New Media books suck

I hate reading all the new media books that get released. Books about AdWords, SEO, Analytics, online marketing, social media and the list goes on. Why? Because 200 of the 250 pages are garbage. I’d rather have 50 pages of how-to and be able to get right to work than reading and reading and getting nothing except those 50 key pages. Often time its hard to even know when you are reading fluff and when you are reading the good stuff. Recently I took a great Analytics book (Analytics 2.0) and got it down to 11 pages. The differences is that this book had a lot of great insight. So my estimate was that 50-60 pages were necessary. So of the 11 pages 4 or 6 of them could help explain those 11 action pages. By 11 pages I mean they were a simple checklist of things to do. So its really a list of a hundred things to do–not just 11 pages filled with a few paragraphs a piece.

One of the best books I’ve read in a long time was not from a publisher. It’s from an online software company, Wordtracker. They released a pay per click book and it was nothing but tutorials and screenshots from beginning to end. A beginner could take that book and do a pretty good job at getting started and learning. This ebook could pay for itself in a week. It’s ironic that a non-publishing company outperformed a publishing company, but not surprising.