After a weekend of avoiding endless posts by bloggers pointing to the NY Times story on how blogging can kill you, it was nice to learn* that while it may kill you, blogging can also help you land a book deal.

Congratulations to Hugh MacLeod on the news that he has signed a contract with Portfolio Books (a Penguin imprint) to develop into a book his popular “manifesto,” How To Be Creative. Also, this proves another point about the power of Free. One of the ways Penguin knows Hugh’s book will be a success is the popularity of an earlier PDF version available for free.

As Hugh does on his cartoons drawn on the back of business cards (he can boil big thoughts down into small gems), here’s his key to being creative: “Work Hard. Keep at it. Live simply and quietly. Remain humble. Stay positive. Be nice. Be polite.”

And here’s a great side benefit from that advice: It will also help keep blogging from killing you.

*Actually, I learned this last month, but was sworn to secrecy.

Bonus link: Chris Anderson on how NOT to use a free PDF download to promote a book.

If you are a high school or college student, here is how you are being described in the media these days: You are a super-brilliant over-achiever who scored a perfect SAT and found a cure for cancer by age 16 so you could be one of the 5% of applicants who got into an elite college. Of course, you and all of your friends served concurrently as class president, were class valedictorian and even though you were only auditing that ROTC class, won of the Congressional Medal of Honor. Despite all that, you are hopelessly ignorant of anything newsworthy and can’t write worth a crap.

Later: Oh, yeah: You know nothing about finance, either.

Over on the Custom Media Craft blog on Hammock.com, I just posted some highlights from the annual survey conducted by the Custom Publishing Council called “Characteristics Study: A Look at the Volume and Type of Custom Publications in America”. (Note: Hammock Inc. was one of the founding members of the Custom Publishing Council). According to the survey, in 2007 a record number of marketers used custom media to promote their products and brands. Personally, I believe the numbers are still conservative as there are lots of online “content marketing” activities taking place that fall through the cracks of this research. For instance, most of the digital startups that have content creation for marketers (i.e., video distributed online) as part of their business model should probably be covered in this research — but aren’t.

One thing this survey underscores is a statistic that doesn’t click with many of my friends in the magazine and media industry who think of the magazine format as being, exclusively, a business model (i.e., consumer of B2B magazines). The magazine format is not just a business-model, it supports and serves other business models. I typically use university alumni or association magazines as examples here, but think of all the institutions and, now, companies, who use magazines and other media they create as platforms for fostering long term relationships with their constituencies (customers, alumni, members, supporters, etc.). While there are probably (and I’m guessing here) less than 20,000 magazines that have advertising and circulation-revenue as the focus of their business models, this survey indicates there are 143,173 magazines in America. Even if my number is low and their’s is high, the truth of magazine publishing is this: Most magazines in America “support” a business model — they aren’t a business model.

This is an important fact to consider when thinking about the “business model” of another media: blogging. Today — and forevermore — there will be only a small fraction of blogs that are, themselves, a business. The vast majority — as in 99% or more — of business-related blogs will support a business model (or a cause or institution or campaign), not be a business model.

Another thing: I confess: As much as I enjoy publishing — indeed everything about — magazines, I’m also very-much a new-media guy. I believe content-marketing, custom media, social media, conversational media — whatever you want to call it — should be front and center in any company or institution’s marketing effort (our company works with clients in doing just that). I see no “competition” or “conflict” or “irony” in me advocating new media while still championing the magazine format as the most compelling engagement media available.

At Hammock.com, view statistics and highlights from the Custom Publications in America survey.

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