Last week Adam Engst sent me an email in which he mentioned that Macworld magazine was going to have an excerpt from my latest ebook, Take Control of Mac OS X Backups, on their Web site. Apparently there had been some discussion about putting it in the printed magazine, but for a variety of uninteresting reasons everyone agreed that it made more sense just to put it on the Web site. I was not part of those discussions, and I really didn’t think about it much. I’ve had articles published in the print edition of Macworld, and excerpts from all my ebooks have been made available in many different forms. This didn’t seem like that big of a deal. I didn’t even bother to visit the Macworld site or ask which portion of the ebook had been excerpted.
A few days ago, I began noticing that sales of the ebook were up significantly, and I also started getting email messages from folks who had read the article. These are both normal occurrences anytime I have something new published, so again, I didn’t really think about it. Then I got a message from a company whose software I’d referred to in passing; they felt that perhaps I’d given their product short shrift. Before I could reply I had to go over to the Macworld site to see exactly which portion of the text they’d published. And there, to my surprise, was my article at the very top of their home page—the equivalent of front-page news in the Macintosh world.
On the one hand, I was delighted: publicity is always good, and the extra sales don’t hurt. On the other hand, I was a bit embarrassed—I hadn’t updated this blog in a long time, and readers have been checking it out. D’oh! It’s like having company on a day your house is a mess. Oh well. I guess that’ll get me typing. It’s not as though I have a shortage of things to write about, only a shortage of time.
