Well, those of you who’ve known me for a while know that I’ve been working on a “how-to, everything you need to know about” online display advertising book for publishers.
In case this is news for you, I have found that many startups I work with want to make advertising as a key part of their revenue plan. However, most of the people I meet are people who have never worked with advertising at all, but only have encountered it as a snippet of HTML that you put on your site from an ad network. But shortly, to their chagrin, they wonder why only a few dollars pop into their account every month!
I found myself giving the same speech to them and after about the second time I realized that this was dumb; I should just put the speech into a book and then they could just read that and ask me for the finer points.
However, writing a straight how-to book seemed very uninteresting. So I thought I would make my book half about my experiences at Yahoo with online display advertising, and then the other half would be a straight how-to in case the reader just wanted to get to the point and skip the stories. But I did want to include them because I use them as support for what I advise.
It’s been over two years of writing with many thanks to Stephanie Zhong (Green blogger, Fabulously Green, @ThinkSideways) who sat with me every week and listened to me ramble about my Yahoo days and the advertising industry and put it all down in Scrivener, probably the best damn writing software out there.
I’ve been not writing somewhat due to a new arrival in my family, but now having engaged a night nanny, my brain is somewhat back to functioning and I’m back to writing. Currently, I am a little before half way done in the first version of the book, taking all the notes I’ve compiled and writing/editing them to narrative. With any luck I’ll be done with a first draft sometime this year, but hopefully not too much longer.
It’s been a great experience so far – writing long form doesn’t come naturally to me. It took me years to get used to writing in blog post length but getting heads down to write an entire book has been challenging!
In any case, I’ll let you know when my book makes it out. I hope to learn a lot by self-publishing (seems like I’m heading down this road, versus going with a formal publisher) and self-promotion of it when it comes out. I hope to take advantage of e-formats judiciously, although I am still a big fan of paper – what can I say, I’m old skool…!
To those who have contributed and helped, thanks a million! To those of you who will read it, I hope you’ll all get something out of it, as much as I’m getting out of writing it!