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The truth is that I’ve been thinking more about blogging than actually blogging.  Maybe it’s the word: blog.  Blog is a portmanteau of the words web and log; a combination of morphemes that lacks seriousness in my opinion.  Blogging doesn’t sound like a thing I want to happen to me let alone something I would put my mind to accomplishing.  The consensus is that blogging is an important endeavor for the modern business person.  But blogging sounds a lot like flogging, and I can’t shake the overall sense of punishment that lingers when I hear it.

“Blogs are the new business cards…” is a phrase I keep hearing.  I know where I stand with the classic business card.  I decide between ivory and eggshell; navy blue or black, and move on with my life.  Blogging is far more involved than the traditional self-promotion of handing out business cards.  They even invented verbs to describe new marketing strategies.  Unfortunately for those of us who were born before the internet, words like blog and tweet may sound juvenile.  Tweeting conjures a mental image of doing “The Chicken Dance” with four year olds. How can something called tweeting be crucial to my marketing platform?

After listening to Michael Niemann discuss his own hesitation at joining the world of blogging my interest in figuring out how to overcome my own reluctance got kicked up a notch.  Turns out that blogging and tweeting are almost a job in themselves.  Professional bloggers take the job seriously.  According to Greg Digneo’s blog post titled 5 Lessons Steve Jobs Could Teach You About Creating a Popular Blog, blogs should “make a dent in your niche” with “zippy” but simply presented content. 
Digneo also urges bloggers to follow Jobs’s advice to Stanford graduates to “Stay hungry, stay foolish.”  Basically, a serious blogger will go out on a limb and allow some of the sloppiness that accompanies raw curiosity to be public on the internet.  I don’t agree with Digneo on this.  I think that everything I make public should be my best effort.  I have nothing against curiosity or taking a risk with an idea, but I feel that if I post on a blog or tweet something to the world – I want it to at least be free of spelling errors.

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Ryan W. Bradley is an author and book cover designer who currently works in the Southern Oregon University Bookstore as the shipping/receiving coordinator.  He spoke to the History of Publishing class on April 25, 2012, about how he creates book cover designs: which covers sell, which ones do not sell and how it is working with authors from a small business perspective.  His business changes with the popularity of electronic books that do not require book covers, or their designs.

Ryan’s small business Artistically Declined Press “births books,” but more specifically book covers – although Ryan himself has also authored several books.  For Artistically Declined Press, their book covers are definitely not “aesthetically declined.”  According to Ryan, he has never had to redo book covers for authors more than two or three times typically.  There is a rare and occasional customer who he has had to modify his style for a little, but for the most part he enjoys working with all the books and authors he does covers for.

Many of the book covers Ryan creates are taken from pictures here in Ashland; many are taken from his own home and of his family.  For one local author who wrote a story about motherhood, Ryan used a picture he took of his three-year-old as the book cover.  Ryan explained how he relies very much on computer programs that adjust the lighting, saturation, sharpness, and other features of a photo to match the tone and context of the book.  In the case of the book cover he produced for the book on motherhood, Ryan explained how he adjusted the color and lighting of the photo to create a dull or almost melancholy sight since the book highlighted dreary aspects of motherhood – not just the perks.

Interestingly, Ryan has also created book covers for some of the books he has authored.  One of his books, Code for Failure A Gas Station Novel has a book cover he designed to fit the autobiographical tone of this story.  The book cover design so accurately depicted Ryan, that he had it tattooed onto his arm.  Ryan puts sentimental thought into the book covers he designs, which is why I found the book covers designed by Artistically Declined Press to be so cool.cThey are bold and charismatic with a touch of Ryan’s personal life.

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While wandering around the internet and the SOU library database, I stumbled across an article reporting that words are falling out of use faster than new words are being coined. Now, on its own, I might just overlook this report (especially with Professor Battistella remedying the problem by creating a new word every day) if it weren’t for the reason given to explain this occurrence. What’s the cause you ask? Spell-check.

Now, this observation wasn’t made by someone with a little too much time on their hands. Some credibility can be give due to the fact that the study was conducted by a team at the Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies in Italy and they analyzed, according to the article, English, Spanish, and Hebrew with the help of the Google’s digital texts. As they moved through books from the nineteenth century to present day, here’s what they found—beyond finding the need to point the finger at spell-check:

The investigators found words began dying more often in the past 10 to 20 years than they had in all the time measured before. At the same time, they discovered languages were seeing fewer entirely new words emerging. They suggest that automatic spell-checkers may be partly responsible, killing misspelled or unusual counterparts of accepted words before they see print (Choi, par 7).

I’m not really one to talk because I honestly can barely spell opportunity without spell-check correcting me. I never really applied myself during elementary school spelling lessons. Sorry to my second through sixth grade teachers, but in my defense, it wasn’t because I assumed spell-check would catch it, as I justify it nowadays…it was because I just hated studying for spelling quizzes.

However, that being said, I’m not entirely sure I believe spell-check’s to blame. Yes, it corrects spelling, but if a word existed before the spell-check existed, it should be checkable—allegedly—since there would be something to reference. I believe it’s slowed the coinage of new words because people shy away from having the red squiggle under anything that might not be in the database of words spell-check knows.

It should at the very least be interesting to see if the discovered trend continues into the next decade.

Works Cited

Choi, Charles. “Digital spell-checking may be killing off words.” Science. MSNBC, 15 Mar. 2012. Web. 26 May 2012. <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46749036/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/digital-spell-checking-may-be-killing-words/#.T8D8KsWEFEN>

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What John Yunker from Ashland Creek Press said in class “If you can write and have something to say, you will do well in life,” resonated with me too.  I felt that it was more than a distant possibility that I could get my ideas ‘out there’.  Getting published was suddenly tangible.  I have access to all the same social networks.  I have an expanding knowledge of how to be creative in the digital world.  But everyone else can also see the vast opportunities that are possible on the internet for voicing your piece.  The internet is almost overly accessible.  The question arises, “How will anyone find my voice, my needle in a haystack, amongst all this s#*t?”

Midge Raymond and John Yunker introduced, at least to me, the idea of book trailers.  Their trailer, Love in the Time of Amazon.com ignited a series of ideas that make getting noticed online plausible.  I became curious about what kinds of book trailers my favorite authors created.  I imagined them being a bit more like a movie trailer than the example Ashland Creek Press showed our class.  There is quite a variety of approaches to book trailers, and companies like Circle of Seven Productions specialize in creating book trailers for authors and publishers (at a cost of course).  Here are some of their selling points for their book video marketing package:

• Book trailer and online distribution
• Social Media Promotions, including YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace
• Online Marketing to multiple platforms, including blogs, video sites, social media and bookmarking sites
• Promotions to portable devices such as Wii, PSP, iPhone and other mobile phone devices
• Video submission to media sites for broadcast
• Online distribution of book video to reader sites including GoodReads, Watch the Book and Bookscreening.com
• Aggressive Online Outreach to Genre Specific Sites
• Online distribution of book videos to over 5000 libraries
• Online distribution of promotional material to over 300 booksellers
• Multi-venue online promotions including social sites, media sites, reader destination sites and blogs

The internet has added multiple layers of complexity to what writing is as a profession.  I only follow one well-known author on Facebook, Neil Gaiman.  His was the first book trailer I watched; Instructions was written and read by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Charles Vess.  It was not what I expected.  I expected the book trailer to be a teaser.  I thought the author would not divulge the entire story, but he does.  I love it, and the trailer doesn’t detour me in the slightest from wanting to have my own copy of the book.  It’s about four minutes long, but worth it.