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February 22, 2013

The “B-Book”. A new book medium in the making?

4 Comments

[THOUGHTS ON THE B-BOOK FORMAT]

We have hard­back books, we have paper­back books, we have Kindle books, we have e-books, we have iBooks…

I’ve had some suc­cess with all of those, over the years…

But the for­mat that has given the most joy over time, is the B-book i.e. the blog book.

The B-book is a book that starts life out as a blog post. My first book, “Ignore Every­body” began life that way, as did my friend, Aus­tin Kleon’s delight­ful clas­sic, “How To Steal Like an Artist”.

Sure, both became mains­tream bes­tse­llers later, but only AFTER their magic was already igni­ted all over the web. In B-book for­mat, both have been seen by lite­rally millions of peo­ple. “Ignore Every­body” has been down­loa­ded well over 5 million times over the years, maybe 10 million. That’s an inc­re­di­ble num­ber, really.

Whe­reas most blog posts get buried and for­got­ten within days, often hours, B-books keep get­ting dis­co­ve­red again and again, pas­sed around again and again, fore­ver. The ori­gi­nal Ignore Every­body is almost a decade old, and it still gets read by thou­sands of peo­ple, every month. Most con­ven­tio­nally published books can’t say that, not even close.

The disad­van­tage is, of course, that it’s hard to get peo­ple to pay you for B-books. I never tired, frankly. I just assu­med if enough peo­ple read them, I’d find a way to make a living from it in an indi­rect way, eventually.

And time pro­ved me correct: a lot of peo­ple who first dis­co­ve­red me via Ignore Every­body went on to become gaping­void art collec­tors and/or cor­po­rate clients. Same is true for the other B-Books I wrote.

“The Art Of Not Suc­king” is my latest effort; I’m also currently wor­king on another one about my client, Racks­pace.

True, the for­mat may not be for every­body. I’m totally OK with that, to be honest. It’s an exci­ting medium that, although I’ve been wor­king with it for almost a decade, I still feel like it’s new to me, it still feels like it’s a new world worth con­que­ring. Like I said, it’s exciting.

Tags: Austin Kleon, B-Book, How To Steal Like an Artist, Ignore Everybody, The Art Of Not Sucking, The Rackspace Book

4 Responses to “The “B-Book”. A new book medium in the making?”

1. Shelley Noble says:

   February 24, 2013 at 10:35 PM

   Hugh, you are on fire. This last series of posts are all worth my sen­ding to peo­ple I care about.

   Rock on.

   Reply
2. Andrew says:

   February 25, 2013 at 2:08 PM

   Ama­zing. Both you & AK have been very ins­pi­ring. Thanks for all your “freewill”.

   Reply
3. How to be better with whatever you want to do says:

   February 27, 2013 at 8:04 AM

   […] add to it as I learn new life hacks. So, you might want to book­mark this and come back often. This evol­ving blog book idea is ins­pi­red by Hugh. The dra­wing is his […]

   Reply
4. Wendy says:

   4 weeks ago at 8:27 PM

   I love that you wrote about this. I am currently wor­king on a pro­ject (and stran­gely put the blog on hold to do it, should pro­bably remedy that) that I really just want to share with every­body. There’s so much grief out there about giving your work away for free that I feel guilty wan­ting to do that. Thank you for your thoughts. Cause I was going to do it anyway.

   Reply