Sorry, I’ve been super-ill today, and so remarkably short on spiffing ideas: so let me point you to this meta-idea on why you shouldn’t write a book.
1. People who have a lot of ideas need a blog, not a book.
A blog is more immediate, so you’ll get better feedback. And getting feedback as you go is much more intellectually rigorous than printing a final compendium of your ideas and getting feedback from the public only when it’s too late to change anything.Many people think they have a ton of ideas and they are brimming with book possibilities when in fact, most of us have very few new ideas. If you have so many ideas, prove it to the world and start blogging. There is nothing like a blog to help you realize you have nothing new to say.
Also, note that if you want to get ideas out there, it’s a remarkably inefficient method these days. Especially for the sort of low-grade, rumblingly conjectural micro-ideas most of us are shedding. Just keep spilling them out, and don’t worry if they don’t get purchase. It’s the cheap and cheerful end of innovation. If you’re truly lazy, as all good authors should be, you’ll thank yourself for manipulating others to pick them up and run with them, without even having to spell them out completely yourself. I think in many ways the most economically-efficient idea would be one which was easily conveyable in a few sentences, yet would be irresistably tempting for a Ph.D. student to want to turn into a thesis or project.
Would anyone like to create some empirical research on that?
September 17th, 2008 at 12:58 am
The obvious problem: many places that reward good ideas in an institutional way — oh hello, academia! — want the books and the articles, and not a ‘web’ [sniff] ‘log’. Efficient? Of course not. Academic publishing is a vanity press sustained by its role in institutional advancement, turning one set of drudges into another.
That’s changing: the academic listservs were handling notes-and-queries work before blogs, and there’s an obvious niche for those who make hard-to-find old texts available in scholarly forms, even though that challenges another niche — the comparatively easy work of editing those texts for compilations or anthologies that’s a nice little earner for the tenured.
It’s not changing as fast as the technology would allow, for obvious reasons: just as Labour MPs won’t make guinea pigs of their kids by sending them to Bogstandard Comp, the kind of academics who are most likely to have the combination of tech skills and research obligations to do Really Good Stuff are also least likely to do the career equivalent of hacking off their legs with a rusty scythe.
In short: well, she can talk. She’s getting paid.
September 17th, 2008 at 9:05 am
I’ve been saying for a year now that I’m going to put up a website that lists all the thesis topics I’m NOT pursuing, with a note at the end saying, “No, really, I promise, please go write about one of these, that would be lovely of you, have fun now, byeee!”
I really really ought to do this. Hmm.
September 17th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
Hi,
I am interested in purchasing one to two simple text links on your website’s homepage. How much would you charge for that?
Thanks.
Bryan
—
Bryan Wisotsky
Internet Marketing Associate
SportsMemorabilia.com
http://www.SportsMemorabilia.com
September 17th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
One MILLION dollars