I'm after some advice on the best tactics to use in publishing and marketing a book I'm writing with Toby Moores and David Tebbutt. We are writing a business book iabout capturing creativity. I've provided a fuller description below, but in brief the book is about applying a methodology and techniques so that creativity becomes a regular part of your day to day processes rather than something that happens at some off-site brainstorming session on an irregular basis. Our "secret sauce" is the title of the book, and offers a way to think and adapt ideas so that you can turn them in to something valuable. We also advocate using particular web 2.0 technology as part of the approach to facilitate the capture and collaboration. Like Edward de Bono coined the term lateral thinking, we want to create the term "Xxxxxxxx Xxxxxxx Thinking" the Xs being the (currently secret) title of the book.
We have first draft material written for all proposed chapters and sections of the book. We are trying to decide whether we should:
a. Work on the intro and the first few chapters and use those to sell the concept to a publisher
b. Publish the material in a series of article on a blog, rather like Chris Anderson and The Long Tail, and through that mechanism find a publisher and launch the book.
c. Self publish
d. Use some other approach
Your advice, suggestions, ideas would be really helpful.
A bit more about the book:
We think there is a "perfect storm" of issues that create the current competitive climate, including globalisation, global warming and the way current web tools are changing the way we communicate. Our education system (in the UK and the US and much of the West) Is broken. It was designed for training a workforce for the 19th century industrial age, not the 21st century information age. The whole system is geared towards conformity. Our children start creativity, and then we train it out of them as they progress through the system. The same conformity then flows in to the management style of our corporations. We teach study skills, but we don't teach thinking skills. In any case, if all we can do is train good quality graduates, India and China can do the same or better producing workers at 20% of our cost. Since we can't compete on cost, we have to find another way.
So we believe that today, more than ever, companies and organisations need to be creative and innovative in order to compete in the 21st century. Our book provides an approach for looking at the creative process, with techniques to capture and develop the ideas that we have every day. We incorporate the existing methods and techniques from the likes of de Bono and Buzan, but with our own methodology, and with the thinking framework that is the title of the book. As well as the techniques, we recommend the deployment of web 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis, social networking and other communication and capture tools.