Our visiting writer, Liz Strauss, taught me something important about building web communities. When you blog, she writes, "Be authentic, practical, and nice."Last week, I wrote about smaller publishing houses, but I wasn't practical and I wasn't nice. While I had hoped to start a conversation, I could have handled the whole discussion more professionally.
And, low and behold, Richard Nash from Soft Skull Press called me on it this morning. In addition, he told me that his publishing house (home to The Publishing Spot friends Nick Mamatas and Michael McColly) does indeed track the blogging conversation carefully:
"I've an RSS feed for the Technorati search for "soft skull" (as well as a number of key authors not likely to be doing it for themselves, should a blogger mention the author but not the publisher...)"
Soft Skull Press passed the test, but more importantly, I am sorry that I didn't set up the conversation on friendlier terms...
Jason,
On the first day, any editor started training I would say these words, "You will learn this job by doing it wrong. Even if I could tell you everything there is to know, it would have no meaning." I learned by making mistakes and I'm still doing so. You wrote this post with the gracious class of a gentleman. THAT'S nice.
Liz
Posted by: Liz Strauss | June 5, 2006 10:48 AM | Permalink to Comment