Self publishing is one of the amazing developments of the “social web”. Not only can we simply and easily share insights, analysis, stories, poems, movies, music or any other types of creative work – thanks to applications like Blurb.com, we can also turn these into publications – books, calendars and so on.
I have been involved in a number of collaborations that bridge the digital and offline worlds. There has been the marketing focused Age of Conversation books, my own self publishing efforts around blogging, and most recently, The Perfect Gift for a Man.
The Perfect Gift for a Man was a book that Mark Pollard and I edited and published through Blurb. But when it came to promoting the book, there was nothing that made it easy for us to share the book across the web (we ended up creating our own image based widget). Now, Blurb is trialling a new widget that allows you to embed, share, preview and buy books directly from your blog. I think it’s a huge and much needed improvement. Here it is below:
Did you slurp posts too? If so , how did that feature work for you?
it’s funny how our minds are shaped to read something long through a book interface…
Gavin,
The Blurb widget looks awesome. I take it you would recommend Blurb for self-publishing/POD projects. I’m curious, though, have you tried any other self-publishing/POD tools and if so, what’s your experience with them? Thanks!
Peter
Not for this book. We had chapters submitted as documents. But the auto RSS feed “slurping” does seem to work. Are you giving it a go?
Do you think this is a “learned behaviour”? Do you think this is changing with younger generations? It makes for interesting times as we become more immersed in technology.
Yes, Blurb is great. The Age of Conversation books (1 + 2) used Lulu which is also great from a publishing point of view, though their support was not great.
I may… always thoughthat would be a good app if you could pre-select and also arange the sequence. But busy busy now 😉