On Words and Business

A great article from iMedia Connection about 6 things marketers should know about PR.

1. The press release is dead. (I did not know this!)
2. Don’t beat a dead horse. (I’m a strong proponent of this and probably lean too far into the not-even-checking-if-it’s-dead camp.)
3. Be considerate of a reporter’s time. (Actually, of anyone’s time.)
4. No hype.
5. Help the reporter build the story.
6. Don’t rely on press to drive sales.

The cover story in this week’s Publisher’s Weekly is about an interesting new way to publish books and still make money. Counterintuitively, it includes giving away a free e-book. It also includes some pretty creative ways to monetize the effort. But it isn’t all about the book.

Maybe it isn’t all about the book anywhere anymore. Maybe it never will be again.

Good luck to Cory Doctorow. I hope is experiment is wildly successful!

I just love the name of this blog I discovered: Black Plastic Glasses.

It contains “musings on publishing and life in the digital age.”

At long last, I decided to hire a virtual assistant. And I decided to use Elance to find the VA. After researching what companies were available that did what I needed, I registered, wrote a project description, and invited a company to bid on the project. They never responded. So I researched a few more companies and invited them to bid. One declined and the others haven’t responded.

So far, I’m not impressed with the responsiveness of any of these companies except the one who declined within an hour of my invitation.  I’m a little nervous about opening the bid up to everyone, because I prefer to vet the company first. But it would appear my vetting process needs some help, since none of the companies I selected based on my criteria even bothered to respond.

The whole idea behing hiring a virtual assitant was to make my life easier. So far? Not so much.

A friend and I were just discussing the way the workplace was portrayed in t.v. shows from the 1960s and 1970s.

Business moved much more slowly when the process of looking through data (via punch cards) was onerous and time-consuming, when there was no fax to send documents instantaneously, when overnight shipping wasn’t available. Now that things move faster, we’re expected to do more with our time.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed or a bit guilty because you snuck out of the office early, remember this: by lunchtime, you’ve probably done more work than your 60s-70s counterpart did in a whole day.

The Nieman Journalism Lab.

Interesting stuff.