Cooking Up A New Social Blog - For Loners

As the Blogger deadline for cutting off FTP access for blogs like mine nears, I've started looking into alternative platforms for Self Publishing 2.0. But my new Cooking For One blog is more than a test for the WordPress software, it's also an attempt to use blogging as it's intended, as a social networking tool rather than as a content management tool.

From the technical standpoint, it's the first time I've offered e-mail subscription to a blog, added the feed to feedburner (though you don't get the pictures that way), and included a Blogroll. More on that in a minute. I even created a custom graphic for the look:



The problem came with the subject. What do I know enough about that I can write something every day without putting myself to sleep? I concluded that the one subject I should really be able to hit out of the park is going through life alone. I realized I might have a different take on the subject when it came up in conversation a while back that I don't have a table for eating. I've been eating off my lap for the last dozen years because there's nobody to tell me not to.

I've written a handful of posts over the past week while learning the WordPress software, but I haven't hit my stride on the tone yet. It won't be a glorification of living alone which I see as a second class existence at best. I'm more interested in the cooking tricks and time trials of living alone, never having somebody to call to come pick you up. I'll also write about being in business alone, which has upsides and downsides and probably a wider audience. So my clear vision for the blog is a place for people to be alone ...... together. Huh?

Which brings us back to the problem of the Blogroll. There are plenty of blogs about business and finance that I can include, most are essentially giving advice to individuals, but I couldn't find a single blog about living alone that wasn't the result of a death or divorce. I'm interested adding blogs by people who are living alone because like me, that's all they know. I don't understand why I haven't found any yet, could they all be ashamed?

Let me know if you have any Blogroll candidates for me, and check out Cooking for One if you're curious at:

http://blog.cookingforone.org

Low Cost Digital Publishing Experiments

I've taken quite a few photographs in my life, and between the series of how-to books written for McGraw-Hill and my websites, I've published over a thousand of them. One of the things I've learned is that panoramic pictures almost never capture the same feeling you get when you're looking at some distant attraction. It cost me dozens of rolls of 35 mm film and hundreds of dollars in developing to learn how to frame photographs in the view finder so the final print didn't shout - "Why didn't you move closer, dummy!"

Then the new millennia arrived, and in 2000 I bought a Olympus D-360L, a 1.3 Megapixel camera with no zoom for $300. It took me a couple days to really internalize the fact that taking photographs was now very cheap. In fact, the more I've used the camera over the years, the cheaper each individual photograph costs as it's amortized against the original $300 purchase. I almost feel like NOT taking photographs is costing me money.

Web sites follow the same economics as digital cameras. Once you're paying for a website, adding web pages doesn't cost anything extra. It's NOT adding web pages that makes a website site seem like a waste of money. Starting a website with a half dozen pre-planned pages and never updating it is like buying a digital camera and never even filling up the memory card. Imagine if you had a friend who claimed to be a big photography buff, and every time you visited he just showed you the same half dozen photographs. How often would you go visit him?

The primary value of all this digital stuff to publishers is that it makes it cheap to experiment. Whether you're talking about blogs, eBooks, print-on-demand, eMail newsletters, videos or podcasts, production cost is limited to the first copy. Reproduction, as pirates all know, is basically free. That's why I'm such a strong advocate of the incremental approach to publishing. Why tie up all of your time and money in creating a comprehensive work before you know how it will be received? Take it a web page at a time, see what interests your readers, try to find a compromise between what people want and what you want to give them. The old publishing world said, "It's our way or the highway." On the Internet, the highway is just a click away, so try to unbend a little.

Unfortunately, the ease of creating digital products has led to quite a few con artists "publishing" eBooks that serve no purpose other than enriching the publisher. All it takes is a good sales pitch and some cut-and-pasted together garbage so that the buyer doesn't cry "Fraud" and reverse the charges through their credit card company.

Besides, some of the best digital publishing experiments involve giving work away for free. I try writing about new subjects on a regular basis to see whether there's enough interest for me to start thinking about writing a book, and if that writing isn't always top-notch, at least I'm not charging anything for it. And sometimes the results of a digital experiment will even surprise me. For example, I've known for a decade that my hands are too shaky to take photographs at night (the exposure time is long even for a digital camera), and I know that taking pictures of celestial bodies is a waste of time. But I made the experiment on a bright moon shining through the clouds the other night and was impressed with the result. Click on the small picture for the full size version.

The Day The Self Publisher Took A Vacation

I should have been in New York for Tools of Change this week, as evidenced by an inbox full of invitations to press events, but I stayed home. This is no reflection on Tools of Change, which I think is THE conference for publishers trying to stay ahead of the curve and for working media in the publishing field. However, I'm trying to get away from blogging, and conferences are primarily about networking, establishing relationships. Since I'm not interested in any consulting or speaking work, I don't see the point.

Instead of traveling to Manhattan, I ran five miles this morning, will do laundry this afternoon, and follow-up with McGraw-Hill about getting the rights reverted for the last book I authored for them. "Build Your Own PC - 4th Edition" was published in 2004, and is horrifically obsolete at this point, but they only exhausted the stock from the last print run in recent weeks. I haven't done any writing in that area since 2004 because the original contract (signed in 1998) included a non-compete that's open to interpretation. Rather than interpret, I've just stayed away. But when I get the right reversion, I'll build a couple new PCs for the website, at least it will give me a definable project.

In the meantime, I'm reading the works of Charles Lever, which have the most interesting illustrations I recall seeing in years. Both the plates and the embellishments that start each chapter reflect the text, are well executed and clever. I'm not sure how that's supposed to help me as a self publisher, but it's good for a pleasant few hours every evening.

That's all the news from Northampton, Massachusetts this faux spring day. It took eleven minutes to write, so I think I'm finally on my way to beating the blog disease. All I need now is to see my subscription number start dropping in Google:-)