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Seven Best Lessons Learned in Creating the "Best of" Book Series

In two-and-a-half weeks, I published eight volumes of “Best of…” books for Urban Semiotic, Go Inside, the Boles Blogs Network and a special tribute to Dr. Howard Stein.  The process of peeling back the onion of my writing life over years and years was both painful and exhilarating.  I discovered exactly what worked and what did not work. Here are seven of the best lessons I learned in editing eight book volumes of blog posts.

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The Best of Urban Semiotic Now Available on Amazon Kindle Direct!

After the glowing success of publishing our Hardcore American Sign Language Learning series via Amazon Kindle Direct, I started thinking about other ways to more permanently preserve the record of the best of what has been written.  Hurricane Sandy, and the death of Howard Stein, have made me consider worst case possible scenarios that led me into thinking about what if WordPress.com went down forever or something happened to me, or my Pair Networking hosting woke up and died.  How would the writing survive?

I decided having access to multiple article resources was becoming paramount in moving forward in a treacherous world, and so I thought to finally do something many readers have been asking me to do for many years:  Create a “Best of” series of writing that they can purchase and read in their own time and on their own devices.

Since the break of the New Year, I have been whittling down this Urban Semiotic Blog into its best, redacted, stories that I alone have written.  It was a long and sweaty job and the results are interesting.  There are no images or hotlinks or reader comments or quotes from outside sources.  It’s just me and my word against your eye.

The results of that effort are twofold:  The Best of Urban Semiotic, Volumes 1 and 2 on sale now on Amazon as Kindle Direct Publishing books!  You can read these books on your smartphone, Kindle, tablet or computer!

Continue reading → The Best of Urban Semiotic Now Available on Amazon Kindle Direct!

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How John Biggs and Tech Crunch Blew Up the Boles Blogs Network!

This has been a wild week with Apple threatening me with takedown notices and Tech Crunch riding to the rescue and then reflecting on what it means to be a blog publisher and dealing with threats from Apple Fanbois and lessons in legality from anonymous amateur Copyright commenters.

One lesson I learned this week, is that if you contact Tech Crunch for feedback and advice — as I did when I wrote asking if they’d ever seen a Takedown Notice like the one Apple sent me — you better make sure you tell your story first, or Tech Crunch will beat you to the publication punch — and that’s precisely what happened to me, and I couldn’t be happier about it!  Here’s why:

Tech Crunch’s John Biggs took my inquiry and ran with it and published the Apple threat letter and I was amazed by the power of that simple article.  Bigg’s story currently has 44 comments, 192 Facebook Likes, 609 Tweets, 153 LinkedIn Shares and 41 Google+ mentions.  However, those numbers only begin to tell the story of the real Tech Crunch muscle in the marketplace.

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The Immediate Me and the Instant Now

In the comments stream for a previous article — A Semiotic History of Playing with Brains — I revealed the following:

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WordPress Censorship or Technical Glitch?

As we live and die and publish and perish on the web together, it is never a delight to be told your work is suddenly missing from publication. 

I was informed yesterday that my article, “Urban Semiotic Articles Deleted from Google?” had gone missing from my Urban Semiotic blog hosted on WordPress.com.

Continue reading → WordPress Censorship or Technical Glitch?