Book success even sweeter in tough times

The publishing and media worlds have had a tough year. With magazines folding, newspapers dying or going digital and staff cuts plaguing nearly every industry, it feels there has been little to celebrate.

But while we watch our industry undergoing what is clearly a game-changing shift pushed by technological and digital innovation, watching an old fashioned book, the kind that lives between two covers, remains a big thrill.

This week, Jeanne Bliss has enjoyed a double victory with her book "I Love You More Than My Dog" Five Decisions that Drive Extreme Customer Loyalty in Good Times and bad. (Portfolio, hardcover, October, 2009)

It has become a BusinessWeek bestseller http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_49/b4158068815587.htm?campaign_id=rss_null

And Inc magazine has named it a notable book of 2009. http://www.inc.com/ss/best-books-business-owners-2009#14

Our hats off to Jeanne!

And for the record, the seismic shift and the rise of the digital book are both trends that I feel bring with them tremendous opportunity. More on that here later. After we've popped the champagne corks to celebrate with Jeanne.

New Year, New Rules?

The new year may be bringing new rules in the land of PR. Or, they may just be the same rules, redefined, for the digital age.

On December 17, Stephen Baker posted a piece called "Freak Out-- Twitter Infected by PR" on Blogspotting, his BusinessWeek.com blog, that proclaimed, "It became clear to me in my early days of blogging, four years ago, that the historic divide between press and PR was no longer the same in the world of blogs."

Translate that to mean that Baker doesn't mind getting pr pitches via his twitter account, and further, thinks that at least half of the then 2,500 (now over 3,100) people he has following his tweets are probably PR folks. I suspect what they are doing what PR people have always done – trying to figure out what might appeal to Baker that might not be immediately apparent from his writing or bio on Cision.

But is this really anything new? Seems to me that tweets have replaced the idle chatter that PR people used to have on that old device called the telephone. We have always tried to dig in a bit with reporters -- finding out that one management reporter loves western movies, another has three kids and is married to a doctor and someone else wrote finance columns but was penning a thriller in his spare time. That behind-the-scenes information sometimes helps us deliver things that will appeal to the reporter that might not be obvious -- Twitter does the same, just digitally.

When all is said and done, I am not sure there IS such an historic divide between PR and the press. Many people (like me) move from journalism to PR, from writing the stories to trying to place them. Some of us are trying to place content, others creating content for their publication. If everyone does their job well, the stories will be cogent and compelling, the facts correct and everyone name will be spelled correctly. Nothing new there, even in the digital age.