Once you have a network - and Facebook has some 200,000,000 people in theirs, I was told yesterday - you can leverage it.

Hillsong does the same thing very effectively with their congregation.

Most of what happens in Facebook is pretty trivial, but some of it is quite interesting. Mainly because of the platform for active communication that is enabled. Blogging in my opinion, although giving the option of two way communication, is still very much a passive medium, where comments and responses flow only when you have a large readership and you touch a nerve.

On the other hand in Facebook once your network node has only a relatively small number of contact points with other nodes, you have the ability to go out and stimulate their interest in two way communication.

The Question application does this very nicely. And it enables quite interesting, albeit brief, debate to take place. You pose a question, invite people to answer it, and... they do. Not surprising really. But quite rewarding. And because human beings tend to respond to positive feed back loops, we are prompted to respond to other people's questions and to ask more ourselves.

And every time this happens, slowly and bit by bit, our intelligence rises and more importantly we gradually opt to change ourselves. This is a giant experiment in social engineering that is only just beginning. Fascinating to observe and to participate in.

I think it also has quite non-trivial aspects to it as well.

As we are very largely, in the Western World, caught up in the denial of what is coming soon to a suburb near you at the moment: Oil at $200 per barrel, Fish supplies dwindling fast, Crashing greenback, Water wars, Climate change.... Each of these things on its own is potentially catastrophic. Together its beyond a train wreck.

So we have to my mind two very real options. We can push our societies over the edge and move to the Afghanistan model - back to a primitive, fear and repression based society (hang on a minute that is what our current government is doing to us right now!). Or we can work on a true societal shift that is based on a move to a new kind of nuclear community - one in which we see a maturation of the concept of Facebook style social networks into local digital trading and social support networks - a new kind of digital socialism, I suppose (and I don't mean socialism in the political sense here).

You know where to reach me. If it is of interest to discuss and brainstorm about this, let me know!

To start with - full disclosure: I was a music publisher for a good many years. So I look at publishing and writing with that frame of reference....

However, I was a songwriter before I was a publisher. And I was an author after I was a publisher... Confused? Don't be.

There is a clear and simple benefit in self publishing - absolutely no doubt about it. You keep the copyright and you max the margin contribution from your efforts. Easy. And in some areas of enterprise that works pretty well. But not many.

Here is why I think being published by a traditional publishing house makes sense, with one caveat - it has to be a publisher with clout.

It actually starts before that. You need to be with a good literary agent. Your literary agent gives you access to her network. A good agent will have a huge rolodex. And that gives you access to a big network. But it starts before that. Your agent is your best filter. She will know your field almost as well as you do. And she will challenge you to do better than you can possibly do on your own. She will also lend her own cachet to your work. Because she has provided the first tick on the check list that a publisher has that enables them to parse a lot of new material.

Publishers just don't have the time to read everything that comes across their desks. Unless it comes with an introduction from an agent. And the agent will know exactly who to send your work to, and who to avoid in order to get to "yes" faster.

These days with the advent of book superstores you need to be signed to a good sized publishing house in order to even get put into stock. Smaller publishers have less clout. And self published authors have zero clout in terms of getting exposure at retail, being put onto end caps if you have a title that looks like it is going to break out. And the only way that you really shift units is to have both wide and deep distribution.

And another thing: big publishers have well oiled PR machines. If it looks like your title has some potential for newsworthiness they will get you column inches wherever they possibly can. Its their bread and butter. It probably isn't yours.

And an even bigger thing: a successful writer is really only as good as the editor that they have. An editor that makes sure that your writing is fluid and concise is incredibly valuable. Good publishers have great editors. If you go in looking for someone to tell you how great you are, you'll find it. But it won't do your sales much good. If you get yourself an editor who tells you that you are full of it, and challenges you to do better, just like your agent, you will improve your chances of success exponentially.

The downside is that publishing deals are not too much different to how they were in the days of Dickens. And there are deductions for all kinds of things too. So you have to figure that you aren't going to get wealthy out of writing. But from having a book in the market, and preferably more than one, and ideally a franchise, you will get visibility. And that leads to paid gigs.

I remember a story several years ago about a self help author whose book became a best seller. As a result he started a series of paid personal appearances that made him quite a lot of money. And of course his book was on sale at the gigs too. It turned out that the book was a best seller because he had bought so many copies at retail in the first instance! He was able to get rid of them at the gigs. But he wouldn't have gotten the gigs without the hit.

Not too much different to the music business in many respects.

But the great thing about writing is that there really is something special about holding a copy of the book in your hands. It isn't ephemeral like music is. Not yet anyway.

I am now close to 60,000 words into the first draft of my current project. I figure that this is about half way. In the past I always find that the first 20,000 words are pretty easy, but then it starts to be work. So far on this outing it has been a breeze. However, what I have down at the moment is exceedingly raw! So first edit is going to be work.

Then trial it on the family, and then cull a couple of chapters to send to Mary, and clarify the target market. I have been giving this some thought and I feel pretty good about the potential.

More later!