The National Speakers Association of Northern California January Meeting

Last Saturday NSA/NC kicked-off 2008 with a fantastically full day of panels and talks on writing and publishing for speakers. Over 80 members and guests attended, celebrating the huge NSA advantage over other writers – as speakers we bring an extroverts’ love of talking about our books or blogs into the public arena, in contrast typically introverted writers.

To be a writer is to practice the world’s loneliest (but not of course, oldest) profession. Yet once the book is complete the solitary figure in front of the keyboard needs to go out and sell themselves. The writer as whore? I don’t think so. Not according to the panel of experts who kicked off the morning. They pulled no punches, sharing the wonderful and awful truths about writing and publishing books.

The morning panel was moderated by literary agent Michael Larsen. Mike handles nonfiction and wrote How to Write a Book Proposal and How to Get a Literary Agent, and co-authored Guerrilla Marketing for Writers: 100 Weapons for Selling Your Work.

On the panel were Steve Piersanti, offering the Publishing House perspective; Dan Poynter, CSP provided the self-publishing perspective; editor Alan Rinzler who has worked on books by Bob Dylan, Hunter S. Thompson and Jerzy Kosinski in his 40 years of experience at Simon and Schuster, Macmillan, Bantam Books, Grove Press, and the Rolling Stone Book Division of Straight Arrow Publishing; publicist Anita Halton discussed how to play the PR game. Alan was easily the coolest guy on the panel.

We heard something about the paradoxes involved in writing and publishing, where it’s always the worst of times and the best of times to engage:

The 16 Wonderful Truths About Writing Books (Michael Larsen)

1. Now is the best time ever to be a writer
2. As a writer, you are the most important person in publishing because you make it go
3. There are more ways to promote your books and profit from them in more places than ever
4. You have more models – books and authors – to help guide you with your writing and build your career as an author
5. Your have more ways to test-market your books than ever
6. Technology is the greatest tool for writers since the printing press
7. You have more subjects to write about than ever
8. Agents and editors must find new writers to make their living
9. If you come up with an idea for a series of novels or nonfiction books that you are passionate about writing and promoting – you can create a career out of it book by book
10. You will do a better job writing and promoting you next book than you did your previous one
11. You don’t have to quit your day job to write
12. Writing is a forgiving art – take whatever time you need to write your book
13. It’s easier to become a successful author than a successful actor, artist, dancer, composer or musician
14. Readers are the second most important people in publishing because they determine whether a book fails or succeeds
15. No matter how your books are published, you will be the most important factor in their success
16. You can spend your life browsing in bookstores since you have to keep to to date on what’s going on in your field
17. Nonfiction writers can sell their books with a proposal of a sample chapter
18. Nonfiction writers can be authors without writing a word by working with a ghostwriter as collaborator.

The 10 Awful Truth About Book Publishing (Steve Piersanti)

1. The number of new books being published in the U.S. has exploded to 291,922 new titles in 2006
2. Book sales are flat, despite the explosion of new books
3. Average book sales are shockingly small, and falling fast – 950,000 titles out of 1.2m sold fewer than 99 copies and the average book in America only sells 500 copies*
4. Bookstore sales peaked in 2004 and have been declining since
5. A book has less than a 1% chance of being stocked by an average bookstore
6. It is getting harder and harder every year to sell books – new titles compete with the other 300,000 published annually and the 5m previously published that are still in print
7. Most books are selling only to the authors’ and publishers’ communities
8. Most book marketing today is done by authors, not publishers
9. No other industry has so many new product introductions
10. The book-selling world is in a never-ending state of turmoil.

* Since a typical print-run on an analog press is 5,000 copies there’s huge environmental benefits in the move to on-demand digital commercial printing which currently accounts for only a small percentage of the total 53 trillion pages printed each year on the planet, but is predicted to grow significantly. The forests are breathing a sigh of relief!

Self-Publishing Rules!

My big take-away from the morning: self-publishing is the way to go! Why pay a publisher their percentage when you are the one who’ll do the promotion anyway? The downside is losing that 1% chance your book will be in the stores, if it is, congratulations! If it is not, congratulations! You are free to do the niche marketing, back-of-room sales and public awareness campaigns on-line and in person to market the heck out of your baby and keep all the profits minus the printing costs.

Two NSA members who’ve cracked the code

We heard from Allen Klein, CSP, the author of fifteen books, past-president of the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor, and the world’s only Jollytologist on how to get published and stay published. Allen makes a difference in so many people’s lives with his uplifting books.

Dan Poynter, CSP wrapped up the day with an afternoon that countered the claim “never judge a book by its cover”. That’s exactly what Dan demonstrated books are judged, and sold, on. He specifically worked on the all-important task of choosing a title that passes “the glance test” for buyers.

My one regret about the meeting was that people did not talk more about the value of blogging. There are an increasing numbers of writers who blog and find it keeps the creative juices flowing. Some even use their blog as ‘morning pages’ for their book.

Writing begins where it ends – in solitude

It took me a full week to digest this material and make the time to write this blog posting. Procrastination can have its rewards. Today’s Weekend Financial Times has a series of reviews of five assorted books on the subject of writing and publishing which are an interesting coda to this subject:

• How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authorsedited by Dan Crowe and Philip Oltermann
• The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writingby David Morley
• A Novel in a Year: A Novelist’s Guide to Being a Novelistby Louise Doughty
• Your Writing Coach: From Concept to Character, from Pitch to Publicationby Jurgen Wolff
• NW15: The Anthology of New Writingedited by Bernardine Evaristo and Maggie Gee

One section of the review hit home:

…the general assumption has always been that writers are born, not made. Asked what made a poet of Wilfred Owen, many readers would claim that the sheer force of his terrible experiences somehow poured through his nervous system and on to the page as if he was a medium or a lightning conductor. Owen encouraged this Romantic view of creative genius. “The poetry”, he famously wrote, “is in the pity.” But the poetry is also in the poetry: for example, in the experiments with half-rhyme which he shared with more skilled contemporaries such as Edward Thomas and Robert Frost – experiments they worked on and practised like musicians playing scales.

The sheer hard work of writing, as of any art, is what gets talked about least. In the post-Warhol age of celebrity worship – a phenomenon which the current buzz about creativity is arguably part of – people tend to be more interested in whether writers talk to themselves when they’re inventing dialogue, as Jonathan Franzen does, or whether, as Neil LaBute claims, all he needs to get him going is a Sinatra album, than in being told that writing can be the most lonely and labour intensive of all art forms. Yet no work of art takes longer to produce than a novel.

An excellent website to add to your bookmarks is the archives of all the Pulitzer Prize winning journalists going back to 1917. Full texts, photographs and cartoons are available for Journalism winners from 1995 – 2006 only.

This is a fantastic resource for the best reporting on a wide variety of topics which can add relevance to your next speech.

One of the gems in Andrew’s list of public speaking blogs was Jessica Hagy’s wonderfully witty blog Indexed.

Jessica creates inspiring sketches on Index Cards. These simple outlines of ideas are a great model for your next PowerPoint slide deck. Here’s a couple of examples.

What concepts or ideas in your next speech could you reduce to a simple visual?

Canadian Toastmaster and award-winning speaker and speech evaluator Andrew Dlugan has compiled a fantastic list of Public Speaking Blogs. He currently lists 75 blogs which cover a wide range of topics: speech delivery, visual presentation design, speechwriting, humor, personal development, and interpersonal communication.

I’m honored that Professionally Speaking is included in the list.

He includes a link to a sample posting for each blog. There’s also a useful OPML button at the end to allow you to import all 75 blogs into an RSS reader in one step (this is a little tricky. If, like me, you use Bloglines, first save the OPML file, then use [Edit] [Import Subscriptions] to load all the RSS feeds into a single folder.)

Andrew is actively soliciting more Public Speaking bloggers to contact him and have their blog added to his list.

Useful Video Critiques

Andrew’s blog has other great content. I especially like his video critiques of various speeches. These use YouTube videos to allow you to see the speech being delivered, then, in true Toastmaster style, a thoughtful evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of each speaker. I especially liked his critique of Steve Jobs’s well-known Stanford Commencement Address and Al Gore’s talk at the 2006 TED Conference.

Thanks, Andrew, for a great resource for all speakers!

Recently I’ve noticed a number of blogs that seem to be unloved, untended, unedited. They’re not as disturbing as Splogs (Spam Blogs) or Flogs (Fake Blogs), but they are quite annoying and deserve their own name, so I have chosen to call them Mogs (Moribund Blogs).

It’s apparent that many, many blogs become moribund. Blogging takes energy and commitment. People start a blog, post a few entries, get tired or distracted, and voila! a blog that has not been updated for weeks.

Nothing will turn blog readers off quicker than leaving too long a gap between postings. Would you subscribe to a newspaper that was only delivered every three months? No. So why expect people to subscribe to your blog if you’ve not posted anything new in weeks.

There’s no easy way to say when a blog becomes moribund. However, I think it’s fair to say that any blog which has festered for more than 90 days is probably in need of some attention.

So, since this is a great time to make resolutions, bloggers who have not tended to their blogs for 90 days should perk up and post. Or else, the moggies might come calling!

Meow!

This New Year seems like a good time to look back over my own blog postings for 2007 and make some 2008 resolutions.

Of my 140 postings (better than one every third day on average) certain topics sustain my ability to blog:

Professional Speaking and Speechwriting

The National Speakers Association annual meeting, our Northern California Chapter meetings, the Ragan Speechwriters Conference and the Pro-Track meetings all provided material. I find it’s a useful exercise to write a ‘trip report’ on conferences and meetings I attend. The useful thing about a blog is that the material I post is an archive I can easily refer back to.

Resolved: To continue to post about any and all conferences I attend, and to extend the reports by commenting on Toastmaster meetings.

Podcast Interviews

I’ve enjoyed my role as ‘outside broadcast’ correspondent. I moved from using an elaborate high-end digital recorder with external mic to my trusty Olympus hand-held recorder. A recent experiment with Skype convinced me that podcasts recorded from my conversations on Skype have great potential. What I like about podcasting is that there’s no writing. The voice of the person comes through loud and clear. It seems like a good idea to keep the podcasts to around 5 minutes. And I have no interest in sitting down in front of a mic pontificating.

Resolved: To continue to podcast interviews with interesting people I meet at conferences and also to seek out people anywhere in the world I can connect with via Skype.

The Financial Times

My daily read of the FT gives me a host of ideas for blogging. I usually spot three interesting articles for each one I write up as a blog entry. It’s been fun sending some of the FT journalists a note about my blog comments and occasionally getting a kind word in return.

Resolved: To continue to scour the FT for stimulating ideas to comment on.

Deep Issues

Looking back on 2007, I see there was a period in February and March when I was trying to look into ‘deep end’ issues such as Ethnomethodology and examine how it is relevant to public presentation skills. I think this is a grand subject for someone’s PhD thesis, but I could not sustain the interest myself. I did hear from a couple of sociologists who came across my blog because there is relatively little on the web about a subject as obscure as this.

Resolved: Stay away from the deep end.

Politics

Since 2008 is an election year there’s going to be plenty to comment on here. I’ve mostly commented on Immigration and Climate Change. OK, so this is not central to the title of the blog. But how these ‘hot button’ issues are debated and the way people represent (and mis-represent) them is a great case study in communications.

Fun stuff

Since all work and no play makes Ian a dull blogger, I’ve found that fun stuff now and again keeps things fresh.

I’m proud of my review of Bamber Gascoigne’s Timesearch site which resulted in an email of appreciation from Mr. University Challenge himself.

The Rothko paintings in Washington DC left a lasting impression, as did the movie Code 46.

Resolved: Have more fun with my blog.

Guest Postings

Little did I know when I invited Clinton speechwriter Vinca LaFleur to create a guest posting on the State of the Union Speech that this single blog posting would attract more visitors than any other. So thanks, Vinca.

Resolved: Invite other qualified people to create guest postings.

Hewlett-Packard

After ‘flying under the radar’ with my day job at HP, 2007 was the year my blog was listed on hp.com. To date, I’ve only posted a few blog entries specifically about HP, but since executive communications at the company is a rich source of content I could easily expand this. My role supporting Prith Banerjee at HP Labs gives me a ringside seat at a major global R&D organization. Communicating about complex technology is a fascinating challenge.

Resolved: More blog entries about HP’s executives in 2008.

Great series on public speaking by Aliza Sherman!

Part 1: Public Speaking to Market Your Business
Part 2: Finding Gigs.

Hard-nosed executives think ‘storytelling’ dilutes their message. They see it as ‘acting’, as being somehow less than authentic with an audience.

Nothing is further from the truth.

So gather round people wherever you roam; draw closer; are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. This is a tale of a filmmaker, Peter Gruber, whose really good article in the December Harvard Business Review reveals the Four Truths of the Storyteller.

Obviously, the corporate storyteller has nothing to do with the Gandalf figure above, or the ‘nighty-night’ bedtime stories we tell our children when they go Up The Wooden Hills to Bedfordshire. No. But there’s a lot of this cultural baggage around ‘telling stories’ that the executive communicator needs to overcome.

Gruber is an experienced executive and filmmaker (he produced The Color Purple and Midnight Express) ideally situated to distill the essence of good storytelling into a business setting. His HBR article does this by discussing Four Truths.

One: Truth to the Teller

Authenticity is crucial for the storyteller. His story must be congruent with his tongue, feet and wallet. He must show and share emotion. This requires vulnerability, or what my friend Lee Glickstein calls relational presence. The good news is you can practice being in relationship just like you practice your golf swing. And people on a podium who don’t practice this as often as they should are as embarrassing as any duffer on the green.

Gruber tells us that the main challenge for the corporate storyteller is to appeal to the listener’s emotions as well as their logical minds:

He must enter the hearts of his listeners, where their emotions live, even as the information he seeks to convey rents space in their brains.

One way to connect is to use what ad-meister Roy H. Williams calls Magic Words:

Learn to choose words whose unconscious associations will accelerate your message: “I stepped into lemon sunshine that was vivid, startling and bright.” In that short sentence, one tart word, “lemon,” added the sparkle. Had I written, “I stepped into the bright yellow sunshine of a summer’s day,” the oatmeal droning of an unthinking writer would have only just begun.

Two: Truth to the Audience

Gruber counsels executives to research the audience and understand what his listeners know about, care about, and want to hear. Beyond presenting facts that will satisfy the intellectual needs of a particular crowd, the speaker must, again, get the emotional arc right. One way to do this is tell the story in an interactive fashion helping people see themselves as the hero of the story. Make the ‘I’ in your story become the ‘we’.

Three: Truth to the Moment

This moment is different from any before and this
moment is different it’s now.
The Incredible String Band – This Moment

Never tell a story the same way twice. The context is always part of the story. The challenge, especially for a CEO, is to tell the same story over and over again and make it sound fresh each time.

Jack Welch does not mince words when recalling what a challenge this is:

Like every goal and initiative we’ve ever launched, I repeated the No. 1 or No. 2 message over and over again until I nearly gagged on the words. I tried to sell both the intellectual and emotional cases for doing it. (Jack: Straight from the Gut, p. 109)

Four: Truth to the Mission

The job of the corporate storyteller is to capture the mission in a story that evokes powerful emotions and wins the assent and support of his listeners.

In Summary

What makes a good presentation? It’s something beyond the PowerPoint your graphics wizards can cook up. It’s beyond the facts your investor relations and corporate communications department can load you up with. It’s beyond the supporting videos and carefully orchestrated cameo appearances your marketing and PR guys fund.

At the end of the day it’s as simple as your ability to tell a story.

Are you sitting comfortably?

Tell him there is measure in every thing
and so dance out the answer.

Shakespeare – Much Ado About Nothing

Hidden deep inside the HP Labs website on innovations for the environment which I profiled yesterday, is an important research theme for assessing the total environmental impact of technology on our planet.

Work being headed up by Chandrakant Patel on lifetime energy use introduces a new measure of environmental impact.

It can be argued that the environmental debate which is currently being conducted in terms of carbon emissions and carbon trading contain anomalies that limit full awareness of the impact of technology on the world in which we live.

It’s like figuring out the cost of running your car by only counting what you spend on petrol. As any motorist knows, there’s also the cost of repairs, insurance, depreciation and so on. From the day you drive your new car off the lot until the moment it is crushed and recycled there’s a total cost of ownership associated with running a vehicle. A savvy owner would want an accounting of this and not be satisfied with measuring one factor while ignoring others.

Just so, the concept of exergy allows engineers and policy makers a measure for performing accurate environmental accounting. Exergy-cost analyses evaluates the impact of human activity on the current natural environment and measures the overall environmental sustainability of different products: whether it’s a plastic drinks bottle or a supercomputer.

To attain true sustainability, it’s not enough to simply consider costs of powering, cooling and operating IT. It’s essential to take a ‘cradle to cradle’ approach, taking into account IT’s entire lifecycle – from the raw materials extracted to build the machine to its manufacturing and to its recycling and potential reuse.

HP Labs is working with the University of California at Berkeley to build a tool called the Lifetime Exergy Advisor, which would assess the total environmental impact (from extraction to shipping to operation and recycling) of using different types of materials (or different combinations of materials), different processes, operational or reclamation techniques.

Patel’s novel framework is based on the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and aims to drive the deconstruction of existing value chains with high resource costs and replace them with net-positive end-to-end IT solutions.

This research moves the focus on Green IT solutions beyond the level of anecdotes and into the realm of rigorous analysis.

“In the future, we will end up judging IT decisions based on the pool of available energy resources that we are depleting from the ground,” Patel says.

Technically speaking, this is the second law of thermodynamics, which says that although using a resource (e.g., burning coal) does not result in destruction of energy, it does destroy its available energy – that is, its ability to do useful work.

Such available energy is often called exergy and the unit in which it is measured is a joule.

“In a flat world,â€? suggests Patel, “the only currency is going to be joules – not yuans, not rupees, not dollars. What we want to do in our future research is to look at the entire IT ecosystem from end to end and quantify the available energy destroyed.”

This is a potentially game-changing way of looking at the environmental impact of IT.

It’s appropriate that in the same week Al Gore gave his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, HP Labs – the research arm of Hewlett-Packard – has published an elegant summary of a range of innovations which help deliver on the promise of a greener information technology landscape.

Al Gore challenged the world’s scientists to focus their research on confronting a planetary emergency:

The innovators who will devise a new way to harness the sun’s energy for pennies or invent an engine that’s carbon negative may live in Lagos or Mumbai or Montevideo. We must ensure that entrepreneurs and inventors everywhere on the globe have the chance to change the world.

So it’s significant that research institutions like HP Labs, with a network of seven R&D centers spread around the world, focus attention on environmental sustainability.

Innovative solutions from HP Labs which provide a way to minimize the environmental impact of data center computing include Dynamic Smart Cooling and Data Center Thermal Assessment Services – as well as looking beyond the data center to energy-adaptive displays, better ways to keep chips cool and video conferencing that has the feel of a face-to-face meeting. From the glass house to the executive jet there are now a range of environmentally sensible solutions that you can implement today, if you choose to do so.

These solutions from HP Labs allow customers the choice of an environmentally conscious alternative to the more profligate computing technology they may currently use.

So if you work in corporate computing, ask your CIO two things.

Firstly, ask them to evaluate the environmental impact of the entire IT life-cycle in your organization. Are there ways to implement technology that is good for business and good for the planet?

Secondly, ask them to consider their response to the question Al Gore posed yesterday in Oslo:

The future is knocking at our door right now. Make no mistake, the next generation will ask us one of two questions. Either they will ask: “What were you thinking; why didn’t you act?�

Or they will ask instead: “How did you find the moral courage to rise and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?�

It’s your choice.