Nancy A. Shenker has seen the future of business book publishing. It looks and reads like a comic book. Its content inspires more laughs than snoozes.
“I think there”™s a lot of people out there who claim to read business books but don”™t really read them,” Shenker said recently in her loft office at The Onswitch in Yonkers, the marketing company she started in 2003. She wants to reach those time-and-attention-challenged readers through her new book publishing enterprise, nunu media L.L.C.
“The mission of the company is to make business reading fun,” said Shenker, who has found the comic book”™s shorter format more congenial to her business writing. Her target audience “is really any business person with a sense of humor,” she said.
Shenker recently made her self-publishing debut at nunu media with the first in her trademarked “Bizic Books” line. Titled “The Sins of Social Media ”¦ and How to Avoid Them,” the illustrated, 18-page booklet also is the first volume in Shenker”™s planned “Bad Girl Good Business” series, which she described as how-to business comic books for “smart business people with short attention spans.” The “bad girl” is Shenker the marketer”™s exercise in self-branding.
“The plan is to have a book out every six to eight weeks,” she said. Next up: “Bitch Slap ”“ When Women Misbehave at Work.” That will be followed by “PowerPoint Perversion,” a short, illustrated compendium of “event horror stories”; “When Bad Websites Happen to Good People”; “Get the &#*$@! Outta Your Office,” a how-to primer on networking, and “Green for Lazy People.”
Socially unacceptable
In “The Sins of Social Media,” Shenker, making light use of vintage American photos culled online and irreverently embellished with quote balloons, spans the technological divide that separates “digital natives” ”“ persons too young to remember a time without computers and cell phones ”“ and “digital immigrants” ”“ people born before the Internet, also known as baby boomers. She offers 11 points of advice to each set on dealing with social media and other social-media users.
“There”™s a lot of bad behavior in social media right now,” she said. “People are doing bad things in the online world that people wouldn”™t do in real life.” As an example, she cited Facebook users posting products for sale on other people”™s Facebook walls. That”™s like a guest passing out business brochures at a cocktail party, she said.
“I have dual citizenship in the old media and the new media world,” said Shenker, The Onswitch mixes the two when marketing for clients. Like the direct-marketing boom from an earlier era in Shenker”™s career in corporate marketing, “Social media is just another channel of communication,” she said, “but it”™s highly powerful.”
”˜Concise and tidy and purposeful”™
When looking to publish her own business writing, Shenker either could pitch her work to traditional publishing houses “or I could self-publish, which is no longer a dirty word,” she said.
Working with Julie Trelstad, founder and publisher at Plain White Press L.L.C. in White Plains, she chose the latter route. Priced at $9.95, her debut book is printed on demand by the self-publishing subsidiary of Amazon.com Inc.
Completed in February, her book already has had a soft launch at Amazon and on the nunu media website. “If I”™d gone the traditional route, I”™d still be schlepping proposals around,” she said.
Shenker said she might hire a cartoonist to illustrate her books “once the collection gets off the ground.” She hopes eventually to publish other business writers “as long as their content is short, irreverent and it lends itself to pictures as well as words.”
A blogger too, Shenker has launched a new blog and another website, “Show Girl Talk,” to complement her self-publishing venture. The shows of which she writes are trade shows and business conferences. “Blogging is good practice for writing the series,” she said. For both short forms, “You have to be somewhat concise and tidy and purposeful in what you”™re saying, which is a good quality in all communication.”
Shenker does not expect to reap a bonanza from book sales. Instead she hopes her status as a “bad girl” business author will translate into more speaking engagements for her. “If you have a book, the assumption is that you”™re the guru,” she said.
The entrepreneur will formally launch her “Bizic book” after Labor Day. “I already sold eight books without telling anybody,” she said. “And my mother”™s not online, so I know one wasn”™t hers.”
