Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

- Ferris Bueller

And then I woke up one day and, much to my surprise, it was a Thursday in late-April 2012. I don’t know if that is a reflection of how much distraction there has been, how busy I’ve kept myself, or a sign of abject-laziness. In the six years I’ve been writing in some form or another, I haven’t ever gone so long without putting fingers to keys just for the sake of doing so, and I can feel a bunch of knots in my head needing to be unwound, something the keyboard is particularly good for. At least for me.

I haven’t just not been writing though. If anything, I suppose I got a little tired of just talking about things, I wanted to do some making. The first thing was a collaboration with my friends at Projucer, along with a few other special individuals. The Meaning of Mate started off in my head as some sort of digital shrine to the word “mate” and how Australians (and, to be fair, Kiwis and those from the UK among others) use it in a variety of situations. Thanks to friends in low places, we racked up over 250,000 views in the first week and wound up on YouTube’s Australian homepage for Australia Day.

Next up was Shitter, with a much simpler premise: take people’s Twitter feeds and print it onto toilet paper. The tagline? Social media has never been so disposable. We thought people would have a laugh, and that the tech press might join in on it. We never expected to wind up in Forbes, on TV back in our native Australia, and a host of other channels and outlets. The euphoria of a successful launch turned into the pain of actually fulfilling on the manufacturing and shipping of the product itself, but it’s been a great learning experience.

A roll of Shitter in action © Gabriela Herman

All of this has been done under the banner of Collector’s Edition which is a company I’ve formed with some friends. I’m looking forward to writing more about it all over the next few months as we continue to launch projects into a fairly staid media environment, but I’m also looking forward to just writing more. It feels a little clunky at first, but in the words of your friend and mine Katie Chatfield, “Don’t tell me what you’re going to do, tell me what you did.”

I hit publish.

And then I got on with it.

While I was sitting there contemplating the swift, gracious death that might be bestowed on me were I more fortunate, I noticed a theme in what the rep was saying.

The first thing was, essentially, “If you want your campaigns to work, spend media dollars on them.” This comes as no surprise, of course they’re going to say that. And in my experience, they’re right. They’re right because they know people actually do not care about your brand one little bit, and if you want to have something decent to show for your campaign spend, you’re going to need to force it in front of people. Funny how new marketing looks a lot like old marketing.

The second thing I realised was they had shifted so quickly to focusing on engagement. Talking about engagement. Talking, in fact about their new metric “talking about this”, where the number of people doing just that kicks off that sentence. Strange, I thought, to have made such a sudden about-face.

And then it hit me: they were running out of road.

Look at the below graph. This is Starbucks’ fan growth over time to its present day.

Now look at this, Starbucks’ average new fans per week:

The growth they continue to experience would be the envy of most brands, but it’s still a shadow of its former self.

So, this is what I think: Facebook realised that all brands, from the smallest upstart to globe-straddling behemoths, would have a natural ceiling on the number of fans they had. Once brands hit that ceiling, it becomes harder for marketers to justify the ad spend because they’re not seeing the growth they’re used to, which in turn would mean they started to seek alternate places to spend their media dollars.

So what do they do? Change the conversation purposefully from being about numbers to “People talking about this“.

Now, I actually think it is the right way to go, number of fans had little more meaning than the number of friends anyone had on MySpace, and smart marketers always knew it was about engagement. But in launching this new metric and focusing as much attention on it as they can muster, Facebook have managed to stave off any apathy that may have been headed their way from marketing managers on post-fan-drive come downs.

The above might strike you as wildly cynical, but look at those graphs again. In an environment that will accept nothing less than significant year-on-year growth in all forms, what other conclusion can you come to?

When you’re right though, that’s when the trouble starts. That’s when the business grows. That’s when the phone rings. When you’re right it’s a call to arms, it is life asking you to step outside your comfort zone. You can of course ignore the call, and stay being right, but who aspires to a lifetime spent saying “I told you so”? Being right is an opportunity to be wrong, to make a whole new set of mistakes, to learn that which cannot be taught in a classroom. And the only benefit that comes from being right is more opportunity to be wrong. That is, my friends, a good thing. Curiosity didn’t kill the cat, complacency did.

Hope you enjoy, and I’d love your feedback, over there or in the comments below.

This is a book that has been on my “To read” list for far too long.

Thanks Sally.

The original speech is taken from a Charlie Chaplin film, The Great Dictator, released in 1940. It was his biggest success, and it carries a message as relevant as is possible for us, 71 years later.

Now, share this with everyone you know.

At the time Richard was in the process of pulling together a start-up, Cursor, which is a socially-driven publishing platform. He’s of course not the only one, Seth Godin and Amazon have a much-publicised project together to try and “re-invent publishing”, and most of the major publishers are, in various ways, throwing whatever they can at the wall in the hope that something, anything, will stick.

This quote was ringing in my ears though when an email arrived from Amazon a couple days ago. @author is a service they’ve just launched to allow readers to pose questions to certain authors from either their Kindle or from the Amazon site itself. The tagline? Connecting writers and readers.

I somehow don’t think a call-and-response mechanic was what Richard had in mind when he made the above statement. It will be interesting to see how they build this out, particularly in light of their moves to become not just seller but publisher of original works. The most famous face among the authors featured, Tim Ferris, has already said his next book will be published exclusively through Amazon. Tim is no stranger to experimenting with what it means to have a relationship with your audience through writing, going so far as to put on a workshop detailing how he has managed to achieve his success with both the Four Hour Week and the Four Hour Body. That bootcamp of writing and marketing would set you back $10,000 – if you could still get a ticket. It was well and truly over subscribed, with people filling out a form TED-style in the hopes of having the chance to attend.

Ferris’ approach is a little closer to what Richard had in mind, though I wonder if he had figured it as brazenly commercial and unapologetic as Ferris’ execution. Regardless, its experimentation that the industry needs. If the music industry went about things in this manner rather than simply creating new contracts that tapped into revenue streams that were traditionally out of bounds for the major labels, you might see something as interesting, and potentially even more ludicrous, than a $10,000 work shop bearing all the hallmarks of attendees who have failed to beat, so are paying to join.

(If I had a spare $10k, I’d probably be doing the same)

Related articles

• Amazon Lets Readers Ask Authors Questions Directly From E-Books (readwriteweb.com)
• Seth Godin to Forgo Traditional Book Publishing (nyconvergence.com)

Cover of Norwegian Wood

When I was going to university a good decade ago now, I was a book worm. I was obsessed and constantly reading anything I could get my hands on. These days I still do, but something happened along the way: for the most part, I no longer read fiction.

In the last couple years, the only fiction books that spring to mind are Cory Doctorow‘s Makers, and Michael Chabon‘s Yiddish Policeman’s Detective Union. Both are brilliant; where Doctorow’s work is edged out in pure prose it claws its way back by being wildly entertaining and an entirely plausible vision of the near future. if you haven’t read one or both of them, I suggest you do so.

One of the books I read, I think at the behest of my friend Ruth, was Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. It s the only book I’ve ever read where I find myself so incapable of talking about it. Understand I’m not being dramatic, it just kind of left me nowhere. I could never tell whether it was the translation or simply Murakami’s style, but the whole book just felt cold. Cold and distant, like there was a solid pane of glass between you and the world in which the story was unfolding. I definitely read the book, but I didn’t manage to experience any of it. Maybe with the benefit of a few more years, the brief but eye-opening trip to to Japan I would take, even perhaps just picking up another of his books, maybe then I would have found something new in his work.

But I don’t go back. I never go back. High Fidelity remains the only book I’ve read more than once. That is a book I liked so much I bought a second copy just to lend people; last I heard it was making its way around the backlots of Warners Brothers Studios near where I grew up while they were filming Scooby Doo. High Fidelity is, as far as I’m concerned, as true a perspective on relationships from the male point of view as anyone is likely to find or write at any time ever. Women, read this book. You will understand your men better.

Also: you will feel even more sorry for them.

All this was triggered by reading a piece on The 99 Percent; Murakami talking about perseverance in writing. He says the most important thing you can have is talent, although:

in most cases the person involved can’t control its amount or quality. You might find the amount isn’t enough and you want to increase it, or you might try to be frugal and make it last longer, but in neither case do things work out that easily.

He goes on to say focus and endurance are the next two most important things, and unlike talent, they can be worked on. Improved. We can find more of it if we try.

You have to continually transmit the object of your focus to your entire body, and make sure it thoroughly assimilates the information necessary for you to write every single day and concentrate on the work at hand. And gradually you’ll expand the limits of what you’re able to do. Almost imperceptibly you’ll make the bar rise. This involves the same process as jogging every day to strengthen your muscles and develop a runner’s physique. Add a stimulus and keep it up. And repeat. Patience is a must in this process, but I guarantee results will come.

I’ve been thinking about this as I’ve written less and less. I used to write every day, but that is hard to do. It’s not impossible though, and it’s not like I have good reasons not to. After a while the blank page and the blinking cursor become so overwhelming you just never open up whatever it is you write in and make a start.

That is of course the other thing I used to be: fearless. Fearless, and not desperately scrambling to make sure I was somehow bettering myself at every moment. Somehow reading fiction got sat alongside the list of activities that did not involve bettering myself. That is of course, horse shit at its finest.

My friend Matt has a book coming out shortly. I told him recently I was so impressed by his ability to just sit down, write, and get the thing done. He shrugged at the time and looked at me and said “If a publisher came to you and said ‘Here’s an advance, what do you reckon you write about something like this?‘, you’d probably find you were able to sit down and write as much as you needed to.” He may be right, he may not be. He also then referenced a quote I’d posted from Tina Fey, which seemed to sum up everything we had been talking about:

I guess for Matt it was time to jump in. Time for me now.

And time to get back to fiction too.