The Gift of Blogging
[Featured in today's newsletter]
Blogging's been very very good to me.
First, there's no question that it's helped me sell books. Nowadays people simply expect to be able to find all sorts of material about anything on the web, including authors. Anticipating that, my webmaster Critt (then, just a strange man who pestered me virtually from afar) pushed hard for me to start a blog in the spring of 2004, as the publication date for The Pentagon's New Map approached.
At first I resisted. I knew I needed to have a site separate from my Naval War College site, which, quite frankly, had been moribund since 9/11 killed the NewRuleSets.Project (along with my capacity to write the last report of our final exercise held in June 2001). And I knew I wanted to progressively migrate all my writings over to this new site, seeing, as I could, ahead to the day when the college would tire of my growing web presence (the college was just then beginning its own migration to the much dreaded and justifiably maligned Navy-Marine Corps Intranet).
Frankly, just moving all my documents over to the new site seemed like it would suffice to create a web presence that would adequately support the book. But Critt kept pushing for ancillary material directly related to the book, and that was something I was willing to consider.
Way back in the beginning of 2004 (oh so long ago) most of us were just getting familiar with the "second disk" aspect of "expanded DVDs," and that became the paradigm for the first great collection of material that I generated for the new site (all the director's commentary, deleted scenes, etc.). So far, so good.
But Critt continued to push me for a blog, saying it would become this invaluable resource for a one-many dialogue (I post, many respond, we dialogue). Critt didn't really have a great ulterior strategy in mind (to my knowledge), just the desire to set something up and see what happens.
Well, a lot did happen, and instead of the "disc 2" material becoming the great center of gravity for the site, it was-by far-the blog that anchored the site (based on our tracking of visitors, many come to check out my slides [they've seen me talk on TV], then my bio, and then they start scrolling the blog in-depth).
So my many talks brought many in, and all the "expanded DVD" stuff was great in getting them to browse the site, but it was the blog that created the relationship.
Now, of course, this whole thing started very slowly in the weeks leading up to the publication date, and then it expanded greatly across the first 8-10 weeks of the book's run. During that time, Critt and I allowed comments on individual blogs.
At first, the comments were useful and interesting and on-topic, but over time the blog seemed to become just another place for a lot of webizens to rant and rave over a host of issues. Pretty soon the comments became posts of their own, as people started blogging within my blog, posting entire documents, etc.
I tried to keep up with this flow, following every comment with one of my own, but that quickly became pointless. Then I just started becoming unhappy with the quality of the comments. I'd spent an hour or so shaping these posts, and then it was just a lot of crap being dumped on them by the same small collection of over-the-top types who never seemed to be offline.
And all that bile started ruining the process for me. I had always promised myself that as soon as the process stopped being fun, I'd stopping blogging. But Critt talked me out of it and we simply cut the comments function instead, angering a few of the blowhards but not seeming to impact readership numbers whatsoever.
At that point, we directed people to write me directly. That too soon became a bit much, because all the feedback was being channeled into this one pipe.
Then the compromise became, let's start a discussion group separate from the blog for people to dialogue over issues of common interest, and we'd create a new journal/newsletter venue for those who want to engage in serious, article-style posts on subjects related to PNM. Within that new vehicle, we also moved toward an Ask Tom format for letters, and finally, we seemed to find the right mix of blog, newsletter with Q&A, and the Blogging the Future forum--keeping everything free (after we learned what a hassle it was to collect subscriptions for the original journal).
That's the journey as far as dialogue mechanics go. Meanwhile, there's been the content dialogue, and here the blog's been invaluable.
First, the blog has become my "try out" venue for new thoughts and ideas. It's where I basically practice my ideas, fleshing them out progressively as I come across mainstream media articles and write up my commentary on them. This is a neat function because it forces me to link my ideas to real world events of some real magnitude or frequency, meaning I'm not chasing down the arcane, just the stuff that's really important.
Second, the blog, because it archives everything I write, becomes the great, audit-trail of my thinking over time: this huge database that probably is searched by me alone far more than it is by the readership in aggregate. It's like having this second brain crammed full of memory. So it stores not just the articles that I find interesting, it stores my first-impression analysis of them as well.
It's hard to explain just how amazingly useful this is for a horizontal thinker like myself. Since I'm mostly about drawing connections between things (in that crazed, Beautiful Mind-sort of way where I'm always searching for the "governing dynamics" that link seemingly disparate events), just keeping an archive of past articles that have interested me is a huge research function.
Third, the blog became my venue for chasing down the implications of the many concepts I put forth in PNM. I'd write something there, people would be curious about what I meant and ask me to elaborate vis-à-vis some real world event, and I would be forced to extend the analysis.
This last function truly made Blueprint for Action possible, because, as I discovered about six months into blogging, I had basically researched and thought my way through a host of subjects that naturally flowed out from the original material presented in PNM, which, I had come to realize over time, was more about explaining how we got to today than a serious projection of where we'd logically go next. The blog readers, therefore, became the great prompt to project into the future-in effect, determining which of the plethora of concepts presented in PNM needed to be fleshed out in a future-projection sense.
What was so cool about this was that the blog was creating a small network of content mentors for my work. I had always enjoyed the benefits of career mentors (a subject I cover throughout PNM) in my work, along with a few key content mentors, or people who'd say, "Wow, that's an interesting point. You should write about that!"
Hank Gaffney, going all the way back to my days at the Center for Naval Analyses, was more content mentor than career mentor (in the manner that Art Cebrowski and Bud Flanagan had been). At the college, my big content mentor had been Bradd Hayes, a colleague in my department.
But when I wrote PNM, I really left those content mentors behind by forging such a huge mass of both new material and the restructuring of a host of past material, generating a product that is, for all practical purposes, my grand unifying theory (PNM).
Now, by putting that huge GUT out on the table in PNM, I really moved beyond the capacity for any one person to be a content mentor. Instead, I needed a true network of content mentors. No network, no possibility to extend the material across a broad front, and therefore no possibility of cranking a "vol. II" (BFA) that-I now realize-is the equal of PNM in terms of synthesized, big-picture content.
What I'm saying, in effect, is that the blog made BFA possible along the timeline that it has unfolded. No blog, no BFA in the fall of 2005.
Could I have created BFA on my own? Sure. The vast majority of the prompts on content came from audiences that I briefed, not from the blog readership. But the dynamics of most presentation settings is such that you can take in the questions after your talk, offering the best off-the-cuff replies on the spot. But if you really want to chase down the larger implications of those questions, you need a venue to do that, plus a discerning readership that critiques your material in a real-time fashion.
So I would have arrived at BFA someday, but it would have taken a far greater effort, stretched over a far longer time frame. And, quite frankly, given the continuing demand for the original brief, I can't see how I would have found the thinking time sufficient to have made that extending process unfold.
This phenomenon of intense dialogue over product #1 strangling the ability of the artist to move on into product #2 is probably the best explanation for why "sophomore efforts" (the second album, the second book, the next TV pilot) often fail: the artist in question can’t move beyond the dialogue/interest generated by the first product, meaning he or she is a victim of their own success.
Now, the artist has two choices in the sophomore effort: an extension of the original product (sort of a give-them-what-they-want approach) or a sharp turn into significantly different material (like Kate Winslet going from "Titanic" to a series of weird, small characters in smaller movies), which, of course, greatly risks losing the audience you've built up with the first product.
Why risk that loss? Fear of stereotyping is huge for some artists, but I think obviously less so for authors in general and grand strategic visionary types like myself in particular. It's less a danger for me simply because I operate quite naturally at a very high elevation ("Just the vision, ma'am"), so there is almost never a lack of useful vectors to pursue.
I felt this with both PNM and BFA: complete amazement that I had written roughly 150,000 words both times and yet I was barely scratching the surface of the material I was racing through (in effect, meta-analysis, or analysis of analysis). In PNM, that meta-analysis was mostly of my own work (leading some reviewers to chastise me for not writing about other people's big ideas). But having done that meta-analysis of my own stuff in PNM (it truly is my "masterpiece" then), the only way I could move beyond it was to engage in meta-analysis of the works of others, and here is where the blog proved to be immeasurably useful because it generated all these leads from readers like T.M. Lutas, Michael Lotus, Mark Safranski (above all) and others.
The blog readers became the great prompts on what I should be reading and what I should be blogging. Looking back on BFA, I think the vast bulk (probably about 70%) of sources was provided to me by readers, with the rest being stuff I came across on my own. It was like having this vast army of research assistants sticking good stuff under my nose on a daily basis in a flow that could only be accomplished on a free venue like the Internet.
So, in the end, the blog didn't just sell a lot of books, it basically made the second book possible, both in terms of content reach and speed of execution. All those intellectual prompts from readers made it possible for me to--knock on wood--avoid the sophomore jinx of either going too far astray from the original "hit album" or simply regurgitating the same melodies.
Like any good "hit album," PNM created its own mini-genre, and the blog helped me figure out not so much how to "give them more of the same" but how to "give them more of what they need."
When you read BFA, you will see this phenomenon in spades, and I describe it in spades throughout. Naturally, I will get a lot of reviews that continue to harp on my "self-important self-referencing," and these criticisms will basically ignore the blog transaction function for what it's done. Because BFA is so chocked full of strategic concepts, I bet I won't see a single review that really tackles the blog function to any serious degree, and that's too bad, because--possibly more than any book yet written--BFA was constructed fundamentally out of an ongoing many-one dialogue I conducted with my readership.
Naturally, I'm responsible for the text and the ideas contained within, because, as always, I play the role of great synthesizer, deciding which ideas merit inclusion and which do not. In a couple of key instances (Lutas's "implicit villains" and Safranski's definition of "connectivity") I actually cite the fellow bloggers in question, but in the vast majority of instances I do not. This will bug some people who will recognize, "Hey, I gave Barnett that bit about Picasso painting Gertrude Stein." But, to be honest, there is simply no way I could generate an audit trail of all the pointers I got from people unless I spent half my day cataloguing emails and archiving them for the long haul, and that’s just not practical. I know everyone who writes me sees their email as unique in its content glory (and, of course, it is), but the sheer mechanics of going through hundreds of emails each day simply precludes that sort of precise archiving. I mean, I simply have to flush my email boxes regularly, otherwise they are shut down by the services that provide them.
Plus, it would simply be weird to have such extended citations: "this source, first presented to me by so and so, because of a blog I once wrote on this article, because of a blog my webmaster talked me into writing, a skill I credit my older sister for developing, based on an early childhood rearing by my mom … " and so on and so forth.
Hell, it would take me months simply to compile all the names of people I've interacted with, and in that list I'd generate a lot of unwarranted thank you's to go with all those warranted. So what I did in the acknowledgements of BFA was simply to thank the blogosphere and my readership in aggregate, citing by name only those whose frequency level was so high that they became distinct personalities in my mind (Safranski, Lutas, Lotus and Meade).
For the rest of you who, when you come across some bit in BFA that seems familiar to you because you remember some interaction over that subject matter, get this tingly feeling in your gut that maybe--just maybe--you were the one (or one of the ones) who generated that lead, enjoy that sensation for all it's worth, because in many cases it will be true. You really did help me write this book.
The best compliments I get on PNM are of the "you're just talking about the same ideas I've been talking about for years!" sort. Sometimes, the excitement of these missives rises to the level of almost accusing me of vision plagiarism ("We think alike!"), but mostly they just constitute a celebration of connectivity ("We think alike!"). Either way, these are the best sort of compliments because they signal the portability of the ideas contained within the book, and that sort of "aha!" feeling is crucial to the reproducibility of the strategic concept. In short, your great idea is yours alone, but your great vision is everybody's together--otherwise it's just your great opinion.
If PNM generated those sorts of compliments in spades, then BFA should generate them all the more (hopefully, along with fewer "young man, narrowly read" carps because BFA's meta-analysis focuses on the works of others more than on my past thinking), and the blog will be the reason.
The blog, therefore, becomes the giant feedback loop that raises the reproducibility factor of BFA by an order of magnitude. It makes PNM "the series" the vision that just keeps on visioning.
And THAT is why Critt now has a well-paying job as "Director of Corporate Blogging" at Enterra Solutions. I get it now. Steve DeAngelis gets is now. And Enterra has got him now.
Will BFA enjoy that much greater a reach than PNM? I certainly hope so.
And if it does, the blog will be the main reason, making the vast amount of hours I've put into it well worth the effort.