A big thank you to ChangeThis

In the space of just three months after my manifesto was published on ChangeThis, there have been over 4,800 downloads of my manifesto. I've received emails from people as far apart as Norway, South Africa, Australia, the US and the UK. I doubt if this would have happened as quickly through the traditional route of getting a book published.

Before I wrote the manifesto, I planned to write a book on dictator bosses. But there were several obstacles:

1. I was a first-time author
2. I needed to find a literary agent
3. Although my aim wasn't to make money, the money is in fiction (think Harry Potter), not non-fiction. Hence, literary agents specialising in non-fiction business books are few and far between.
4. The literary agent needed to sell the idea to a publisher
5. There is too much legal stuff involved
6. You may not believe this, but some agents and publishers still insist on interacting by regular snail mail (ie proposal and manuscripts have to be sent in hard copy!).
7. You have to spend a significant amount of time and energy marketing your book.
8. Most of all, according to one book on getting your book published, the time-scales involved are 'geological'.

Obviously, there are tons of business books that are published. But for the effort involved, I wasn't sure if it was the right route for me. Since my aim was not to make money from the book but spread an idea, I wondered what to do. Luckily, I discovered ChangeThis, via a link on Tom Peters blog.

While I would still love to have a book published, ChangeThis offers a fantastic route to people who want to spread an idea. In that sense, ChangeThis perfectly achieves Seth Godin's goal.

Hence, I'd like to publicly say a big Thank You to the folks at ChangeThis (and 800-CEO-READ who own ChangeThis). To anyone contemplating writing a manifesto, I can't recommend ChangeThis strongly enough.

(email me your comments cvdhruve@gmail.com)