Jon Samsel

One of the most popular book categories is the self-help book. The range it covers is wide from a “teach yourself” series, on a variety of subjects, to books on achieving more success, money, skills, and a happier lifestyle. This category covers many subjects.
 
Millions of readers out there want help––all kinds of it. Life may have them uptight in one way or another. Or maybe they just haven’t found the help they expected from magazines, newspapers, television, their doctors, lawyers, parents, ministers, the government, or other sources.
 
The help they are seeking may be in a book on how to raise their children, how to guide them through the dangerous teen years, and how to pay the bill for their children’s college education.
 
Maybe they want to lose weight, find a better doctor, plan a more exciting vacation, learn a new skill, develop a hobby, insulate their home, prevent a possible heart attack, or plan and give a speech.

There are a lot more potential subjects for a self-help book. The point of this type of book is that it offers practical help to the reader and gives specific information.
 
How To Know If You’re Really In Love is a how-to title. But it’s also a self-help book. Some titles bridge both categories.
 
Some authors in this category build impressive lists of published titles, and you may well find your own niche with this type of book.
 
A glance at the book titles on Amazon.com shows that self-help books are selling well. Like other categories, sales of this type of book can go through cycles and peak at times yet fall off at other periods. One thing is certain. The companies selling such books would not continue to publish and promote them if sales were not good.

Why You Might Try Writing a Self-Help Book

A case can be made for writing almost any kind of book. To help you decide if ‘Self Help’ is the right category for you, you should consider the following:

1. You have a real interest in one or more self-help subjects.
2. You have special knowledge, training, or experience in some area which can be applied to a self-help book.
3. You enjoy helping others or would like to believe that a book you write might help at least a number of readers.
4. You have access to the information needed for a book of this kind.
5. The research needed for a book offering self-help seems interesting to you.
6. You have developed a plan that has proven of some help to you, and you believe others could profit from it too.
7. You already blog or tweet about a certain subject already––and writing a self-help book would be a logical next step.

If none of the above suggestions seem to strike a chord within you, it does not mean the self-help book is outside your ball park. The suggestions are meant to be a list of clues to consider as a potential self-help author.

As many of you already know, Twitter is many things to many people. There seem to be two broad categories of Twitter users: 1) Casual friend & family communicators, 2) Hard core social networkers. Twitter is useful to both groups because it’s real-time, it facilitates connections from unexpected users, it quickly enables the transfer of news & knowledge, it allows people to access a worldwide network for personal expression (the me channel), it’s a mechanism for meeting people (no more excuses for being lonely), and it’s a free exchange for leveraging the wisdom of crowds (research, popular opinion, career advice, etc).

So I was on Twitter a few months ago, just a few weeks after joining, when I noticed some of my followers communicating in a strange two-letter code: RT.

Hmm, I thought to myself. What’s an RT? Run time? Roaming tiger? Right turn?

Retweet Defined
According to several Google search results, RT stands for retweet. Retweeting is simply the act of reposting someone else’s tweet and giving them credit. The person making the retweet is a retweeter. Mystery solved. Or was it? There must be more to this RT thing, I thought. So I set off to RT for myself.

Getting Started
Before you can retweet, there are two things you need to do first: 1) Sign up for your free Twitter account, 2) Identify a tweet you like.

The Twitter sign up process is one of the easiest of all the social networking services. If you are not already on Twitter, take a few minutes to get on board.

Finding a tweet worthy of retweeting is another matter. The organic way to do this is to first start tweeting yourself. After a while, people will start to follow you. You will find their tweets in the main content well on your Twitter home page, post log in. Browse through the conversations. When something sparks your interest, this post is a good candidate for retweeting.

Another method of discovering new tweets is by using the search tool at: http://search.twitter.com/. Type in a topic of interest, such as Academy Awards, and a long list of tweets will suddenly fill your screen.

How to Post a RT
A little more research revealed just what to do next. Apparently, the syntax of your retweet needs to start with the abbreviation, RT. Alternatively, you can spell out the entire word, Retweet, followed by a space, then the user name of the person who first made the tweet, and then finish with the content of the actual tweet (or as much of the content as you can squeeze into the 140 characters allotted).

What Does a Retweet Look Like?
RT @jonsamsel Free PDF book: Writing For Interactive Media. Click the green ‘Read It Now’ button http://www.jonsamsel.com/books

Why Are So Many Retweeting?
I asked three of my Twitter followers about retweeting. Why were they using this odd code in their tweets?

@joerawlinson told me that he started seeing RT in people’s tweets so he Googled to see what it meant. Joe said he retweets when others make a great comment that stands out or when someone shares a link to an interesting article. “My RT usage is really based on what I come across as I see others messages. Maybe once every couple of days. I don’t want my tweets to be all RT’s.”

The one thing Joe dislikes about retweeting is the 140 character limit, which forces him to have to edit other’s messages since their username takes up characters their original tweet didn’t.

@ctomlin said he retweets to: a) Let his network know about something, b) Give credit to the original tweet.

Craig did mention he’d like to see one Twitter one improvement to the RT process: “It would be nice if it could be done via a single click.”

@heatherhuhman explains how and why she retweets. “My first tweet was on November 3, 2008, and my first RT was on November 26, 2008. I RT as often as necessary. It’s not about quantity—it’s about quality. I RT information I truly believe my followers will find interesting and/or beneficial. Most of my followers are internship and entry-level job seekers, many of whom are thinking about careers in public relations, so I RT information relevant to them. I enjoy being able to bring my followers information from sources other than me. I certainly don’t have all the answers, and it’s great to bring other people’s perspectives to the table.

Recently I RTed a blog post by @dmullen about the importance of building relationships with the media in order to place stories. That RT caused a flurry of activity on his blog, as well as prompted people to write about the issue on their own blogs, because it was such a controversial issue. It started an excellent dialog among public relations professionals, and I think we all learned a lot from each other.”

What It Means to Be a Retweeter
The act of retweeting is a lot like adding footnotes to a term paper, or publicly recognizing a helpful co-worker on a large team project. It’s good karma, proper manors, goodwill. Your social capital is enhanced on Twitter every time you retweet because your network sees you as someone who recognizes and acknowledges others—someone who is selfless, willing to take the spotlight off of themselves for the betterment of the community. Retweeting does have many upsides.

The Power of RT’s
In previous blog posts I have written about the Twitter Effect and the huge impact that social networking is having on WOM marketing. Retweets are a fun part of this phenomenon because they’re more powerful than your average tweet. A retweet means someone’s tweet has received a stamp of approval from another person, and that person was willing to share this with their followers. A portion of these followers will, in turn, retweet again to members of their community. And so on, and so on. As you can see, retweets have the potential of spreading fast, far and wide—to the nth degree.

Monitoring Retweets
Wonder how many folks are retweeting your tweets? It’s nice to keep tabs on who’s retweeting you and the topics that are of interest to them. Not only is this a good way to learn more about your followers, but it can help you identify the key influencers in your network.

There are several ways to monitor your retweets. First, try using the Twitter search tool again:

http://search.twitter.com

Only this time, your query should be: RT @yourtwitterusername. You can also try: RT yourtwitterusername. This result may include a wider net of retweeters infamiliar witht he proper way to RT, plus ot will inlude all the retweets you have posted for others.

Emerging RT monitoring tools include retweet radar, which helps users discover trends in the mountains of information ‘retweet’ed on Twitter, Retweetist, a service that ranks the hottest links being retweeted as well as the most retweeted people on Twitter, and re.twitd.com, a service that track the most retweeted tweets.

In previous blog posts I have written about the importance of solid book openings. I hope you already realize the importance of the book titles, opening sentence, and opening paragraph. The first chapter is just as critical. This is your grand opening that sets the style, theme and tone of your book. The spotlight is on your beginning sentences, but the reader’s attention is focused on what you have to say through the entire chapter.
 
In the case of novels, the first few paragraphs may well determine whether your book sells. Many a prospective book buyer will read the first page before making a decision to buy or not.
 
So the opening paragraph should be strong enough to grab the reader’s attention and say, “Hey, there, you with the bloodshot eyes. Buy me. I’m good reading. You won’t be able to put me down.”
 
Prospective nonfiction-book buyers may read half or more of the first chapter before deciding whether or not to buy. This is especially true if the opening chapter is fairly short.
 
So the first chapter often influences a buying decision. Don’t underestimate its pulling power. It also establishes the purpose of your book.
 
If sent with an outline to an editor, your first chapter can mean the difference between the sale of your work or its prompt return to you. No wonder many authors rewrite their first chapters several times. They know it’s that important.

Baa baa TwitterSheep, have you any wool, er, tag clouds?

Ever wonder what your Twitter network of followers would look like as tag cloud? Well now you can transform your Twitter friends into visual cluster tags in a folksonomy, using the free social indexing tool, TwitterSheep.

Twittersheep takes your Twitter username, pulls your follower list, then analyzes each of your follower’s bios to generate a unique tag cloud displaying commonalities. The most common words/interests are displayed in large type.

What’s the value here? Bragging rights, of course! Compare your TwitterSheep flock to those of your friends and colleagues to see who is more of an authority on any given subject. The clouds are also just fun to look at (social eye candy).

But there could be other uses. Imagine if some upstart dating website integrated TwitterSheeps into their user profile database. Members could search according to tag cloud compatibility, or they could hyperlink to people they were interested in dating based on unforseen commonalities.

Twittersheeps could add a feature to their website that automatically generated a new tag cloud on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, then allow users to compile a time-lapse montage of their evolving social history. Of course, Twittersheep could be expanded to other social platforms so that users could generate a broader and more accurate view of their true social sphere. Start with Facesheep, then expand to LinkedSheep and then launch MySpaceSheep. Or just roll them all up into a single unified service and call it SocialSheep.

The possbilities are endless. Perhaps that’s part of reason why so many of us are entranced by everything social media—there are so many exciting possibilities all around us.

Thanks to @runnrgrl via Twitter who turned me on to this handy Twitter tool.

Here is what my flock of 477 Twitter followers @jonsamsel looks like: