So I went with a print book. And I did a lot of unconventional things – beginning with the announcement — and they paid off. So, here’s my advice on the new rules for self-publishing.

1. Mainstream publishers help very few people. And probably not you.
Authors sell books, not publishers. For writers without a big name, publishers give them credibility. The problem is that publishers aren't set up to be able to make money from authors who haven't already made a name for themselves. This arrangement used to be fine before social media, before almost every author needed a channel to an audience. But now authors have the ready-made sales channel that is social media, so the publishers are no longer the gatekeepers to customers.

Amanda Hocking is reportedly making a million dollars a year self-publishing ebooks. And very rich author Joe Konrath, who has written about the math behind publishing, recently he turned down a half-a-million-dollar book deal so that he could self-publish.

Mainstream publishers don’t work for unknown authors either. So when publishers give an advance to someone without their own audience, the publisher finds itself in a very high-risk, venture-capital type model, but they are venture capitalists for individuals rather than companies. Very few individuals can sell a book on a large scale through a publisher if they couldn’t do it on their own anyway. And if you could do it on your own, why wouldn’t you? The money you earn is so much higher when you self-publish if you can actually sell the book.

If you don’t have a big name, use a blog to get one. If your content is not interesting enough to build up a blog readership, it’s probably not interesting enough to sell books.

2. Self-publishing should be about making money.
You can use a print book from a big publisher to get your name into the speaking world. And then make $15,000 a speech.  I know. I went that route, and it works. (Although the life of a speaker, traveling all the time, is arguably terrible and there’s a reason mostly men choose it. But that’s for another post.)

A self-published book does not get you credibility. So you should do it only for the money. And, in this case, you should consider doing a print book. You can charge more for print and it’s hard to convince people they should buy an ebook when, presumably, your ideas are already online.

(And, if they are not already online, how do you know if they are good? No mainstream publisher will take your book, so the presumption is your ideas suck until someone shows you they don’t.)

3. Print books are souvenirs: Party favors after a fun time.
This is especially true when it comes to blogs with large readerships, or consultants who have changed thousands of lives at big companies. Books take up space in your house, they add to your list of frivolous possessions, and they are expensive in an age when information is largely free. So a print book needs to be like candy in your hand, an interior design choice, an extension of who you are, just like how you have Nike shoes and a Marc Jacobs skirt.

This means that the aesthetics of print books is improving fast. If it's not nice to hold or put on a shelf, then you may as well have it electronically.

Also, once the book is a souvenir of an experience, the book doesn’t need to be completely new. There’s a long list of people who publish great books that are largely excerpts from their blog: Seth Godin's Tribes and Guy Kawasaki's Art of the Start, for instance. That seems fine to me. Almost useful. Because loyal readers will see the short burst of ideas from a blog recombined and reordered into a bigger idea. Blog ideas add up to something. That something is revealed in a book.

4. You don’t need a title.
Self-published books sell via social media word-of-mouth, which is links between social media platforms. There is no need for a title when information is traveling like this. A book is dependent on a friend's endorsement and a link, rather than having the title of the book call out to browsers in a bookstore.

If a book is going to be reviewed in print and then you use that review to go to a bookstore and ask a clerk for a book, only then do you need a great title that someone can remember. But there is none of that when you are promoting a book via social media.

Today the promise of the book is more important than the title. The promise of the book needs to fit into the promise of some given social networks. For example, if I have a book about medicine in Mesopotamia and I can’t find a history of medicine community or a Mesopotamia community, it’ll be hard to promote the book.

Google searches make markets for product sales if you want to pick up customers via search. Communities make markets for books if you want to pick up buyers via word of mouth.

5. Forget about the book cover — have a great landing page instead.
You are going to send people to a page to buy a book, not a book store, not Amazon. This is your place where you are selling. It’s like your food truck. People will take a look at it quickly to see if it’s trustworthy and worth their time to try it.

The number of people you lose on the buy now page has to be really, really small. And it is not necessarily true that a picture of the cover of your book is what will close the sale. So you need to do a lot of tests to see what kind of copy and layout can close your sale. And if you’re on a limited budget, tell your designer to focus on the landing page, not the book cover.

Today authors need to be good at creating landing pages. It used to be that publishers were market-makers for books. We know now that authors are, but since publishers are not great at online marketing, it makes sense that the person who is writing—and connecting with the audience—would also be the person writing the landing page to turn interest into sales.

I used to online tool Unbounce which does a great job of guiding sellers through the process of creating effective landing pages. (Here's the landing page I made.)

6. Do the printing in China.
It’s really difficult to make a book look as good at one of those fun, interior-decorator type books you see in Anthropologie or CB2—the kind that look beautiful on your shelf, like they were made especially for your living room. I wanted that, though.

Melissa solved the problem because was able to negotiate a book production deal with a company in China that speaks only Chinese. (Of course I expressed worries because China is known for having quality issues. But she said, "Don’t worry. It’ll be fine. If the books have with problems, I can yell at them in their own language.”)

Also, use your community to make your own Kickstarter – a site that lets you collect money from the Kickstart community to get their project underway. If you have a community to sell books to, then you have a community to fund your book project. This takes the cash-flow pressure out of publishing a gorgeous book. This worked well for my book—we all get a better souvenir to hold if we all come together to fund it.

7. Print books should be limited editions.
Once you think of a book as special—a souvenir of a reading experience—then selling it for a very limited time makes sense. If something is available forever, it's not special. The business model where you can buy a book any time doesn’t make sense if we are trying to make print books more special in the age of ebooks. If you can buy a ninety-nine-cent ebook any time, a print book should be a short-offer, limited edition type sale.

That is why I was closing sales this week. But selling a self-published book is addictive. When I got a six-figure book advance, my book was so unlikely to earn back the advance that it was not that fun to count sales—none of the money went to me. On top of that, you don’t get daily tallies from in-store sales. The publisher doesn’t tell me if my review in Salon sold any books. They just don’t track things like that.

But tracking sales of a self-published book is intoxicating. It’s a lot like blog stats. It’s immediate feedback, mostly logical, and surprisingly satisfying. The same is true with a self-published book. But I’m also making money.

So, that said, I’m keeping the book a limited edition, but I’m selling it for two more days. Two more days of fun for me. And, thank you, everyone, for helping me to learn all this stuff and have fun at the same time.

My son made this card for me, after I bought him Pokemon Cards. So it seems appropriate that after you guys bought so many copies of my new book last week, I give the card to you.

My book sales are going great, probably because I’m very happy having something to sell. Book sales were supposed to close yesterday, but I have a new idea. For another week. Maybe you can do this with your friends.

If you buy 10 books, I’ll work with you on the phone to rewrite your resume or provide an hour of coaching.

If you buy 100 books, I’ll fly to wherever you are and speak, or do a workshop or hang out with you – whatever you want.

I’d really like to speak at a high school. I’ve done it before and it’s a blast. So if you buy books for all the kids in a high school, I’ll spend two days there inspiring the kids to think bigger about what makes a good life for them – one day speaking and one day meeting with students.

Here's the place where you buy the book.

Thank you for being so fun to do a blog with. I hope I get to meet a lot of you this way.

I know I said I’d never do another book. But I’m good at admitting when I change my mind.

Here’s how that happened.

Melissa was worrying that her life was going to end because she was quitting finance to be a nanny. She was worried that she was ruining her career, and that she was not cut out to navigate adult life, and that she was not living up to her potential.

I was trying to be a good listener, but my talents lie more in being bossy. So I said, when she got to the living up to her potential part, “That is ridiculous. The idea of living up to one’s potential is such BS. Read my post about that.”

“You always tell me ‘read my post about that’.”

“It’s because I’m sick of people telling me they hate to feel lost. Being lost is an amazing opportunity to define yourself. Being lost is so interesting.”

“Do you think it’s interesting that I spend every day in my pink Juicy suit?”

"Yeah. If it doesn’t smell.”

It sort of does smell, but we are easy going about that on the farm. Then I said, “Wait—I have to tell you something—“

“What?”

“Read my post about how being lost is good.”

“Shut up.”

But she reads all my posts anyway. When I have fights with the Farmer I tell him I wish he’d spend all day talking to me like Melissa does. He tells me that he does not have a hero worship complex like she does and that I cannot get along with anyone who doesn’t worship me.

Is that true? I think, if I ever change the poll on my sidebar, it will say, “Does Penelope have trouble getting along with people who do not worship her? Yes or No”

The farmer and Melissa and I spend a week together eating lunches. The farmer eats like a 17-year-old boy who has not seen food in three days. Melissa and I eat like Asperger girls who were never told that we have to look normal at the table. So, picture this:

The farmer is eating two steaks, two baked potatoes, and five chocolate chip cookies. This varies slightly, but not by calorie count or carbohydrate/fat ratio.

Melissa is eating peas and pasta. This is all she eats. I do not have a post to encourage her to eat a more diverse diet because all I eat is PowerBars.

So there we are, and every day we are talking about how Melissa does not need to do a soul search because she is doing fine, but she does not feel fine.

So I decide to put together a book of posts for Melissa about how to keep her career on track.

I divide the book into sections:

• How to be lost and still feel good about yourself
• How to find a great job over and over again
• The secret to feeling confident making career decisions
• The key to making yourself happy
• The best method for creating a safety net for yourself

These are all topics Melissa and I talk about, but I wanted her to have something to hold.

I do that instead of doing things I should be doing like remembering to take the farmer’s cookies out of the oven.

I show Melissa the book while the farmer eats burnt cookies.

But while she is looking through it, I take it back. I decide the book is ugly. I want the book to be something she takes out every time she needs a self-confidence boost and she reads one or two pages. I want the book to be beautiful and sit by her bedside, or in her living room.

So I look online for how to self-publish a book with a great binding and pages that are nice to hold. I find a publisher of hipster, linen-bound books, with gold leaf, and I decide the self-publishing industry is amazing.

But then I see that to publish my one single, book will be about $2000. And I have to save my money for when I start a new company and run out of money and have to not be completely unstable financially because the farmer does not like crazy instability. I have done that before. He read about it—in a post.

No thousand-dollar books.

But now I have a new idea. If this is a good book for Melissa it must be a good book for a lot of you. After all, I write all the stuff I learn as I learn it, and the book is full of the knowledge that helped me craft a career that I love – over and over again.

I can't do the project alone, but I can do it with you. If we all buy copies of the book then we can have a beautiful and inspiring book to keep or to give to friends. It'll be called "For the Soul Searcher" and it'll look like the book at the top of the post.

The book is be $25 – no tax, free shipping, and I'll sign and number all the books. But you can only buy the book for the next week. Because I have to know how many we are ordering.

Note to my brothers: you guys put up with so much on this blog, so you don’t have to buy a copy—I will buy them for you.

To everyone else: Click below to buy the book via PayPal. And thank you.

 

I say no.

I say no because I have no idea how to do a book about my life. I’m sure I have no idea because I already have had a six-figure book deal to write about my life that I’m not delivering on, and the editor has dumped me. (Read: Phone calls to collect on the large advance I’ve already spent.) So my qualifications to tell you advice about how to write about one's life are questionable. But whatever; I have never stood on ceremony over qualifications.

Maybe the problem is that my life story needs a redemptive moment. This is what my agent-who-is-no-longer-my-agent tells me.  And this is a warning to any agent who thinks they might want to be my agent: My past agent dumped me because (even though I did deliver on my first book deal) I am terrible at writing book proposals and I am terrible at following publishing industry rules. And her number one rule is that if you write about your life there must be a redemptive moment because people like that. “That’s what sells,” is my not-my-agent’s way of saying “That’s what people like to read.”

So, okay. I try to see that. I mean, I’ve read plenty of memoirs – Girl, Interrupted, Smashed, Darkness Visible—all good books. All very redemptive at the end, for sure. But I’ve also read Anna Karenina. Well, I haven’t, but I’m able to spoil the ending for you right now anyway (skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want the spoiler). She gets hit by a train. I think she kills herself.

That seems redemptive to me. I mean, at least she doesn’t have to wake up to her same problems every day.

I have told this to my not-agent. She said that people do not want to read about my fascination with suicide. It’s true. I am fascinated by suicide: Why don’t more people kill themselves? Life is very hard. And there is no sane reason to believe it will, at some point, get easier. So why do we keep going? I don’t know. This fascinates me.

(Here is a great book of suicide letters. And here’s a tidbit for all you productivity gurus:  People in their 20’s who kill themselves write suicide notes about how much they love the people who will be most hurt by the suicide: their parents, a boyfriend maybe. People in their 30’s and 40’s write suicide notes that are informational to-do lists: Where the cat food is, when the kid’s homework is due, how to find the keys to the safety deposit box.

Both types of letters are great examples of how people have totally lost perspective when they kill themselves. This baffles me, since I also feel that we have totally lost our perspective by choosing to not kill ourselves.)

Okay. So I told my not-my-agent that my proposal for a memoir is redemptive because the reader will see that I did not kill myself before I got to the date of the national book tour.

That did not work for her.

So I said my book is redemptive because I had an insane childhood and look, now I’m not living on the street.

My agent told me that my life is too precarious for my surviving childhood to be redemptive. She told me I could write about keeping my marriage together even though we both have Aspergers Syndrome, but before I could write the proposal (and convince my ex that this would be okay to write) we divorced.

What about writing about the divorce?

She said divorce is not redemptive. I’m pretty sure that’s when she told me to get a new agent.

Okay. So back to me telling you how to write about yourself. I say, forget about redemption. It’s false. I read The Glass Castle, and I think it’s nice Jeanette Wallis got out of her hell-hole family, but really, I want to know what her fights with her husband are like on her zillion-dollar Hamptons estate.

I think you should write the truth. Be real. If you obsess about redemption instead of the truth, you’ll be like me, writing nothing, because life is not redemptive. Life isn’t like that. Just write your own messy life, and let it spill out.

But, wait. Here’s the problem with that. Your life is boring. I’m sorry to tell you this. But actually all our lives are boring. Which is another strike against obsessing over redemption: it doesn’t make your life interesting, but good writing always makes life interesting.

So you need to tell something true to make people want to read, but you need to be interesting doing it.

Do you want to know what interesting is? How many articles and stories and blog posts have you read about getting fired? Six million, right? Everyone wants to tell their story. Most suck. But here’s a great one: The CEO of Sun wrote a tweet to announce his resignation. It’s interesting because of the media he chose, it’s interesting because of the timing, and it’s interesting because it’s a haiku:

Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more

The bar is high if you want to be interesting. What can you do? Here's what I do:

1. Assume you are not all that interesting. The reader does not want a peek into your life. Not enough people care. Do you know how I know? Because porn is boring. Sure, if you’re using it for masturbation, it’s interesting, because then it’s giving you something. But if not, what are you doing watching? Who cares about someone else’s sex life? And you can be sure that the peek into your life is never going to be as interesting as a porn movie. So forget writing a blog post merely to give someone a peek.

2. Cut fifteen percent of everything you write. Because no one is so interesting that they can’t cut words.

3. Write to give the reader something they want. I try to focus on this with every post I write. But in fact, this is advice about how to do anything in your life: Help people as much as you can. Give people what they need, and if you focus on that, the rest will fall into place. This is true of how to network, how to parent, how to manage people and also how to write about your life.

So really, the world is full of ways to give to each other, and we’re all just looking for the best way. And this, in the end, is probably why we don’t kill ourselves.

And, in an effort to be a good citizen, I spoke at the Rotary Club in Madison, (where they sang God Bless America after lunch). The topic was how to recruit and retain young people. My speaker's bureau liked the video so much that they put a clip of it on their site, here.

Finally, thanks to Steven Grant's suggestion, you can buy Brazen Careerist t-shirts. Workplace fashion will never be the same…

I said, "Because it's my job. My boss wants me to."

I said this to my son even though I don't actually have a boss. But how can I tell him that I am generating this trip on my own? It's too awful to admit. Still, I am blindsided:

He says, "Doesn't your boss know you love us?"

I tell myself to ignore it. I tell myself there are nine million stories of kids saying the most heart wrenching thing they can say to their mom as she leaves for the office.

I get to the airport and I tell myself everything is fine while I bite all my nails. Then I wait at the gate while I sip diet Coke hoping I didn't eat so many Ho-Hos with the kids that I don't fit into my mommy's-working-now clothes. I am at the wrong gate. I read the seat number instead of the gate. I make the flight with seconds to spare.

I try to calm myself down on the plane. I tell myself that there is no way to support the family as a writer if I'm not going to promote my book. I tell myself my kids are lucky that I'm with them every day from 1pm to 8pm. I tell myself I'm lucky to be making a living as a writer.

I get to Chicago to switch planes. I tell myself that I am in better shape and that I don't have to worry about falling apart on local television because I am not falling apart now. I have a sandwich as a sign of body confidence. Or at least waist confidence; it's all about the button.

I hand the boarding pass taker my boarding pass and she says, "This is a flight to New York. You're going to Tampa. You better run."

I run. And I cry. I cry because I am losing my mind. I cannot even remember what city I'm going to.

In my plane seat I tell myself this can be the end of the book tour. And this is the advice I'm going to give you about successfully handling your kids and your career. Don't ever confess anything like this. It's bad for your career.

There is more, though. I get to the hotel, and you know what? It's clean, it's quiet, the bed is huge and it's all mine.

I sleep very well. I get up early, because my body clock is set to wake up at 5am with my two-year-old. (Please, do not post comments about how your kid sleeps until 7am and I should do what you do. Do not be so arrogant as to think I have not tried.)

With lots of time to spare I play music on my laptop. And then, I dance. I dance in the bathroom, I dance in front of five mirrors, and when the Beastie Boys come on, I dance up on the bed.

I am happy. I order the fifteen-dollar omelet from room service without flinching. And I add a pot of coffee.

This is the real problem with travel: How fun it is. How freeing it is to be away from the kids. I can think, I can eat like a queen, and I can bounce around the room like a fifteen-year-old. Not that I couldn't do this at home. I could, sans omelet. But I wouldn't. That's why business travel is so inspiring to a mom. And now I'm thinking maybe I can do one more city for the book tour.

Inkwood Books
216 South Armenia Avenue
Tampa, FL 33609-3310
(813) 253-2638

I have actually already gone to one city, as a pre-publication test run: Cleveland. And I met up with a bunch of people including Cheezhead blogger Joel Cheesman, who recorded an interview that you can listen to here.

I'm looking forward to meeting a lot more people in person as the tour continues.

June 4, Atlanta
A Cappella Books
484-C Moreland Ave NE.
Atlanta, GA 30307
404-681-5128

June 7, New York City
Tequila Jack's
1668 Third Ave
Between East 93rd and 94th
(212) 426-1416

June 11, Boston
Location TBD

June 18, Tampa
Inkwood Books
216 South Armenia Avenue
Tampa, FL 33609-3310
(813) 253-2638

June 21, San Francisco
Location TBD