Perennials

The BS team spent the first full day of 2008’s Book Expo America watching booksellers, publishers, agents, authors, and everyone else get religion. In 2006, Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics, spoke to what should have been this crowd about the future and how the publishing business needed to move forward quickly…sadly, Tapscott spoke a large contingent of well-wired bloggers and a few other bodies. That room should have been packed to the gills. At this year’s Book Expo, held in unbelievably gorgeous Los Angeles — city of beautiful weather and clear skies (yes, the skies are clear) — the educational

Dan Green is one of my favorite bloggers — smart and provocative — even though we see the world from very different perspectives. I would rather read a 1000 of his words over 10 of most bloggers, even when he takes exception to one my recent comments, one where I was baffled about authors who shun marketing: Why should this be baffling? If writers wanted to be marketers, presumably they would have become. . .marketers. Instead they chose to be writers, presuming that marketing was the job of publishers. If one wants to be a “writer” and just write, that

Once there was an author who wrote a book. He (though he could have been she) sent the book to his editor who cried at the beauty of the words and published the book and the people bought this book and declared it a thing of wonder and the book was deemed an American Classic (because it was so good) and the author kept on writing books and publishing books and never bothered with anything so mundane as publicity because the author was a writer and writers write and marketing somehow happens magically and people just buy the author’s books.

I’m still trying to create some coherence from this year’s SXSW Interactive Festival. Lots of ideas coming in, very few coming out. I think there’s a high level meeting happening in my brain. Presumably, the neurons will let me know when it’s time for me to get involved. In the meantime, one quick thought about social networking. There is a sense that much of what’s happening online when it comes to social networking is being made up as it goes along. Fair enough. Everyone grasps the importance of reaching out and making connections; it’s the who, what, why, when, where,

I swear this is going to be my last TOC 2008-related post*. There is one more topic that has been rattling around BSHQ and, well, it’s time to get it out in the open. Blogging. It’s good, it’s bad, it’s ugly, and it’so misunderstood. We need have some frank discussion. There is no such thing as a blogging imperative Scott Karp, during the “Blogs as Books, Books as Blogs” session, made a comment that, sadly, was overshadowed by the bizarre twists and turns the discussion took. As a starting point, I want to highlight what he said: blogging systems are