The Search, John Battelle’s eagerly-awaited book on “How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture” has just hit the shelves. Apart from its intrinsic interest, the process of writing the book is also interesting in that John relied heavily on his blog to start a conversation with his readers.
As he describes it in this interview with Philipp Lenssen:
“I started it [the blog] as a way to catalyze a conversation between myself and what I hoped would be a small but robust community of folks in the search industry, mainly to help me research and ponder the book i am writing. I was stunned when I realized that it got to more than 50K readers.”
This helped him to test ideas for the book, check facts, and of course to build a large readership in advance of the book’s publication. I think Dan Gillmor did something similar with his book We the Media.
One thing to bear in mind of course is that blogging is not a sure-fire way of writing a best-seller. For starters, both Battelle and Gillmor were already big names before they started (I think) and both wrote for a tech-savvy audience, who were already part of the online conversation. Many of the people who will hopefully read knowledge2go do not regularly read blogs and most probably don’t know about RSS.
So I’m not expecting anything on the scale that Gillmore or Batelle experienced, but am nevertheless hopeful that this blog can help a little towords building momentum for the book.
