The Corporate Blogging Book by Debbie Weil (Penguin Portfolio); available on Amazon

Click over to debbie’s blog to get the scoop on what I’ve been reading this summer. Oh, and while you’re at it, I want your thumbs up or down on the title and proposed sub-titles for the book. We’re trying to nail it. The current front-runner is The Corporate Blogging Book. It’s so stupidly obvious we’re thinking it just might work. Plus it will rank high in search engine results. Kind of like an effective blog… get it?? Waddya think? Click here to vote on proposed titles.

How cool to meet and chat with Shel Israel* in the hallway outside the Blog Business Summit here in San Francisco. Shel is the co-author with (the famous) Robert Scoble of Naked Conversations (their book about business blogging). He’s just finished writing the first draft of the book for Wiley and is now working on revisions. Can’t wait til I get to that point… although he says it’s tedious.

In the meantime, here’s his advice for writing a book. He starts at about 5 AM and writes till 11:30 AM. "Make it fun," Shel says. He moves around with his laptop… under the umbrella, on the couch, at his desk. And of course at the local Starbucks.

*Shel tells me he was sitting next to me in the 2nd row at this morning’s sessions… but I didn’t respond when he said hi. Huge apologies for being blind as well as deaf. He says I was engrossed in blogging the event. See here and here.

Had the pleasure of meeting this week with Adrian Zackheim, publisher of Penguin Portfolio, at the Penguin Group offices on Hudson Street in lower Manhattan. Silly me. The Greenwich Village address made me think I was headed to some cool office. Turns out 375 Hudson Street is a sleek, corporate tower.

Adrian is wonderful. He sighed as he settled back on the couch in his small cluttered office. "This next hour and a half is a bad time of day for me," he said (we had a 3 PM meeting). "I can’t think particularly well or clearly." Well I usually feel like that about half of every day. So this was a relief.

Of course he was lying.

He’s not directly involved with my book so he didn’t know much about it. (No surprise. This is how it works in a publishing house.) But he asked all the right questions. And agreed that I’m writing the book for someone like him. As he put it: "This blogging thing seems like more than I want to get into right now… demystify it for me."

Adrian’s questions:

Why do businesses need blogs?
What’s their purpose?
What are they used for?
What’s the point?
How do you do it?

Great guideposts as I burrow into the writing… I’ve had a hard time thus far churning out a draft. Did I mention that I’m a world-class procrastinator?

Keep those helpful tips coming…

Oh, and Adrian recommended Anne Lamott’s classic Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.