Has anyone come up with a particularly good format for ongoing comments/engagement with published books?
What are the best practices you’ve tried or seen in terms of how to invite feedback or additional contributions or comments to a book chapter or topic after you’ve published it? Say for example I have a topic about how to promote apps, and I include in it a list of paid marketing networks, and I want to invite my readers to share their experiences with such networks and suggest additional ones, and I want other readers to be able to find those.
Link to blog post With the url in the book text? Twitter thread (like Fred Wilson’s blog posts do now)? Both of these seem doable but sub-optimal when you might want to have something more like nested comment threads and possibly upvoting. Maybe a dedicated subreddit or similar for the whole book?
Hi Greg,
Until now, I did it by email, which is ok with 10 customers but it will not scale. 😅
At some point, I hesitated to open an access in comment to the google doc I use to write my book, but I don't want readers to propose or contribute on any content.
Finally, for the extra resources I want to maintain or propose to contribute on, I decided to share a link from my e-book to a page hosted on my website. My website's content is based on markdown so it can welcome contributions (my audience is technical so it's ok).
Here is an example of this approach with the 30+ engineering career ladders that I gathered and consolidated while writing my book. The nice bonus is it creates some content marketing and improve your SEO almost for free, as you already built this content.