Digital Roam

A club that would have me

I got the exciting news today that the Miami Herald Business Monday Book Club is going to feature THE BACK OF THE NAPKIN  as their selection next month.

How it works

Business books columnist Richard Pachter selects a new book for the club every month. On a first-come, first-served basis, a limited number of members can get a free copy by e-mailing rap@WordsOnWords.com with the member's name, address and phone number. Readers who do not get a free book in the mail are invited to buy their own copies and send their reviews to the same e-mail address.

What does the club do?

Review books! When you receive your book, you have approximately three weeks to read and review it. Simply send your review back by e-mail and Pachter will run excerpts of selected club members' reviews alongside his own.

The baby arrives

The FedEx stork came early this month. My book -- 18 months in concept, 12 months in writing, 9 months in production -- arrived today.

Let's take a look...

Nine (more) months: How a Book is Born

I just received a copy of "In the Books", the first annual review of the "Most Notable Business Books" from the unstoppable team over at 800-CEO-READ. It is a beautiful, large format catalog of books, reviews, and ideas.

The best business book of 2007? That's easy: "Made to Stick" by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. I say 'easy' because I couldn't agree more.

What also makes "In the Books" fun for me is that on the back page 800-CEO-READ included one of my drawings. The sketch describes how a business book gets made, from author's first draft through store sales.

View this photo
"Book Gestation, Month by Month" is a drawing I made with the guidance of my editor at Portfolio, Branda Maholtz. Branda mentioned how she was always explaining the basics of the publishing process to new authors, so we decided to visually map it all out.

If you're thinking about writing a book, take a look: the picture helps explain what's going on in all those secret meetings you're NOT invited to. :-)

Copies of "In the Books" are available here from 800-CEO-READ.

First "The Back of the Napkin" review

The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
Dan Roam. Penguin/Portfolio, $24.95 (270p) ISBN 978-1-59184-199-9

"The premise behind Roam's book is simple: anybody with a pen and a scrap of paper can use visual thinking to work through complex business ideas. Management consultant and lecturer Roam begins with a “watershed moment”: asked, at the last minute, to give a talk to top government officials, he sketched a diagram on a napkin. The clarity and power of that image allowed him to communicate directly with his audience. From this starting point, Roam has developed a remarkably comprehensive system of ideas. Everything in the book is broken down into steps, providing the reader with “tools and rules” to facilitate picture making. For forward-thinking management types, there is enough content in these pages to drive many a brainstorming session. Illus. (Mar 13)"

Publishers Weekly and my visual soapbox.

A few weeks back I was invited to give a demonstration of visual problem solving at the Northern California Independent Booksellers Conference in Oakland, CA. Using The Back of the Napkin tools, I worked with many of the attendees to visually discover and describe ideas on how independent bookstores can thrive in the age of the online book store (read: Amazon).

We captured everything on a big blackboard, which I then cleaned up and rendered as a single image. Publishers Weekly magazine liked the image so much that they ran it last week as their "soapbox" editorial -- the first time anyone could remember in which PW's op-ed piece was a picture.

To see why comparing an independent bookstore to Amazon is like comparing apples to zebras, click here.

Wacom-sockem wobots

When I run visual thinking workshops for twenty people or so, the only technology in the room is a whiteboard and a couple erasable markers. Getting rid of all the computers makes a bunch of good things happen:

1. We focus on the ideas, not the technology
2. Death by PowerPoint isn't even an option
3. Stories told and pictures drawn live are like magic

But when talking to a room of one hundred people or more, the whiteboard no longer works. The people in the back can't see it, and it can't be projected easily. I tried lots of different things: a video camera, bigger whiteboards, standard projected PPT (yuck -- see above).

Then the folks at Wacom Technologies suggested one of their interactive projection tablets, specifically the DTF-720. They were even nice enough to give me a *really* good price so I could test one out. Having used input tablets in the past, I wasn't convinced: the remoteness of input to display, the drawing delay, the clunky lines -- I hated them.

Then I got the big box delivered and tested out the display to an audience of sixty people down at eBay. It worked! I was able to draw directly on top of a simple PPT (in many cases I just put blank pages in the deck and drew on those). Presto: instant projected whiteboard.

Yes, I had more technology to carry, set-up, and test, but it was a breakthrough. If you need the modern day equivalent of an overhead projector, try the Wacom DTF-720.

It's a (book) jungle out there

I'll be testing out my theories of visual thinking with the Northern California Booksellers Association this Saturday, Oct. 6 at 1:30. At their annual trade show, I've been invited to share a few problem-solving pictures. The topic: "Thriving in the Amazon: Visual thoughts about life as an independent bookstore in the age of the Web."

Not that I know anything about running a bookstore, independent or Amazonian. The good news is that Hut Landon does (he's president of the NCIBA). Hut was nice enough to walk me through the challenges faced by independent bookstores, especially regarding their sometimes testy relationship with Amazon.

Thanks to Hut, I've got enough data now to draw a few conclusions. We'll see soon enough what the booksellers think.

Problems? What problems? My new site.

My new book "teaser" site launched this morning at www.thebackofthenapkin.com. I like to think that it pretty well summarizes my book in about 22 seconds.

This will stay up until the end of the year, and then -- thanks to Jason and Trent at the amazing Oh!Media in Regina, Saskatchewan -- we'll start launching a series of animated "solving problems with pictures" tutorials. Please stay tuned.

Under cover at last

We've got a cover for the book.

It is perfect.

We've got a publishing date as well: March 13, 2008. See you at the book store!

Judge a book by its cover

The folks at Penguin Portfolio and I have been having a spirited conversation about the two beautiful cover options they have created. Option A:
And Option B:

If you have an opinion, we'd love to hear it.