Posts Tagged ‘B-Book’

February 22, 2013

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

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[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.