The day music disappeared
The intriguing tale of how all had to adjust to a strange new world
It’s easy to forget the impact it had at the time. Writing this in the middle of the global coronavirus pandemic, the upset and panic at the time seem trivial compared with the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives across the world. But back then it was huge, and we are still coming to terms with its effects.
The Millennium Bug
If you remember, it started as panic, was then dismissed as hype and finally became a reality, but in a way which no-one anticipated. The Millennium bug, or the Y2K bug as it was also known, was flagged up in the last few years of the 1990s as a potential problem which would affect the way that most computers would interpret and work with calendar data once we tipped into the new century. In the event, with some programming fixes in the background, at one-minute past midnight on the 1st January 2000, planes didn’t drop out of the sky and our lives were able to carry on with the minimum of disruption.
With one important exception. Everyone has their own memory of when they first noticed what had happened. I celebrated the arrival of the Millennium with my family down in Devon. My son Ben even went in the sea on that freezing January morning. We got home late on Sunday 2nd January and I put on a CD which I’d recently bought, Sonic Youth’s Goodbye 20th Century (a more prescient title than they could have imagined) which had been released in November 1999. Nothing. Silence. Nothing came out of the speakers. The digital output on the CD player was showing Track 1 and the time ticking by but no music was playing. CDs’ robustness has always been overstated – even the tiniest bit of dirt can cause them to skip or not play. Bloody thing, and it’s new too. Took it out, did the time-honoured rubbing of its surface on the inside of my t-shirt, and tried again. Still nothing. Skipped through every track, which still came up on the display with their track time listed, but just silence from every one of them.
I then got out several other CDs and tried them. Same story. What about some vinyl? There is nothing digital about that, good old analogue warmth, as vinyl junkies never fail to tell you. Sgt Pepper, the first Beatles vinyl album I owned, let’s give that a go. Dropped the needle in the groove, expecting to hear that familiar orchestra tuning up sound at the beginning of the album, and… nothing. Just the crackle of my particularly worn copy playing even more loudly than ever, with no music to cover it over.
This is crazy. OK, where else have I got music stored? Some old cassettes – just hiss. What about the thousands of tracks stored on my trusty iPod? The folders are there but at this point, 2 January 2000, there is not a single track which is playing. Music files on my computer – same story. How about music videos? I tune into MTV and they are still broadcasting, but with no sound! Good for karaoke, I guess…
And then I heard it on the news. Radio stations had no music to play. Master tapes in vaults were being hurriedly examined, even though it was the weekend. Wiped. Well-known musicians are being interviewed, in tears as they describe how their life’s work has vanished.
For weeks there was panic in the whole entertainment industry, as the vast legacy of 50-odd years’ worth of recorded pop music was found to have disappeared. The experience of being able to see but not hear old TV and video performances was tantalising and frustrating, but at least it prompted memories, if only to try to sing or play along to.
So, 20 years on, where are we now? There is now a 20-year legacy of recorded music to be explored. Many nostalgists who are now music collectors in their fifties and sixties decided to turn their back on this new music. If they couldn’t listen to Deep Purple in Rock and Led Zeppelin II then they weren’t going to listen to anything. Me? I decided to embrace the new music being made, and below is my playlist selection of post-2000 music.
Desert Island Discs
The nostalgia market has, surprisingly, continued to thrive, even though the music can no longer be heard. Music is one of the most powerful triggers of memories from our past and remarkably, most of us can still quote lyrics from songs recorded in the 60s and 70s, even though we’ve not heard them for over 20 years. Guests on Desert Island Discs still choose a remarkably high proportion of tracks from pre-2000, with Lauren Laverne having to repeat the phrase, “Well, I’m sure many of our listeners can remember that one, so here is 75 seconds of silence for us all to imagine along to that one.” I prefer listening to the episodes online where they skip those bits and just continue with the interview.
Vinyl junkies
Sales of vinyl records have surged over the past few years, fed by the nostalgia market. When the first reissues of pre-2000 albums came out on vinyl, people laughed at the idea. Pay twenty-five quid for an album I’m never going to listen to, you must be crazy! But it’s the whole package people are buying. The sumptuous gatefold sleeve artwork, the sensation of sliding the album out of its inner sleeve and placing it on the turntable. Dropping the needle onto the first groove, the anticipation of hearing it again. Except of course, there is nothing to hear. But still, it’s the artefact that’s important, the desirability of it as a prompter of the memories of listening to it.
So, record companies have found ever more ingenious ways to make people buy new versions again and again. Vinyl as picture disks or in various colours and finishes abound – after all, ‘splatter’ vinyl looks even more interesting as it goes round and round, bringing back memories of listening to that Pink Floyd album mildly stoned.
This interest in vinyl reissues has transferred across to newer music. Most new albums are issued as LPs as well as CDs, with of course the bonus of actually being able to listen to them. Most collectors though are so in the habit of just looking at the vinyl versions that they never play them and use the handy download codes or CD equivalents instead. A survey found that 48% of vinyl bought is never played, with 7% of purchasers not even owning a turntable.
What about people’s existing collections? As with most music nerds, I have a confession to make. I’ve still got a huge CD rack and some LPs, with it all lovingly displayed and alphabetised by artist, even though I never play most of them. The pre-2000 ones all sound the same. Except not quite. I know many people who play their old vinyl just to listen to the hisses and scratches. Here is a typical moment I’ve shared with a friend. “Come and look at the needle here. Did you see that? I know it sounds like a scratch, but it’s more than that. It actually jumps at this point, missing about 10 seconds of Dylan’s Idiot Wind. It was an argument with my first girlfriend at Uni. She threw a shoe at me and missed, hitting this copy of Blood on the Tracks. Kind of appropriate I guess as this is Dylan’s break-up album. Takes me right back to that moment.” There were tears in his eyes at this point. Personally, I’ve never enjoyed listening to the scratches. Give me a pristine digital version of something any day, but many people seem to love it, even without the music.
Yesterday
Have you seen that Richard Curtis film Yesterday? The one with the crazy premise that something triggers the whole world except one man to completely forget The Beatles and their music. I guess it was inspired by the Millennium bug event, but then took it one stage further, magically making everyone’s Beatles’ records and artefacts disappear. And then the hero of the film is the one guy who can remember their songs. He goes on to have incredible success as the ‘writer’ of their amazing catalogue. It’s quite a neat idea which pokes fun at our collective attempts to remember and recreate the music which has vanished.
Re-recording lost music
Talking of Richard Curtis, one of the most famous scenes in the film Love Actually is when Emma Thompson’s character is given a copy of Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now CD. Joni is one of my all-time favourite artists and she re-recorded the song Both Sides Now and a few others straightaway in 2000, and then a larger selection of her songs with an orchestral backing for 2002’s Travelogue album. Such a relief to be able to listen to at least have some of her songs, even if not in their original form.
Similarly, the reworking of classics with an orchestra has been picked up by genres such as acid house, with Hacienda Classical reimagining club classics, with mixed results, but Madchester nostalgics seem to go all misty-eyed for it.
It’s surprising that more artists haven’t attempted to recreate their lost music in this sort of way.
Tributes to lost music
There have been other attempts at recreating lost music though, with varying success. The incredible popularity of tribute bands, even tribute festivals, is the most obvious example of this. If we can’t listen to the original, let’s attempt to recreate it, with the look of the band as we saw them on Top of the Pops, and the songs as we remember them. The problem of course has proved to be the reliability of people’s memories to recreate these classic songs and albums. Most of them sound either like pale imitations or not-quite-right versions, where the transcription of the chords hasn’t quite been achieved. They have my sympathy though, as often they are relying on 20-year-old and more memories.
A similar problem afflicts the original artists themselves. Reforming and going out on tour with pre-2000 music is another trend which has been fuelled by the bug event. Ageing rockers dust down their memory of their 1983 classic album and they lug it around venues across the UK (well, they did before the virus), ‘playing the album in full’. Except quite often they don’t get the running order accurate and, as with the tribute bands, it just sounds like a less good version of the original than the one you remember.
Life has changed at gigs for artists with music pre- and post-2000. If you saw a band in, say, 1995 who had been big in the 70s, your heart would sink when they announced, “Here’s one from the new album”. Time to head for the bar. I’ve found it is now the other way round. With their failing memories and wobbly arrangements, the old tracks are always a disappointment. Audiences have generally picked up on this, and “Here’s a new one” now gets a huge cheer, as a good proportion of the audience will never even have heard of the older songs. I saw New Order at a festival, and they were brilliant, but when the opening chords of Confusion came on, it was only old people like me who went nuts and broke out into dad-dancing. The teenagers stood around me with their arms folded and a look of, well, confusion. True story.
Jumping into the stream
Another big change which the Millennium event triggered is the attitude to buying music. Those of us actively and avidly buying LPs and CDs pre-2000 got our fingers well and truly burned, as our entire collection was rendered useless. At least it didn’t become worthless, with people still prepared to part with huge sums on eBay for copies of albums they will never be able to listen to.
However, this has dented most people’s faith in buying music. It’s no coincidence that the first major file-sharing platform, Napster, came to prominence in 2000. Investing in a physical copy of something had turned out to be no guarantee of permanence after all. So why not just download something for free, even if it did mean that the artist received no royalties? To start with there was precious little to share and this probably contributed to Napster not being able to capitalize on this first-mover advantage and become THE online music brand. Once online streaming speeds became viable, it went legit in 2006 with Spotify and others, by which time there was a decent catalogue of music to listen to. It has still proved to be a meagre source of revenue for musicians. A whole generation has now shunned physical copies of music and has thought it easier and safer just to stream it.
If you can’t hear it, read about it
I love reading about music and have dozens of books about music. A noticeable trend has been the boom in titles coming out even if often about bands and music you can no longer hear. I find this is somehow not a barrier. I happily read books (and articles in magazines like Mojo) about music I’ve never heard and now never will. This type of interest has led to seemingly everyone associated with music from the sixties to the nineties writing a book: roadies, groupies, managers, and all sorts of hangers-on. Still, it’s all good and I’m buying them!
Artist reinvention
Musing on the bug event there is another aspect to mention. Some artists with music produced either side of The Great Divide (as it has become known) have used it as an opportunity to reinvent themselves and become something different, often with surprising results. Morrissey is a classic example of this. Many of us hold a deep affection for The Smiths, perhaps THE embodiment of the 80s’ Indie spirit in music – affecting, socially aware music which spoke to a whole generation across a slew of great singles and a handful of albums. Since 2000 though, Morrissey’s music and musings have seemed to be the antithesis of this. He was always seen as miserable (a lazy misinterpretation of his mordant humour), but now he has become misanthropic, racist and reactionary, everything we thought The Smiths were fighting against. Strange.
You will have your own disappointments…
What would Bowie do?
I admire Bowie’s life and career more than anyone else’s, so this is sometimes a question I ask to guide me through things. And, as ever, in this situation he made some shrewd moves. Bowie reacted immediately to the situation, appearing at Glastonbury in 2000, his first show there in nearly 30 years, where he played a career-spanning set which has recently been repeated to great acclaim on the BBC.
The final song Bowie played at that Glasto set was a surprise to many. Everyone was expecting a well-known classic such as Jean Genie, but instead it was his coruscating critique, I’m Afraid of Americans. Many interpreted this as his support for the widely circulated theory that the bug’s source was California’s Silicon Valley. Maybe residual guilt for this is why the US is so keen to lay blame for coronavirus on a leak from a lab in Wuhan.
Bowie then made two albums in quick succession (Heathen 2002 and Reality 2003) and went out on tour in 2003 to showcase tracks from these and to play a fantastic selection of pre-2000 songs while his band was still relatively fresh from performing them. My favourite gig of all time.
The very first line he sang post-Divide, on the opening track to Heathen, was “Nothing remains”, and we all shared the mournful regret in his delivery. Unfortunately, ill-health curtailed this surge of post-2000 activity and forced Bowie into semi-retirement from music, choosing to focus instead on his family. A number of artists took a similar path during this difficult period. However, after a decade of silence, Bowie suddenly re-emerged in 2013 with The Next Day. Its cover, with its witty sleeve artwork being an overlay on top of the cover of 1977’s “Heroes”, was a perfect visual symbol for this new world: the past has gone, we need to start building again on the top of it. Bowie then left us with the glorious final statement that is Blackstar just before his death in January 2016.
Other legends have been determined to establish a new legacy of recordings. Bob Dylan, even in 2020, continues to surprise with great new work, reaching number 1 with his new album. There have been great late flowering albums from the likes of Paul Weller, Van Morrison, Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, David Crosby, Pet Shop Boys and many others.
For a 5-hour personal selection of great post-2000 music, go to my Music Disappeared playlist on Spotify.
Is it happening again??
I love the music of the past two decades. In quantity and variety, it now dwarfs the music which has been lost. I find it invigorating being forced to disregard the past and stay focused on new music. I’m happy to hear in my head some of the old stuff, but the inventiveness, the choice, the eclecticism and the fresh new directions music is taking means that no lover of music need go hungry. And if the same thing were to happen, I’d be up for starting over once again.
And right now, in July 2020, with live music having ceased for over three months now and little prospect of it returning properly until sometime in 2021, the lifeblood of the music industry has been cut off. The gigantic rock dinosaurs don’t need your sympathy or your support, but thousands of struggling bands and grassroots artists need help just to survive.
That is where supporting crowdfunded albums on Indiegogo and elsewhere, and platforms such as Bandcamp can really make a difference, along with ticketed live streaming gigs. Seek out music you like and give generously, otherwise, just like other arts organisations in peril in this crisis, when it’s gone, it’s gone. So, it could be happening all over again…
The music of the present is in danger of disappearing too, so support music however you can!
The power of ch-ch-changes
Five great life lessons from David Bowie
Following David Bowie's death in 2016, I created a presentation which I delivered as a 20-minute ‘4Sight’ about the man and his music at various 4Networking meetings around the UK. It started out as a fanboy tribute but the more I presented it, the more I found life and business lessons from his career and his outlook on life.
I recently dusted it down and updated it and delivered it as an online Zoom-based networking presentation, and the lessons from his life seem as pertinent as ever. I mean, has there ever been a more fascinating rock star than Bowie?
In terms of lessons which can be learned from his life and career, here are five I have picked out:
Life lesson #1: If you start slowly, don’t give up!
To most of the world, Bowie was an overnight success in 1972, even if they could remember seeing him as a one-hit-wonder in 1969 with Space Oddity. When Ziggy crash-landed on Earth, with that iconic Starman performance on Top of the Pops and the Ziggy Stardust album, suddenly there was Bowiemania.
The thing is though, Bowie had been making music and been in bands ten years earlier in 1962, with Ziggy Stardust his fifth album. Some of the great albums he’d made before Ziggy, Hunky Dory in particular from a year earlier, then received the recognition they deserved. But it had been a long hard journey to achieve that success, and that might be the case for your own business. So, if you’re wondering if it’s ever going to come good, if you have real faith in what you do, then “You better hang on to yourself” as the song goes, and keep going, success could be just around the corner.
Life lesson #2: Be true to yourself
Even I, as a life-long Bowie fan, have stuff in my collection I never seem to play, or movies of his I never watch, because, well, they’re not very good. In a career spanning 47 years, between Space Oddity in 1969 right up to the amazing Blackstar in 2016, no-one can be an artist for that length of time and not produce some duff stuff along the way.
The interesting thing though, is that there is a pattern to his less good output. In general, it was produced when he was trying to be something different to his true self. With a chameleon figure like Bowie, it may seem surprising to talk about his true self, as at times this was wrapped in disguise or a cloak of enigmatic signs and hints.
However, his mid- to late-80s slump was when he was driven by money rather than his artistic vision. The financial debacle of his management deal with Tony Defries in the 70s (a fifty-fifty royalty split) had left Bowie surprisingly hard up at the beginning of the 80s. The genius of Nile Rogers helped to steer the 1983 Let’s Dance album (well, most of it) to some great heights and gave him his greatest mainstream success. And then, artistically, it all fell apart. It would be another ten years before he started to make interesting and rewarding music again, with the nadir being his Tin Machine project, where he decided it would be a good idea to be just another band member, like that was ever going to work… it’s David Bowie! During this period also was the Glass Spider tour, an overblown and pretentious production with a massive set which couldn’t even fit into most venues on the tour. Also in the 80s, Bowie appeared in schlocky movies like The Hunger (which admittedly has its cult fans), again seemingly not comfortable compared with the roles he’d carefully chosen in the 70s, such as The Man Who Fell to Earth and Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, both fine performances.
So, be yourself, be true to yourself and don’t try to second-guess what you think people want you to be. People see through it and don’t like it.
Life lesson #3: Be a business innovator
While clearly a musical innovator, what is less well-known is Bowie’s track record as a shrewd trend spotter in digital and financial matters. Following his naivety in agreeing to that punitive royalties deal earlier in his career, in the 90s he created the clever new Bowie Bonds, a financial device since copied by various other artists. In 1997, Bowie sold asset-backed securities which awarded investors a share in his future royalties for 10 years. The securities were bought by US insurance giant Prudential Financial for a tidy $55m and provided a highly attractive fixed annual return of 7.9%. The deal committed Bowie to repay creditors out of future income, which he did; everyone got paid! Bowie used part of the $55m windfall to buy out Tony Defries and take back full control of his back catalogue.
The Bowie Bonds put him on a secure financial footing, to the point where, when he died in 2016, he left $100million in his will, and his estate is now estimated to be worth over $230million, with the surge in back catalogue sales since his death.
The second notable area of innovation for Bowie was on the internet. He pioneered the concept of a fan forum with BowieNet, launched in 1998, which was not just a website, but an ISP offering each user 5MB of webspace and a fully interactive experience. On the fan forum, he would not only answer fans’ questions but also troll his own site, with hilarious anonymous postings. In 1999, in a Newsnight interview, he foresaw the power of the internet before many others:
“The actual context and the state of content are going to be so different to anything we can envisage at the moment – the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in simpatico it’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.”
The full fascinating story of BowieNet can be found in this article: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/11/david-bowie-bowienet-isp-internet
So, innovation is a key component of success; adopt Bowie’s questing attitude to find new approaches for your business.
Life lesson #4: Reinvent yourself
This is probably the most famous aspect of Bowie’s life and career, his ability to keep changing, not just to reflect cultural shifts but to influence and lead them. The run of albums 1970-1980 in particular is not only dazzling in its quality and inventiveness, but also in the range of music it covers. Aside from the Beatles, what other artist has achieved anything like this in such a relatively short period of time?
Two phases can be detected, the first, 1970-1975, pointing west to America and rock n’ roll, and the second, 1976-1980, turning attention eastwards to Germany and even Japan for influences. The surprisingly heavy rock of Man Who Sold the World switched to the classic singer-songwriter style of Hunky Dory. This then changed to the glam-rock genius of Ziggy Stardust and its more elaborate follow-ups, Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs. One of Bowie’s boldest changes followed, the soul album Young Americans. Then the beginnings of that turn east (“The European canon is here”) with Station to Station, an extraordinary album which Bowie doesn’t even remember recording, so acute was his drug habit at the time. He then fled L.A. and took refuge with Iggy Pop in Berlin, to get clean and to record startling new music in 1977, the Low and “Heroes” albums, which along with 1979’s Lodger, are referred to as the Berlin trilogy. He capped off this decade run of reinvention with Scary Monsters which inspired the entire New Romantics movement, its opening track sung intoned in Japanese.
Whole books have been written about this, Bowie’s golden decade, so this is a highly compressed summary, but do check out every one of these albums. And from a business point of view, stay fresh by restlessly reinventing your business proposition in order to keep ahead (or at least in line with) business trends.
Life lesson #5: Keep challenging yourself
For the fifth point, I’m just going to leave you with one of my favourite quotations from Bowie, given in an interview in 1997:
“If you feel safe in the area you’re working, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you are capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. When you don't feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you're just about in the right place to do something exciting.”
So, not only did Bowie create some of the greatest music of the past 50 years, in his words and his deeds he has provided some inspirational lessons for us all.
Year of the book
When thinking about a structure to a book or even planning a series of blog posts, my view is that 12 is a sweet-spot number to aim at. 12 chapters to your book. You may end up with more, or possibly less, but if you plan and develop a mind map built around that number you won’t go far wrong.
Why 12? To me there is something satisfying and symmetrical about that quantity, the principle reason for that being that there are 12 months in a year. A year is a narrative which takes place across our lives, with of course, as we get older, each one seeming to pass quicker than the last. That familiarity we all have with a year makes it an easy reference point to work out a structure to a book. Whatever specific events are taking place in a particular year, they sit within a rhythm and a pace that gives them context.
Work through each month of the year in order, although not necessarily starting in January and finishing in December, as the rhythm of the seasons crosses calendar years. More on this below. However, whenever you start, each month has an instantly identifiable character to it, depending on which part of the world you live. I’m basing my views on a typical UK year, as that is where I have lived all my life. For each month, we can all summon a broad description of what it usually means to us in our lives. For example, for me, April is not, as TS Eliot had it, the cruellest month, but one that signifies hope, longer days, Spring, rebirth and Easter. September has a tinge of melancholy about it, being the beginning of autumn but also has some of the finest views, with long shadows and continuing warmth. I love September.
Each of the 12 chapters of the year has a clearly identifiable character, influenced heavily by the chapter before it and the chapter which is to come. So should your book’s chapters. Each one should have a title and a theme that makes it obvious why its contents are bracketed within that particular chapter and not somewhere else. If the contents of your chapter 5, May, flanked by chapters April and June, could equally sit in chapter 9, September, then its identity and subject matter needs to be made more distinctive, more focused.
In turn, the 12 chapters divide up into the 4 seasons. Let’s start with four seasons as our suggested structure. There is a difference between the dates of the astronomical seasons and those labelled by meteorology. The latter is easier to work with for the purposes of this example: Spring March-May; Summer June-August; Autumn September-November and Winter December-February. Each season, like each month, has a character and a feel to it, some of which is personal to each of us, and some that are more general.
These comments are aimed at non-fiction writing, and more specifically at what could broadly be referred to as a business book, a book used to inform some aspect of one’s career or working life. For this type of book I would approach the structure as Winter > Spring > Summer > Autumn.
- Winter is all about identifying problems thrown up by harsh conditions. This is your set-up, the premise of your book, the challenge/syndrome you are planning to set out how to fix.
- Spring is the time to try new ideas, experiment and face challenges with enthusiasm, even if it’s not the time when issues are fully resolved.
- Summer is a time of consolidation, of relaxation even, of finding time to ponder and consider.
- Autumn is the time for new impetus, the height of determination and implementation and resolution.
And so, this is the way your book’s ideas are worked through, tested, promoted and championed. If in each ‘season’ you find there are five great ideas and phases instead of just three, pushing your chapter total to 20, then you have too many ideas and concepts for one book. Prospective readers will be daunted by the scale and complexity of your book and put it back on the shelf. Look at all 20 ideas/chapter outlines and work out which eight could now form two-thirds of your second book. Hold this back from the world and hit it instead with your 12 ideas that each has a month-style definable character to it and a clear seasonal position.
Then start planning and writing your book. That project may well take you a year to complete, but that would be kind of appropriate.
What to write about
Stay at home and start writing
“I keep six honest serving men (they taught me all I knew); their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who.” Rudyard Kipling’s well-known saying, which can be abbreviated to the five Ws and H, will serve you well when thinking about possible content to start writing about. They work as great prompts on a wide level and then also within each piece of writing. Let’s look at the wider level first.
Why?
Why write at all? What is your impulse and motive for writing a blog post, an article or even a book? Here are some reasons which may fit:
- To enhance and complement your business
- To educate people about your area of expertise
- To share your passion for your area of interest
- Or simply to have the fulfilment of having written something
This last one, in particular, applies to the possible prestige of writing something as substantial as a book. You will only stay motivated if you’re clear from the outset what your purpose is.
What?
What to write about? In many ways, this is the key question, as obviously if you have no idea what to write about, that Word doc is just going to have a blinking cursor and white space for a long time. Before putting yourself in that position, jot down some notes by hand, sketch out some thoughts or even use the voice-to-text facility on your phone to create some notes and ideas.
If you are embarking on writing a book, a great way to kickstart the development of ideas and themes is to think of a title and a subtitle for your book. This will help you to visualise it as a real project and not just a vague ambition. If it’s just a blog or article, come up with a title and central point and then work on from there.
If it IS a book you’re contemplating, then, once you have your title and sub-title, think about the blurb on the back of the book and even visualise in your mind some cover ideas. All this will help to make it real and achievable.
Who?
Who is your blog or book aimed at? Build up a picture of your ideal target reader. You may even want to narrow this down to a particular gender, age-range and profession so that you can address your reader directly in your writing. As a visualisation tool, a bit like imagining your book’s cover, complete with title, blurb and cover design, imagine your blog, article or book has been published, and then think about the sort of reaction you would ideally like to be receiving about it.
Think of someone posting up a comment: “This book/article has…” and the key feedback you would like to be receiving. This could be how useful the advice is, how original and incisive the opinions expressed, how thought-provoking it was. This will help you to decide on the style and the content you are aiming for.
How?
How are you going to take the plunge and get started? If you are planning to write a potential series of blogs, start with your strongest idea, the one you feel most passionate about or know most about. Make it easy to get going. Similarly, with a book, don’t necessarily start at Chapter 1, page one. Ease into the process by writing a key moment in the book first, even if that will end up appearing somewhere in the middle of the finalised book.
Writing that first blog or first passage of a book gives you a peg in the ground, something to base everything else around. Use its ideas and themes as the centre of a mind map and then draw out further ideas from it. If it’s a book you are planning, think as the sweet-spot a figure of 12 chapters in total. With your first piece of writing, you have created all or part of a key chapter. Draw outwards from there 11 further chapter ideas. Then stand back from all 12 and determine an overall theme which is emerging. Then cluster the 12 chapters into three sections: the beginning, the middle and the end. This may well not be an even four-four-four split to each section, but in this way, you will begin to work out a narrative arc to your book. Even non-fiction books need a strong narrative arc.
If it is a series of blogs or articles, then, again, 12 is a good number to aim at. This represents probably an ambitious series stretching into the future, but this would create a solid body of work to have in a blog section of your website or to have credited online as articles you have written.
When and Where?
Right now! As discussed in my previous blog, here at the end of March 2020, locked down at home as a result of the coronavirus containment measures, we may well all have some extra time which could be used constructively to start writing. The conditions may be perfect, so at least get started! As for where, well, if you’re not hunkered down at home, you’re probably not where you are supposed to be according to government guidelines, so where is less a question and more a no-choice answer.
The five Ws and H for your written piece
After working out the wider level answers about writing, you can then ask those same six questions within your individual piece of work. Why is this topic important? What is it about? Who will benefit from it? How does this piece about this topic work? Is there a ‘when’ to it ie is it a topical piece reacting to specific news or is it more universal? Is it in reaction to the coronavirus world crisis? As with ‘when’, is ‘where’ relevant to this? And where are you going to publish this?
So, start writing!
Hopefully, this may have inspired you to take the plunge. If you would like more support and guidance on the writing process, then please use the Contact form to get in touch.
Start writing now
While self-isolating, start writing
In order to produce original written content, you need various conditions to be right.
- Firstly, you need peace and quiet and a minimum of distractions.
- Secondly, you need some time to think, to form ideas and work out ways of expressing them.
- And thirdly, you need a catalyst for those ideas to start to form.
Well, right now, in the UK, at the end of March 2020, you potentially have the perfect moment to start writing. Locked down in self-isolation from the coronavirus, all three of these conditions may be in place. Looking out on my street, there isn’t even the noise of cars going by or people walking past – it is SO quiet. Inside, there are just me and my wife quietly going about our daily routines. I still have some book editing projects on the go, but the time I used to allocate to networking is more than halved, with the excellent alternative of online networking cutting out all travelling time.
So, for me, the first condition is more than met. For others, of course, life inside may well be mayhem, the opposite of an ordered life before all this. Having all the kids at home, extra responsibilities of care for others, I’m acutely aware that I’m in a privileged position and right now this may not be yours. Or worse, you may have caught the virus or have loved ones who have. For you, clearly, everything is off the agenda in the fight to get better.
The second condition, more time, may well be one which more of us have right now. If you run your own business, life has probably gone one of three ways. You may be offering goods or services for which demand has sky-rocketed such as anyone selling food and drink products online. Conversely, demand may have fallen off a cliff, your whole business rendered irrelevant or inaccessible overnight by all of the changes imposed on our lives. In which case, you now are in a state of enforced idleness. Or you may be somewhere in-between these two extremes, working doubly hard to try to prop up plummeting demand.
The third condition, needing a catalyst for ideas, is being met for all of us. The media keeps trying to find even vague comparisons for these times: with wartime, with past pandemics and financial crashes, and as time goes on all comparisons fall away. These are unprecedented times creating unprecedented challenges and seismic changes which will be felt for years to come. There is already talk of, from now on, us referring to the world BC, before coronavirus, and AC, after it. It’s that big.
So, like me, you may be in a position where all three conditions are met. You are surrounded by an imposed peace and quiet; you have more time on your hands, and your head is swirling with all sorts of thoughts and ideas.
What are you going to do?
- You can read more - always a good option in my opinion.
- You can watch more – it’s important to stay informed by looking at the news, but endless Netflix bingeing isn’t going to help you to prepare for the future.
- You can listen more – podcasts are great and, interestingly, latest figures point to a move back to the radio as opposed to streaming services; for many of us there is something comforting about the human voice instead of just continuous music.
- You can connect more – social media is finding its true purpose in this crisis. OK, it is full of even more misleading advice than ever, and pockets of hate have become even more extreme, but in general, it seems to be a brilliant way for people to share help, advice and support.
On our road, a couple of brilliant organisers have put together two WhatsApp groups, one titled HELP and the other titled CHAT, and almost everyone in a road of around 100 houses has joined. The CHAT one helps all let off steam, with some welcome humour to the fore. The HELP one is providing a brilliant social service, checking up on the elderly residents, giving advice about shopping etc and offers of help to get prescriptions, plus dozens of other topics.
So, it’s a great time to read, watch, listen and connect.
It could also be the perfect time to start writing. This could be of two types – in direct reaction to the crisis, or something completely different. In my next blog I’ll go into more detail about what type of writing may work best for you right now.
The power of the printed book
Using a combination of self-publishing and digital print-on-demand, it’s never been easier or more cost-effective to achieve your ambition of being the author of a printed book.
Think of that proud moment – the photo of you holding the book and how much more powerful that photo will be than one of you holding an iPad with an electronic picture of its cover.
To be able to feel, touch and smell your book will be the exciting moment of payback for all the hours and the effort expended in getting it to that point. And then, once your book is in the hands of your target reader, think of the life that your book takes on.
You now have your name as the author, along with your book title, on your book’s spine, facing out at your customers and your prospects. Most readers of business books keep these in their office, in their workspace as opposed to on a bookshelf in their living room. As a genre, business books are kept separately from fiction, biography and other books read purely for leisure purposes. So, there you are, suddenly rubbing book-spine shoulders with perhaps the likes of Seth Godin and Richard Branson on your clients’ bookshelves. In that space, suddenly you are their equal – your book has been given equal prominence and space along with all those others.
And it stays there! As I have commented in this blog, books have a way longer shelf-life than any other business communication which you give to your customers or prospective customers. Every day, for years probably, your name is peeking out from that bookshelf, ready for that moment when the area of your expertise which you have showcased in the book, is exactly what is needed right now. The book is reached for, pulled out, flicked through, and the relevant chapter, passage and hint/tip/piece of wisdom is located. It may well be that the passage has already been highlighted, the margin written in, the page corner turned down. Good luck finding the relevant passage as quickly and easily from the e-book version.
Cherished business books are meant to have scribbled-in margins, Post It notes peeking out from key pages, page corners turned down, passages underlined or highlighted, extra bits of paper jammed into them. A book which has really resonated with you becomes uniquely your version of that book. It becomes a diary of your business-thinking. It may even make sense to add a date reference to your own comments, so that, over time, you can look back and see when it was that you first picked up on a particular idea or technique and can then see when and how you applied it to your own business or your way of life.
All that presence, all that interaction, all that inhabiting of your book, you frankly just can’t achieve that with the e-book version. Sure, invest in creating the e-book version too, but lead with the printed book, let that be the version which people cherish, use and yes, keep on their shelves.
2020 resolution - write!
Your 2020 new year’s resolution – write that book
OK, here we are, already a week into 2020 and no doubt some of your new year’s resolutions have already gone by the board – how’s that daily exercise target going?
Here’s a resolution which could be for sometime during 2020 or maybe even just sometime in the 2020s – writing a book. There, you’ve now got a whole decade to complete it!
Writing a book is not a resolution for the faint-hearted, I get that. It will involve setting aside many hours of thought followed by even more hours of writing. Writing material for a book is not one of those casual tasks you can do with one eye still on your phone or on that Netflix boxset. So how are you going to find the time and the headspace for it? Well, think about the amount of time spent with both eyes on your phone or on Netflix boxsets during the past year. Even roughly tot up how many hours and it will probably be a scary number. If only part of that time was set aside for writing, think what you could achieve over the next few months.
So, that at least is a start at chipping away at the first barrier to writing a book – the time available to do it. The second barrier needs in fact to be broken down before the first one:
What to write a book about?
If you’re sitting there asking yourself that question and nothing obvious comes to mind, then it’s probably time to park this resolution for another year or maybe even for another decade. But if some sort of “I’ve always wanted to write a book about…” thoughts start crowding around in your head, then why not choose now to change from “I’ve always wanted to” to “I will this year”?
Write about change
As we enter this new decade, there is such a feeling of change and disruption in the air, some of it positive, some less so. The climate emergency is now entering all our lives, as daily climate disasters crowd the headlines and the option of not changing anything in our lifestyles and our life choices vanishes. For better or for worse, Brexit is now a done deal and we have to get on with it. The speed with which technology and AI will affect our lives in a way that moves beyond wild sci-fi predictions will become real during the 2020s. On top of these three examples of flux and change, there are dozens more which may affect you and your business in the coming decade.
On that basis, it can be said that there has never been a more interesting time to be alive. You may take an optimistic or a pessimistic view of that, but whatever your outlook, all this disruption will be feeding into the backdrop of your life, your business and the sectors in which you operate.
Does that backdrop of change create in you an urge to comment, to speculate, to use your experience and expertise to chart a way through these uncertain waters? Or maybe to look at aspects of the past to try to find lessons for the future?
Whatever is bubbling away in your mind as a topic, an issue, a cause, a reason for your book, then start some jottings now. Everyone is searching for answers, and maybe right now, in your world, you have found some you’d like to share.
Whatever the imperative to write which is stirring within you, don’t bury it yet again.
Use this milestone of the new decade as the starting gun for that book you’ve always wanted to write.
Brad Burton's books
The story of Brad Burton’s four books (so far!) is a fantastic example of using business books as an integral part of your brand-building process.
Brad published his first book, the wonderfully provocatively titled Get Off Your Arse, in 2009. The book vividly charts Brad’s rise from being £25k in debt to successfully launching and running 4Networking, the UK’s fastest-growing business networking organisation. 4Networking started in Feb 2006, so this book came out when the organisation was still fairly new, as was Brad’s speaking career.
The three elements of the book, the speaking and 4Networking all fed into each other. Brad promoted the book at his motivational speaking gigs, using the classic formula of “I’ll be signing copies of my book at the back of the room after this event”. The book helped to provide a foundation, credentials and credibility to the speaking – being a ‘published author’ all helps on the CV when trying to secure speaking engagements.
In turn, the book covers, with great honesty, some of the challenges and the guerrilla marketing tactics used to get 4Networking off the ground. It’s a rollicking read as an ‘origin story’ about 4Networking and provided some great publicity for 4N. And of course, with (at that time) around 200 4Networking groups covering most of the UK, this was a ready-made distribution network, with the book being promoted and sold to its target market, SME business owners, at every 4Networking meeting.
Get Off Your Arse, with its lively blend of Brad’s honest personal stories and the lessons he’s learnt from them, was an instant hit, becoming one of the highest-rated and reviewed business books on Amazon. Ten years on, it now has 362 (and counting) reviews on Amazon, achieving 4.7 stars out of 5 average ratings.
Any successful debut deserves a sequel, and so Get Off Your Arse Too was published in 2011. Promoted as a ‘self-help/biz book for people who DON'T like self-help/biz books’, it followed the style and formula of Get Off Your Arse, packed with further stories from the networking/motivational speaking front line. In his role as founder and MD of 4Networking, Brad meets thousands of business owners each year, many with interesting stories to tell, so new and interesting material for this book wasn’t hard to find.
Get Off Your Arse Too, as with most sequels, didn’t quite repeat the success of the first book in terms of sales numbers, but it provoked a similarly strong reaction from readers, with again, to date, 4.7 stars out of 5 average ratings on Amazon.
Both these books were self-published, using Brad Burton’s own imprint 4Publishing. Back in 2009, the economics of print-on-demand were not as flexible and as favourable as they are now. As a result, the only way to get the economics of the cover price (and Amazon’s cut) to work, was to print a few pallets-worth of these books. Today’s print-on-demand pricing is far more favourable, with printing just 50 books (or even fewer than that) a realistic option.
The story of Brad Burton’s next two books, Life. Business. Just Got Easier and Now What? will be the subject of a future blog.
You can find all of Brad Burton’s books on Amazon. Visit the Brad Burton author page to see all the books, their reviews and their ratings, along with information about Brad as a motivational speaker.
Oh, and here’s a testimonial Brad has kindly given me, as I have worked closely with him on all his books:
“I have worked with Mark now for over a decade. I’ve written four books and I’m now in fact the highest reviewed and rated business book author on Amazon. Mark has been my sub-editor through those ten years throughout writing those books. We work really well together and what Mark’s done, he makes my colloquial language readable and gets the right grammar etc. And what he’s done as a sub-editor, he makes certain it doesn’t lose my voice, very important.
So, would I recommend Mark to support you with your books? 100%!
Will Mark be working with me on my 5th book? Absolutely!
So, 10 out 10 for editorial support for any aspiring book writer!”
Perfect Christmas gift
A business book is the perfect personalised (Christmas!) business gift
This is one way to think about your published book. It has your personalised branding all over the cover and so it can be given to all your key clients as a ‘thank you’ for their business. It’s a constant reminder to clients and prospects about you and your expertise. It’s a gift that has real intrinsic value, unlike a personalised stress ball or novelty fidget spinner. And it has a perceived value that is greater than its cost to you.
How many of your books you give away rather than charge for is a careful calculation you will need to make. Some business book authors treat their book as a 100% promotional tool, with the whole print run given away as part of a careful strategy to win and retain clients. When you can pay £3-£8 each for a personalised A5 hardcover lined notebook, a commonly used business gift, giving away a book which you have written, with a similar cost to you, may not be such a daft idea.
For most authors though, it’s a mixture of approaches, with a portion of the books given away or used for a specific promotion: “Sign up for my three-day course by x date and receive a FREE signed copy of my latest book.”
The lower-cost way to give away books is of course to offer a free e-book or audiobook. You will have had costs associated with producing these, but free delivery is now not a problem. You may even choose to create a ‘taster’ version as the e-book given away – not the whole book, but an edited version, complete with a different ‘promo’ cover design.
But just as no business owner sends clients a ‘personalised 2020 e-calendar’ for Christmas instead of a printed personalised calendar, the e-book as a gift just doesn’t have the same value or purpose as a gift as a physical book.
The obvious danger of using your business book as a promotional gift is that you undermine its value. You’re now giving away your hard-earned expertise and not only that, you are giving away a book which has taken considerable blood, sweat and tears to bring into the world. You don’t want to create the general perception that your book is only worth reading if it’s been received it as a freebie and that there is a rarity only to unsigned copies.
So, add your published book to your armoury of promotional tools, use it wisely and probably sparingly, but it could create a more far-reaching and longer-lasting impact than any other giveaway.
So, at Christmas time, what could be a better gift to give to your favourite customers and prospects?
Long shelf life
The long shelf life of a business book
What is the shelf life of a book? Probably longer than pretty much anything else. The bookshelf is the one that keeps being added to instead of items being constantly replaced. Books generally don’t have a use-by date, even if, just by having some level of topicality to their content, they can often be said to have a sell-by date.
Part of books’ longevity on the shelf is that during childhood and at school, we are taught to respect books as objects and this becomes ingrained in us as adults. When have you ever thrown away a book? You may give a book away, but you wouldn’t chuck it in the paper recycling bin.
So, you’ve probably got bookshelves at home or in your office, with an array of book spines proudly on display. 99% of the time, you won’t get rid of them, even if you’ve not read some of them for years. Because you know that, at some point, something will happen that will trigger you to read or re-read or browse a certain book.
With business books specifically, this “go back to it” factor is understandable. People’s business careers, with their changing fortunes and challenges, mean that advice and experiences which they read about a couple of years ago may suddenly be acutely relevant to helping to fix an issue which has arisen right now. “Where did I read about how x found a way through that? Ah, yes, it was that book about employee motivation, here it is.”
As a result, the artefact of a published book has special power as a marketing tool for you and your business. Business books have longevity to them. Our person’s quotation above - how much more difficult for them to answer that question with, “I read an article on a website a couple of years ago which would help me right now, but I had no reason to bookmark it at the time, let me try and Google it”. That approach may work, but how much more satisfying to reach out to the shelf, have a browse through a book and find exactly what you’re looking for.
And a way to add further to the re-browsing property of your book is to encourage your readers to write their own notes in it. One of the benefits of a printed book as opposed to an e-book is the ease with which your readers can scribble in the margin, turn down page corners, add Post-it notes, fill in checklists and to-do lists you’ve handily provided as part of the format of the book.
What could be better than one of your books starting to resemble a well-used and much-loved cookbook, complete with coffee stains, dog-eared corners, page markers sticking out and scribbles in it?
There are all sorts of ways to keep your brand in front of your customers. Your business book can be a key part of that effort and it’s in no way sacrilege to the idea of a book to treat it as part of your brand.
After all, what other branded business item (as that is exactly what your business book becomes) can retain such power and value for so many years on your customers’ shelves?