Ian M Rountree

Project Manager, Copywriter, Digital Marketer

The Future of Media – Dowager Shadow

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I’m writing a novel. But it won’t be Tor, Orion, or Bantam Press publishing my work; it’ll be me.

Chris Brogan just dropped a perfect opportunity for me to hold myself to account here. You see, I’ve missed my deadline for having the promotional site for the book up. It was supposed to be finished on February 2nd, with some content available to act as a teaser for the actual volume coming in summer. Nearly a month late, I still have 10 hours of work to do on the promo site, and no time budgeted to it.

Before you finish reading this, jump out and read/ watch Chris’ video post, The Future of Media.

Back? Good. Now I’ll explain.

The Dowager Shadow Promotional SiteThe Dowager Shadow, which I’ve spoken of before here, is a fantasy fiction parallax that has been where I’ve put most of my energy for the last four years. It started making its way from ongoing roleplay to novel with 2008’s National Novel Writing Month – my co-author Leila and I smashed the 50k word barrier easily, and immediately had what amounts to a full first volume of book.

Last year, I began publishing the novel as a serial – you can still read some of it on dowagershadow.com until I get the new site up, but I warn you, the manuscript has seen a lot of editing since then.

Here’s what you’ll see once the new site is actually up, and I’ve got the manuscript finished and produced:

  • The first volume will be available for purchase as an eBook, with built in interactivity like an appendix, maps, and other information.
  • In addition to each volume, there will be a few rounds of shorter stories available for free through Pay With a Tweet. This will take care of some of the promotion of the book.
  • Each subsequent volume will be released in two ways: stand-alone purchase, or bundled with the previous volumes, each of which will have been updated with information pertinent to the new volume.
  • There will be a print version, produced through a self-publisher, which can be ordered alongside the eBook. I’m aiming to have two production runs per year for the physical artifact.

It sounds like a lot, but it’s really no more work than this blog.

Building interactivity into a book is a very new media thing. It’s the kind of thing that’s going on all over the place. Usually, though, it’s products like Digging Into WordPress. However, given the success of products like DigWP, and the many thousands of well produced eBooks out there, I can’t help but see this kind of thing as the future of media.

We’re going far beyond the entrepreneurial journalism that blogging has been for the last decade, and moving into an era of entrepreneurial publishing of all flavours. That, I believe, is the future of media.

Resetting Expectations

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In the last week, I’ve read articles in a half dozen places about setting and managing expectations. As I haven’t said much in a while about what this blog is for, why I write, or how I try to make the blog accessible to everyone, I thought it might be time for some expectation setting of my own.

I blog in hopes of creating some conversation and encouraging thought about the things I write about.

Whether it’s making the most of your tools (like turning your WordPress blog into a personal event manager), or making the most of your writing (by enhancing your mastery of the writing voice), I want you to do better work – and, of course, I want to do better work myself. I’m hoping we can talk about that, and find ways forward together. This is part of why I comment on your blog as well – hoping to continue the conversation.

I also want to make it easy to get to what I’m writing.

As such, here are the ways I make my blog available:

I try to post on a schedule as often as possible – you can rely on most of my posts to appear at or around 6am CST, when I’ve written something in advance.

I import to Twitter – @IanMRountree – through Twitterfeed, so my blog posts pop up automatically even if I’m not there to post them when they’re scheduled.

I have, of course, got a feed. Subscribe through a reader or by email to http://feeds.feedburner.com/IanMRountree – there’s an email subscription entry box on the right sidebar if you’re reading this on my site. Getting the feed is a good way to not miss things.

I also publish the feed automatically to Facebook. For years, it’s gone to my personal profile through RSS Graffiti, but I’ve decided to up my accessibility a little and set up a page for my blog. If Facebook is a place you look for news beyond your friends’ updates, please go like my page – it’s available here: Ian M Rountree – Blog

That’s all I’m doing just now. Have I missed anything? Are there places you look for news that I’m not using which would make it more convenient for you to get connected and keep up? Let me know in the comments if there’s somewhere I should be publishing that would help you reduce the effort needed to subscribe.

On Self-Censorship (Or Why We Need Diverse Stories)

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Many of us who work in media – whether as publishers, producers, marketers, or evangelists – create stories around the work that we do. It’s our job to create tales to interest people, to gather attention and, in most cases, sales or contracts.

As creating media becomes easier, businesses – and business owners and employees – are creating more of their own media. Many don’t have the background that professional media workers do, and as a result, are prone to mis-step.

We perceive these mis-steps most easily as inappropriate disclosure, poor personal judgment, or a lack of self-censorship.

But we also counsel businesses that talking only about themselves, about their business, and the benefits of their work is a bad idea. Why?

Watch this video. Award-winning novelist Chimamanda Adichie speaks about the danger of the single story.

The single story is dangerous from any angle. If your single story is a drunken photo on Facebook, you fail. If your single story is a mis-step with sensitive information, you fail.

If your drunken photo is one story of many – well, you still might want to rethink where you leave your camera. But people are a lot more likely to take the detail in stride at the value of what it is; a detail, not a whole picture.

It’s not just about how you tell your story. It’s about what stories (plural please) you’re telling, as well as how.

What stories are you telling? How are you telling them?

Video from TED Talks on YouTube. Hat tip Justin Kownacki for sharing the video.