.

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Here are the links to articles and other resources on the web which formed part of my research for the Digital Spaces Panel discussion at the Bookseller’s Digitise or Die conference today. The list shows only the latest 30 items - to see more items, click on “Digital Spaces Panel - links” to be taken to all my research items on this topic.

I’m also grateful to the following people who kindly shared with me their knowledge about the use of digital spaces in publishing:

Ian Metcalfe, Hodder Faith and Hodder General - Publisher, Bibles and Digital Media

Lucy Luck, Lucky Luck Associates - Literary Agent

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Ever since the start of this year, I’ve been working like mad on my third book, the business book on New Trends in International Public Relations. It’s been fascinating exploring the web in search of great examples of how businesses and individuals are using blogs and other social media and also making contact with bloggers and others to interview them for their views and experiences of using social media tools for communications. But it’s been very “full on” and exhausting as I’ve been working on the book at weekends and on my days off as well as following up contacts in the evenings after work or during my lunch hour. I’ve now got one more chapter - the rounding up and final views chapter - before I finish the first draft.

So I’m taking a break from the book for the next couple of months.

I’m really enjoying having the time to do a bit more of my own blogging, which I’ve neglected somewhat due to all my time being taken up with the book. I’ve also got into reading books again - having spent almost a year, maybe more, reading blogs, newspapers and magazines to keep my finger on the pulse of what’s going on in fast-moving world of social media. What books I have read related almost entirely to blogging, marketing and social media so I’m really enjoying indulging my eclectic and varied taste again. I’ve recently finished the e-book version of 1968: The Year That Rocked the World, a social history of that tumultous year and an audiobook of 1776: America and Britain at War, a history of the critical year of the American Revolution and I am currently reading Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought:: Language as a Window into Human Nature (Penguin Press Science), about how our use of language reveals the way we view or construct the world. And my poor garden that has been unloved for so long is finally getting some love and attention - it’s been great getting out there, pruning and chopping and mucking around in the dirt, getting it looking tidy and lovely again.

Hopefully, the break will give me perspective on what I’ve written so far and help me with forming my conclusion for the upcoming final chapter. It’ll also mean that I can go back to the book refreshed and rested and ready for the next stage, which is reviewing and editing the first draft into a more publishable form. After that is stage three, which is to review with my co-author Silvia Cambie both my parts of the book and hers and work with her to sew the patchwork of the two manuscripts into one cohesive whole, ready to be delivered to our publisher, Kogan Page, in November.

Photo: thanks to Gianluca Neri from flickr.com (CCL)

For all you web surfers out there, if you haven’t discovered the Firefox browser, now is the time to expand your horizons. In particular, if you are a blogger or keen on exploring and using social media, Firefox is excellent for integrating blogging and social media tools for a holistic viewing and interactive experience of the web.

Most people start their web explorations using Internet Explorer because that is the web browser that comes bundled with their PCs. Internet Explorer is pretty good as far as it goes. Firefox is a free, open source browser that you can download from the web - it is used and trusted by millions of people and because it is open source, there are a lot of extensions and add-ons that you can add to it to enhance your surfing experience. Open source means that they have opened up their software to the world so that anyone can develop applications to be used with Firefox - this contrasts with Microsoft’s proprietory model where the code is secret so you can only use products that have been developed under licence to Microsoft.

Firefox 3.0 has just been launched and you can download it free. Firefox has a number of nifty features such as zooming and a password manager but my favourite is the ability to type any keyword into the URL address bar without knowing the exact web address of what you’re looking for and it cleverly takes you straight to the website you want or offers up a list of options as a Google search would do. So just typing in “bbc” takes you straight to the BBC’s homepage without your having to manually type “www.bbc.co.uk”.

But where Firefox shines for me is in its intuitive functions that help with blogging and other social media interactions. To name a few:

Managing Images for Blogging

I use images regularly to illustrate my blogs and if I get them from the web, in Firefox all I have to do is right-click on the photo on the webpage where I’ve found it, select “Copy Image Location” and paste that URL into the “Add Image URL” of my blogging application and voila, the picture appears on my blog post. I also usually add a link back to the image and I can just right click on that webpage and “Copy Link Location” to paste in my blog post.

In contrast, to find the image location in Internet Explorer is unintuitive and fiddly - when you right click on the photo, you have to go to “Properties” to find the URL of the image location.

Blogging right from your browser

There is a brilliant add-on called Scribefire for Firefox that allows you to blog right from the Firefox browser - it opens up as the bottom half of the browser screen and you can drag-and-drop images and text from the webpage you are blogging about into the Scribefire. It syncs with your blog so that you can even choose the categories you’ve set up in your blog (or create new ones) and when you’re done, you can either save it as a draft or send it to your blog for immediate publication.

Twitter and Firefox

If you are a Twitter fan, there are a lot of applications that integrate Twitter with Firefox so that you can follow your Twitter buddies and also post “tweets” to Twitter without leaving Firefox. One such is Twitbin which opens Twitter as a sidebar in Firefox. I was using Tweetbar but it’s not yet compatible with Firefox 3 - hopefully, that will be addressed soon as I prefer that interface to Twitbin’s.

Annotating webpages

You can also annotate webpages with virtual Post-It notes and send the annotated page to friends, using Fleck. There is an integrated application with Firefox that makes it easy to do.

Firefox Add-Ons

I could go on but it’s probably just easier if you go to the Firefox Add-Ons page and check them out for yourself!

If you already use Firefox and have some favourite applications/ tools, do add a comment and tell us which one(s) you like the best.

I’ve been invited to join a panel at “Digitise or Die: The conference for the book industry in the digital age” on 3rd July, held at the London Stock Exchange. The conference is organised by The Bookseller, the trade journal for the book industry in the UK. The blurb says:

The Bookseller is going to get to grips with the digital questions for the book industry once and for all.

Is the digitisation furore just a nervous reaction to experiences within the music industry - or is the heightening concern very real? Is eveyone prepared for the digitisation of the written word? What are the new technologies that publishers should be thinking about that could improve their online presence?

How can digitisation sell more books? What about digital rights and digital copyright? How do you find and develop communities of readers online? What are the differences in digital strategy of trade and non-trade publishing?

With e-books about to take off in the UK, isn’t it time the industry faced up to the changing consumer climate and technology?

These are just some of the questions that will be addressed at The Bookseller’s Digitise or Die full-day conference on 3rd July in London. It is fair to say, that you will definitely miss out if you are not there.

I’ll be on the panel discussing Digital Spaces, alongside Andrew Keen (author of The Cult of the Amateur, I think, though it’s not clear from the draft programme yet) and Kieron Smith, managing director of BookRabbit, which is a cross between the book social network LibraryThing and online bookstore Amazon. The panel will be chaired by Jeremy Davis of Chameleon Net.

The panel topic will be:

Different kinds of digital spaces: @ home on PC, out on the mobile, paid for content, UGC what works on different platforms? To what extent do digital platforms fit into each other to enable content to live across hardware boundaries? How do young people in different cultures interact with digital platforms? (itunes, phones, PC, online etc…) and how does this culture affect the use of such devices?

This invitation came via a non-blog related route shortly after my series on audio downloads and ebooks so it feels to me as if there is some synchronicity going on right now. Given my background as a novelist and my current explorations of the social media sphere, what I’d like to contribute to the discussion, I think, is the use of digital spaces by writers and storytellers from a creative perspective. How can we use the new media to enhance the way we tell stories? How might the stories we tell evolve with new media channels? Is creating a story for online reading different from creating one for a physical book? Is it different for e-book reading? Is reading passe in the face of YouTube and Flickr?

I’ll be making notes and researching all this in preparation for the conference over the next few weeks.

If you have any thoughts, ideas or experiences of storytelling in digital spaces, please do get in touch so I can share your views at the conference as well. I’d also love to hear from you if you have views about ebooks and the current state of ebook publishing - and any thoughts about what you would like to see evolve in ebooks and digital publishing in the future.

You can get in touch by leaving a comment to this post, or emailing me via the Contact link above, or by leaving me a voicemail at http://www.jaxtr.com/yangmayooi. If I use your contribution at the conference I will of course give acknowledgement to you for the contribution so do leave a name as well.

If you’d like to come along to the conference, you can do so using the Bookseller’s booking form.

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