In addition to the million other interests I have, you might be surprised to learn that I do digital pin-up art. Over the past couple of years, my work has started to gain some recognition and recently, I was offered the opportunity to be featured in a new book called “The Contemporary Illustrated Pin-Up” by Schiffer Publishing.

The book features me, along with 14 other awesome contemporary pin-up artists including Armando Huerta, Steve Baier, Paul John Ballard, Matt Dixon, Dave Nestler & Sonia Roji, to name a few, and it was a real honor to be featured along with so many amazing artists.

I just received my copy and I must say, it looks super fabulous! If you are into pin-up art or are just looking for a sexy coffee table book, this is definitely one to get.

You can pick up your copy on Amazon
You can check out more of my pin-up art at: www.digitalgirlies.com

Here is a screen capture for the first level of a Facebook game called “Fragrant Flowers” that I helped develop while at Razorfish for Unilever’s Drive/Rinso/Surf laundry detergent. (It is called Surf in the UK and Asia and Rinso in Turkey)

The goal of the game is to grow a virtual flower. A different flower every week, for 6 weeks. Each flower is representative of the different fragrances of laundry detergent. The player has to water the flower, talk to it and protect it from different types of weather.

This version which runs for 6 weeks, was launched in Argentina and the text is in Spanish. My role was user experience consultant, information architect, and in the beginning, interim project manager. In addition to UX, I created the game design document as well as the wireframes. The project had a very short launch window, a small budget and skeleton crew, so I think the team did an awesome job.

Writers, authors and publishers have been influencing technology and culture since the written word was invented. I am constantly reminded of this every day on my commute to work, when my train crosses over the river and passes thought Mainz Germany, which is the birthplace of Johannes Gutenberg, the father of the movable type printing press.

This invention was one of the key catalysts for starting the Renaissance and the scientific revolution. It’s creation occurred over 500 years ago, and yet I am shocked and amazed when I think of all of the revolutionary events that have occurred because of it, just in the span of my lifetime.

In the past few years we have experienced a new renaissance of sorts, in the growth of ebooks, ebook sales, ereader devices and the self publishing industry.

It is now possible for an author to write, self publish and sell their own books online, literally from a mobile device and are able to make a decent living from it. Some are making millions from it.

The Good News

The good news is, that no longer are we restricted to having to rely entirely on a publishing company as a gatekeeper to successfully promote and sell our books.

We have reached a point where the same promotional, printing, sales and distribution capabilities, once only available to major publishing companies are becoming available to everyone. These tools are free and easily accessible online, which is also, I might add, where the readers are browsing and doing a majority of their shopping.

The Bad News

The bad news is just that. The old ways of browsing for new books in the book stores are rapidly disappearing as major brick and mortar stores are losing out to digital and going out of business. Ebooks are now outselling print books (according to Amazon) and as a result, the majority of the promotional focus is now done online.

The new prime time is no longer sitting around the TV at night with the family or reading the newspaper. It is now online, on the mobile devices, on your Facebook wall, in the blogs and in the apps. If you want to market a product successfully, these new mediums are where you now have to target.

To add to this growing pressure to adapt to all of these changes, consider this:

According to a recent article on Smashing Magazine:

“…if you recorded all human communication from the dawn of time to 2003, it’d take up about 5 billion gigabytes of storage space. Now we’re creating that much data every two days.”

What this means is we are in the middle of an exponential growth curve of garbage content production. People are writing and publishing in droves and without publishers and editors to filter it, “most” of it is pretty bad. Without the help of contextual platforms such as Google, Apple’s Siri, Facebook, and other upcoming services that help to push you relevant information based on your interests, it will soon become impossible to separate the cream from the crap.

As a result, people will continue to rely on these filters to insure that they are receiving relevant content and the ability of authors and writers to stay on the good side of these filters, will require considerable focus on tech and networking.

Welcome To The World of The New Digital Author

Because of all of these changes and challenges, authors are now facing the paradox of both the incredible freedom to control their financial destinies, but also the pressure to adapt, learn and add a whole new mandatory layer of tech, marketing and promotional skills to their toolbox.

It is no longer just a matter of being a good writer these days. In order to stay competitive and earn a decent living as a writer, artist, musician, or any other type of creative profession for that matter, you have to start thinking strategically and you have to think digitally.
Unless you polish your online marketing skills and learn how to compete strategically by making your quality writing, books and products stand out from the masses and index in these new contextual search engines, you will be buried.

Selling digital content is a whole new ballgame. (Just ask the musicians!) It requires a digital marketing strategy, an author platform, a mechanism for traffic, discovery, research, lead capture, sales, communication and networking and as a result, an overarching understanding of all the complexities involved. Now, more so than ever, because of the highly competitive ebook prices, it also requires a major focus on the backend strategy and the upsell.

The reality is, if you want to make a living as a writer, you now need a hybrid of BOTH mad writing skills AND ninja digital marketing skills. It is not just a luxury anymore. It is a necessity.

Start Now!

Should you be blogging, using social media, building a platform, and digitizing your work? The answer is YES to all of it. It has been for some time now. It is a moot point.

Sure this is a lot to learn, and I definitely suggest moderation, but just get started. Learn something. Take action and do it NOW!

Summary

To summarize, there are a ton of new opportunities for authors for selling and promoting their work, however the down side is that people are jumping on the bandwagon in droves. If you want to stay competitive you need digital marketing skills and you need to start developing them now.

Let me say before I close that I can’t predict the future. In many ways I feel we are reaching a critical mass. I have fears for authors, both published and self published in regards to their means of rising above the noise and growing and maintaining a large enough fan base to be able to make a decent living selling their work.

On one hand, I am full of doom and gloom for the industry. On another hand, part of me is screaming RELAX! Just write good stuff and people will follow.

I think it is a little of both. We need to put continued focus on writing great stuff, however we also need to have the skills to stay in the game or else things will be getting very difficult for authors very quickly.

What are your thoughts on the future of publishing? Do you have a digital strategy? If so, I would love to hear about it.

When I was young, I can remember having some sort of dream or daydream about where I would be when I got older.

From what I can remember, the picture in my head is just a scene of myself with a beautiful woman I was married to. We were walking hand and hand down a tree lined country lane, somewhere in Europe. It was autumn and I could clearly see the particles blowing around in the light of the sun, as it streaked through the trees. A dog ran by us and up the driveway to a beautiful stone country house with a red door and large arched windows. There was a red Karmann Ghia in the driveway, which is weird because I hate red cars and I hate old VW’s even more.

I’m not sure if I actually made this up or maybe I just saw an ad in some 70′s magazine with the photo, but the image still sticks with me and is crystal clear. Somehow I remember thinking, that’s me and this is where i’ll end up. When I think about what I did for a living, my first thought was an author, or a professor or maybe a scientist?

I write a lot about making plans and setting goals. My blog, for example,  plays a large part in achieving my goals, but I’ll admit that unfortunately it has suffered from a lack in focus for a long time now. It’s hard when you have so many scattered interests as I do, but at some point you have to stop the analysis paralysis and just focus.

Time to set a goal or set a dream and take action towards it.

New Direction

Ever since I published my first book, I knew I was addicted. The second I opened up the package, held my product in my hand and smelled the ink as I flipped through the pages of my first printed book, I knew that this was something I wanted to do a lot more of in my life.

Because of this new obsession, moving forward, I will be placing a lot of emphasis on self publishing. If it were a recipe, it would include a heavy dose of marketing, blogging, platforming, & strategy as well as a pinch of design, social media, motivation and optimization.

The goal of this new direction is to not only help me reach my goals of building a solid platform for my writing (in order to get my dream house and ugly red car…), but in the process, to use my knowledge of marketing and design to help authors, writers and other creative professionals, to adapt to this new digital world, to effectively sell their work and be successful at it.

In the process I hope to network with people who know way more than I do and learn from them, which I will also share here as well.

Be forewarned though. What I talk about may, at times, be a little shocking, abrasive or a little controversial. Based on my recent book, you can probably tell, i’m no saint, but my intentions are good and my opinions come from a whole lot of different experiences.

Talk to Me!

If self publishing is your thing as well, leave me a comment and say hello. tell me your goals and dreams. I would love to network.

I also would like to encourage you to join my mailing list located in the sidebar under my photo. You can also follow me on a slew of social networks, where I’ve been recently connecting with a lot of author types and talking shop and strategy.

I am officially an author. On July 17, 2012 I published my first book on Amazon Kindle. It took two years to write, and a majority of it was done using a mobile phone or an iPad, while standing on the train from Wiesbaden to Frankfurt Germany, during my long commutes to and from work.

Yes, two years is a long time to write a book, especially when edited down, was only about 120 pages. or so. The first year was kind of a wash because I just kept rewriting the first 2 pages over and over. It wasn’t until the following year where I actually took it seriously, created a solid outline (a plan) and dug in.

The goal of this book was not to write a bestseller or change the world. It’s certainly not a feel good, Oprah Club, curl up with a cup of tea, kind of book. (In fact it’s a little bit “shocking” but more on that later.)

It was simply to just write a book, finish it and publish it. It was purely an exercise in completion. In my post about creating a 20 year plan for myself, writing a book was one of my 2 year short term goals. Well… mission accomplished.

It almost didn’t happen though..

Big Problem

My biggest problem in writing this book was not that it was all that difficult. The book is nonfiction, so a lot of it was just documentation of facts. It was simply a problem of time. I never had any, or so I thought…

On average, I spend about 4 hours a day just in transit, either sitting on a train, a bus, a streetcar, or waiting to catch one of them. Much of this time however was spent standing up, shoulder to shoulder in crowded, sweaty, stinking rush hour Deutsche Bahn commuter hell.

When I am not in transit, I am either working full time as a consultant, or spending what remaining time I have with my wife and daughter. On busy work days, this family time is often times very limited. My wife and I get up at 5am and are pretty much comatose by about 9pm.

Free time to just sit, clear my mind and write is a rare luxury.

Luckily, with the help of my 20 year plan and the pressure it put on me to reach my goals, I realized that you can’t write a book if you don’t start writing. If you decide that you don’t have time, you won’t have it. Most likely, you never will write your great novel, because the number one problem why most people fail, is because they just never START.

It became clear to me that if I were to ever leave any kind of legacy of the thoughts and helpful stuff in my head, much less just reach a life long goal, I needed to start writing and I needed to start NOW.

Lightbulb Moment

One thing you’ll notice about people packed in like cattle on trains with nothing else to do, is that they all kill time by messing around on their cell phones. Playing games, texting, listing to music, talking. In my case, it was either checking email, reading ebooks on the Kindle app or taking notes with a program called Evernote.

Because of the convenience of cloud computing and applications like Evernote, Dropbox and Google, you are now able to record and access your data virtually anywhere you have an internet connection.

Evernote is an awesome program because it allows you to write and organize notes, format text, add photos, and even has a speech to text function, so you can just talk to it if you don’t have time to type. I use it a lot for work and recording ideas, so… DUH! why couldn’t I use it to write a book? If this was all the time I had to write, then I would have to use it to my advantage, so there the book began.

If I was lucky enough to have a seat, some of the book was done on my laptop, but much of it was done via my phone or iPad, in Evernote, standing, and taking advantage of any short bursts of inspiration and optimizing my time.

• Sometimes it was a phrase or a quote.
• Sometimes it was via voice recording and speech recognition.
• Sometimes it was a photo I snapped of something to remember.
• Sometimes it was a clipping from a website, blog or a quote I heard somewhere.
• Sometimes just a sentence.
• Sometimes a paragraph.
• Sometimes a whole chapter.

Once the outline was solid, the rest was a matter of filling in the gaps, like paint by numbers.

Eventually when I did have some free time to sit and analyze what I had accumulated, I realized that I had enough info to assemble an entire book and the rest was history.

The next challenge was formatting my book for Kindle, but i’ll leave that for another post. The point being, chunk by chunk, over a period of time, an entire book was written, completed, published and a lifetime goal was achieved.

I am currently working on my next book, which I am hoping will come together much faster. The goal for this next book is to become a best seller.

You can do this!

If I can figure out how to write a book using a cell phone, standing up on a train, you can do it too.

• If you are sitting on a plane, a train, a car or stuck in traffic
• If you are sitting on the toilet, or wake up in the middle of the night and can’t sleep
• If you are sitting in the coffee shop or standing in the checkout line at the grocery store

…you can write a book.

Take advantage of what little time you do have and just start something. We all have more time then we think.

The average american watches between 2 and 7 hours of TV a day. Imagine what you can do if you apply just half of that time to taking action and applying it to achieving something you’ve always dreamed about.

Sure, it might take you forever to do it, but doing, regardless of how little, is better than not doing.

Start now!

It’s your dreams we’re talking about here.

Do you have a similar story, thoughts opinions or ideas? If so, leave me a comment. I would love to hear from you.

About the Book: The Whole Shocking Story!

If you are curious about the book I discuss in this post, well… um… it’s a marketing book about how to start an adult design business. Yep.

You might be shocked to discover that before I was doing the Mad Men marketing consultant thing, I cut my teeth in the design world by starting an adult design business, which, interestingly enough, actually got to be pretty successful.

After getting married and having a kid, I decided to put the business to rest and move on to other things, however, it was such a crazy story that I thought it would make a great theme for a book. In reality it is about marketing strategy (with an adult twist of course) so it can be applied to any businesses, not just adult.

Due to the theme of the book, you can probably figure out why I don’t necessarily want to go shouting it from the rooftops as my premiere literary debut. It sure aint Shakespeare… but I guess if crap like 50 Shades of Grey can become a best seller, maybe my book IS Shakespeare?? Plus I guess I couldn’t write a post about writing a book with a cell phone while standing up on a train without at least sharing the whole shocking truth.

So… if you ARE interested in checking out the book, “Shocking Secrets of Adult Design: Uncensored Marketing Strategies for Starting a Profitable Adult Design Business” it is available on Amazon in print and for Kindle.

If you actually DO read it (God help me…) do me a favor and leave a review of it on Amazon. It might help me sell one or two.

Thought for the Day: While innovative thinking is a much discussed, rare, valuable and sought after skill these days, sometimes thinking INSIDE the box can be the hardest thing to do.

My advice would be that before you go spending valuable time, energy, money and resources dreaming up some BIG idea and glorifying the need for “new, creative, crazy and innovative” make sure you first have a solid grasp of the “old, tried and true, reliable and predictable.” Chances are you haven’t even scratched the suface of what is right in your very own backyard.

• What underutilized or untapped resources do you have hiding in the closet or right under your nose?
• Who do you already know that you can ask to help you?
• What can you do to make what you already have, even better?

I’d be willing to bet that you have way more options than you think.

New isn’t necessarily better. Sometimes the best new ideas are the old ones that are just reanalyzed and better thought through.

I like to collect things.

Throughout my entire life, I have always had some sort of collection going.  It started with comic books and Matchbox cars, then model rockets, then tropical fish, then action figures, then guitars, then mexican art, then books, then Harley Davidson t-shirts, the list goes on and on.

You see, much like squirrels instinctively hoard nuts and berries for the winter, humans have these instinctive, primal urges hard coded into our brains too. With us, however, it is a little more complex.

With the advent of 24 hour grocery stores and electricity, somewhere down the line, we stopped NEEDING to hunt and gather to survive, or collect pelts or the skulls of our enemies.

Somehow, we managed to transfer these fixations, with just as much fervor, to amassing storage sheds full of useless Beanie Babies or shanking some old lady in the check out over a pack of those stupid rubber bands that snap back into the shape of animals, or… the thrill of the hunt for a $2 Black Friday Waffle Iron at Walmart.

Why? For survival of course… life and death kind of stuff right? Actually, depending on which school of psychology you subscribe to, it is just that.

You see, collecting is a VERY addictive chemical dependency. It triggers the goal seeking and achievement chemicals in our brains that make us happy. The more we collect, the more we need more. With every new addition to the collection, we receive that little dopamine hit, just like nicotine or a heroine dose or an orgasm. It’s the same thing.

Dopamine is the mother of all crack and it is what humans live for. Seriously.  Why?

The Need to Collect

Before you freak out and run off to confession or rehab (or Walmart), you have to realize that we need this behavior to some extent to survive.  The simple act of setting and achieving goals are what triggers these same chemicals, but without this process, our lives would seem to have no purpose.  We would feel incomplete. We get depressed and try to kill ourselves with a waffle iron.

Some people collect stamps and stickers, some people collect virtual farms, and others collect life changing achievements and experiences.  It’s made up of the same stuff.

Collecting is a game we play with ourselves. Collecting is fun, collecting is work, and therefore, work = fun. If you are not working towards a goal, then you aren’t having fun.

Collecting is a simple form of achieving goals and this gives our lives value and purpose, regardless of the size, actual value or relevance of the objects of our desire.

The New VALUE of Collections

Not only do we collect real items and experiences, but more recently, people have started collecting “things” on the internet.

On Facebook and Twitter we collect friends. On deviantART, users build collections of their favorite art work.  On Foursquare, people collect and compete for badges and mayorship for their favorite locations. In Farmville or World of Warcraft players collect any number of rare digital items which can have exchangeable, monetary value in the real world.

Pinterest

On Pinterest (oh how I love you Pinterest…) people are starting to collect images and links to pretty much everything they like on the internet. Art, food, fashion, LOLcats, books, porn, you name it. PRODUCTS. They share these collections with other collectors and it is fun to discover what people like.

In otherwords, Pinterest is a HUGE collection of data on what people like to collect and what makes this the holy grail for marketers is because people provide this data naturally, willingly and enjoy it.  You don’t need to explicitly ask anymore what people like in a survey or an obnoxious advertisement, because if you watch the collectors and follow their behavior, they will tell you.  Happily. Implicitly.

I have seen the new crack of the future, and it’s dealer is Pinterest.

Don’t Believe Me?

My cousin just wrote on Facebook that she went to Ikea today because looking at Pinterest made her want to go. That is POWER my friends.

What do you collect?

Leave a comment and let me know. I collect comments too… or maybe just leave me your pinterest ID and i’ll go see for myself?

Side Note Obviously this is not a discussion of right or wrong, i’m just trying to point out some basic facts on human behavior as it applies to marketing and tech. I personally would recommend collecting life changing achievements and experiences, but if your trip is old newspapers or ceramic chickens… well, you GO!

The project I was working on for the last year and a half is FINALLY LIVE! My “technical title” was Senior Information Architect for Crytek’s new social network called GFACE.

It is hard to describe all the roles and responsibilities I had on this project because I wore so many hats that covered so many touch points. I can honestly say that I have never put so much effort and personal blood, sweat, tears and great ideas into a project as with this one. I am really proud to have worked with such a talented team and I am really happy that it is now live.

This was a lead position acting as Senior IA, UX designer and marketing consultant, working closely with a creative director, biz dev, social game designers and developers with the goal of building: a gamer-focused, next generation social network that “Played Like a Game”

My Roles included:

• User Experience Design
• Information Architecture
• Interaction Design
• Creative Direction
• Mobile iOS UX/IA design
• Social Media Marketing Consulting

High level concept development for:

• Social & viral advertising
• Social & Brand Strategy
• Game layer/gamification
• Virtual currency & Economy
• Achievement systems
• Social & Casual Game conception

The service is now in Closed Beta release. Check it out!

Here’s a little story about how I made $97 in less than 5 minutes.

Now, you’re probably thinking, “Wow, dude… strippers don’t even make that kind of money!” right? I know… it sounds pretty incredible, but that’s just what I did, and as a result, I get FREE web hosting.

Curious? Well, check out the image below.

So, here’s how it went down:

My friend Giuliano asked, “Hey man, what hosting company do you use for all of your blogs and stuff?”

Me: “I use Dreamhost.”
Giuliano: “Do you like them?”
Me: “Yeah, they’re awesome. I’ve been with them for like 10 years.”
Giuliano: “Cool. Can you send me the link?”
Me: “Sure. Here’s the link. http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?8012”
Giuliano: Clicks my affiliate link, signs up and pays for a year’s worth of Dreamhost Web Hosting and… Cha Ching!

I get $97 directly credited to my Dreamhost account.

Here’s the conversion in my Referral Summary:

I might add that, the account balance not only includes the one time $97 referral credit for referring Giuliano as a new Dreamhost customer, but on the same day, I also received a credit of $5 as a secondary referral that I made for referring someone else about 10 years ago. Then, the next day, ANOTHER referral credit!

Here’s what I saw in my inbox:

In case you didn’t quite get that, i’ll clarify:

10 years ago, I had another 5 minute conversation with someone and referred them to Dreamhost. They have been on Dreamhost for as long as I have, so for the past 10 years, I get paid monthly, a percentage of their fees. That’s 10 years of recurring income for 5 minutes of work over 10 YEARS AGO!

What is even more amazing is that this person ALSO refers customers to Dreamhost, so I ALSO get paid a small monthly percentage of what they pay as well.

Sounds like Easy Money, Right?

Well, it is! All because of these simple 5 minute conversations, as well as posting links to Dreamhost on my blog, I not only have had a major percentage of my web hosting bill and domain name registration fees completely covered for the past 10 years, but if I choose, I can even request a payout and transfer the money directly to my bank or PayPal account.

Now mind you, I haven’t exactly been pushing Dreamhost referrals all that much, so if I can have this much success with just some casual, passive referrals, think of how much I could have made if I promoted them more heavily?

How Can You Make Money With Dreamhost?

You can start promoting Dreamhost today by signing up for a FREE affiliate account, or if you have been wanting to start your own blog and need hosting, sign up to be a Dreamhost customer and the affiliate program is already built in.

Once you sign up, click the “Rewards” link and it will provide you with your referral link code. Any time you refer someone to Dreamhost, just give them that link to sign up with. They also provide all kinds of buttons and banners you can use, if you want to promote the link on your blog.

So, if you’re looking for easy, proven ways to make money online, I highly recommend you sign up to Dreamhost and get started today.

If you create any kind of viral, social content or if you are trying to get more bang for the buck out of your Twitter or email marketing, you should definitely read:

Zarella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness by Dan Zarella.

Be forewarned though…

This is not another “How to use Twitter or Facebook” kind of book, but instead goes much deeper into the new science of using metrics for a more predictable, results-based social media marketing strategy.

The book confirms some feelings that I have had for a while, which are basically that the social media honeymoon is over.

It is no longer a matter of just showing up and being there anymore. If you want results, you need data, strategy and technique for reaching predictable, manageable marketing goals.

I knew I would like this book from the very beginning, when Dan dispelled all of the normal social media cliche’s of “be yourself”, “make friends” and “build it and they will come” mentality, what he calls “unicorns-and-rainbows advice” and instead takes a deep dive into real analysis of what it takes to create successful, infectious social content.

He even goes so far as to create and analyze a massive databases of Retweets, and then applies the R0 factor (reproduction rate of contagious diseases) to determine social viralablity. That’s real stuff, not social media woo woo.

Dan’s simple strategy is this:

1. Increase the amount of people who are exposed to your message.
2. Create more attention-grabbing content.
3. Include powerful calls to action with specific copy.

Some highlights and key points:

• How to identify yourself authoritatively (example: He explains why using the word “guru” in your Twitter profile can a good thing…) I’m experimenting with it now and will let you know how it goes.
• How to make more impact by avoiding the use of negative remarks and instead focus on using only positive statements
• The importance of using time based words such as now, today, soon, hurry, limited time only, etc
• What are peak twitter times and when are the best times to get specific results with your tweeting.
• How to understand the behavior of your followers in order to get them to respond and share predictably.

Read This Book!

These are just a few of the many mind blowing ideas you can get from this book. I don’t want to give away all of the good stuff, so i’ll let you check it out for yourself.

I thought it was refreshingly awesome. It confirmed a lot of suspicions I have had and it really made me reconsider a lot of other things about how I’ll  approach my social strategy moving forward.

If you read it, leave a comment and let me know what you think.