Promoting the book

[yesthattom]

Are you involved in a local user group for Linux, Unix, or System Administrators? (or just want to come and speak at it?)

It’s time for me to start promoting the 2nd edition of The Practice of System and Network Administration. My plan is to do what I did for the first edition... speak at as many local user groups as possible during a short amount of time to create a lot of buzz. I believe last time I spoke in Boston, Boston, New York, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and the Bay Area. (yes, some of those cities I spoke twice... of course they were separated by more than a few days so I ended up with twice the traveling).

You may be surprised to know that when an author promotes their book, they do it on their own dime. The only help I get is in free books to hand out, and maybe some extra PR support. If traveling costs $200-300 per location, I have to sell about 100-200 copies of a book to break even. Obviously I don’t sell them during the trip, I have to count on the speaking gig creating enough buzz that after the fact people buy the book. That’s why I want to do all the promotion in a short amount of time so that everyone is talking about it at once. If I space the gigs too far apart, it doesn’t build any buzz.

Oh, and I usually end up taking 2 vacation days for each trip unless I can match it with a work-related trip. That’s a rarity. Sometimes I can find someone that wants me to teach my full-day time management class for $, but that ends up using up even more vacation time. While its worth it financially, it means I usually have very little vacation time by the next summer.

While all of this sounds like I’m complaining, in reality I love to travel, I love meeting people at user groups, and I love doing this kind of thing. It’s worth it, too. I think it really helped sell the 1st edition.

So my goal is:

1. Book a zillion speaking gigs all in Jan/Feb (maybe March) of 2008. Preferably big groups that can pay for my travel, or local groups. (Last time I spent $ to speak at one group that had about 12 people there. I can’t do that any again.) Small groups that can coordinate a joint meeting with other local perl/linux/whatever organizations for a large meeting would be awesome. My company has offices in Phoenix, Pittsburgh, NYC, Santa Monica, Mt. View, Dublin, London, Zürich, and other places; if I can talk and recruit, I’m sure I can get assistance with travel costs to those places.

2. Try to get invited to a lot of conferences to speak, which means coming up with something keynote-like that is tangential to the book, but isn’t what I said last time.

3. Come up with something to say at a user group that is not a sales pitch for the book, but somehow minimally promotes the book. For example:
1st edition TPOSANA: Talked about the very geeky technology we used to collaborate on the book. TM4SA: Gave away tips from the book.

So, if you’ve read the 2nd edition I ask you: What in it should I talk about?

If you haven’t read the 2nd edition: What would you like to hear me talk about?

Comments

[airshipjones.livejournal.com]

I'd love to get you out here and I want to get a few signed copies of your book for some of the folks I work with at Playfirst (http://www.playfirst.com).

We are migrating from SuSe to Ubuntu and trying to scale up our processes because we are growing really rapidly. I think talking about process scaling in dynamic environments would be a great topic.

[hcoyote.livejournal.com]

If you hit up Austin, a good place to think about might be Book People. They're always doing book signings here with some sort of discussion about the book. And we can certainly see about promoting it through the various local user groups here (LOPSA-Austin, CACTUS, Austin Sun User Group, etc)

[jss]

I can put you in touch with the Twin Cities System Administrators (TCSA) organizer, but we're small and unfunded (and I really wouldn't wish a Jan/Feb visit to MSP on a friend). Let me know if you're interested.

[princessleia2.livejournal.com]

Is Philadelphia local enough? Looks to be about 2 hour drive for you. I'm the contact for PLUG (Philadelphia area Linux Users Group) which is always looking for speakers for our all three "chapters" of the group. I recently went to a PANTUG (Philadelphia Area Network Technologies User Group) meeting and joined their mailing list, they're a nice group who might also be interested - and I know they're always looking for speakers too and have a broader network admin audience (so, not Linux-specific), I could hook you up with their contact.

[fivetonsflax.livejournal.com]

Hmm ... it's not a user group, per se, but maybe my colleagues at Sendmail, Inc. would want to hear you speak. Sendmail's conveniently located in Emeryville, CA. Of course, recruiting for "your company" wouldn't be appreciated! :-) We could probably get some of our customers in, too.

My signed copy of the 1e has gone walkies, too, so I'd better pick up 2e. I wonder if my name's still in the acknowledgements. (I read chapter 5 of 1e for AW before it was published.) Probably the only time I'll ever be mentioned in the same breath with Dennis Ritchie.

As for topics ... well, we do a lot of outsourced mail system design and management; some words about managing outsourced IT relationships would surely be interesting.