Author Mitch Joel turned to an unexpected social network to promote his new book, earning 102,000 views on SlideShare with a presentation called “25+ Mind-Blowing Stats About Business Today.”
We interviewed Joel on the Morning Media Menu today, talking about CTRL ALT Delete and why he created a SlideShare deck. Joel also introduced his book and shared advice for writers coping with a radically changed publishing world. Here’s an excerpt:
Always think about the context of the platform you are on. In the case of Slide Share, I know what SlideShare is, I know how it works and I know that people love data points. When I saw what we were developing in terms of content for CTRL ALT Delete, there was a real natural fit. We could take all this data and maybe add some new nuggets and post it to SlideShare. So it fit.
Press play below to listen to the complete interview on SoundCloud. To help you explore the network, we’ve collected five successful SlideShare presentations about books and publishing.
5 SlideShare Examples for Writers & Publishing Pros
The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs
Do Readers Dream of Electric Books?
Joel added this advice for writers:
A lot of authors are posting to Facebook, saying “Hey, buy my book” or “Check out this excerpt.” At the end of the day, Facebook is a small community. I know people think it is a billion people, but it’s not. It’s a very small community of individuals who are connected to two or three hundred people they know. For anybody to break through that, they really have to create something of relevance or, as I talk about in the book, something that is of real utility. Something that people could actually use.
He concluded:
In the case of what we did with these pieces of data, it is the type of stuff you would see and intuitively say “I want to share that with my boss.” We started with the mindset: “How do we build something that’s contextually appropriate for the platform we’re putting it on?”