A Brief History of My Time Online

1987: I bought my first modem (300-baud), hooked it up to my first PC (Kaypro II), and began surfing neighborhood "bulletin boards." At that time, I was working as a typesetter and downloaded my first job from a client over the modem.

1989-1994: Worked as editorial director for counterculture publisher Loompanics Unlimited in Port Townsend, Washington. Responsible for the editing, design, and marketing of 20-25 books per year. Opened accounts with CompuServe, America Online, Prodigy, GEnie, and The WELL.

1992: Began using CompuServe, The WELL, and Usenet Newsgroups to locate and hire researchers, artists and translators.

1993: Produced the first book publisher's catalog (that I'm aware of) on the Internet. The catalog contained descriptions of 150 books on a gopher server.

early 1994: My first marketing success online: Began reprinting book reviews in Usenet Newsgroups leading to retail orders, wholesale orders, special markets sales and the sale of translation rights.

mid 1994: Left Loompanics to start Internet Publicity Services exclusively for book publishers and authors. Starved.

late 1994: Mosaic is released, marking the beginning of the modern World Wide Web. Landed my first major client, HarperCollins Trade, on Christmas Eve.

1996: Wrote Publicity on the Internet, published by Wiley. Won the Tenagra Award for Internet Marketing Excellence.

1997: Relocated from Port Townsend, Washington, to New Orleans, Louisiana.

1998: Sold Internet Publicity Services to The Tenagra Corporation of Houston, Texas, and joined Tenagra as Director of Internet Publicity Services.

2000: Left Tenagra to write and help nurse my wife through cancer treatments.

2001: Started Patron Saint Productions as a training company to help book publishers take Internet marketing in-house. Starved. Began teaching Internet public relations at Tulane University.

2002: Published the all-new second edition of Publicity on the Internet, now titled Complete Guide to Internet Publicity (Wiley).

2003: Launched AuthorViews, a division of Patron Saint Productions developing author videos for the web. Starved.

2004: Started the International Association of Online Communicators with Don Dunnington, professor of Internet public relations at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey. Don and I had been trying for years to organize an association of college instructors in Internet marketing and public relations. IAOC makes a big splash at the PRSA convention in New York.

2005: IAOCblog.com becomes one of the top blogs on the Internet. AuthorViews goes on first U.S. tour with the goal of shooting one hundred videos in six months. Hurricane Katrina closes the AuthorViews office for 2 months and disperses the staff.

2006: AuthorViews stays mostly on the road, filming in 20 U.S. cities and two Canadian cities. Offices temporarily relocated to Seattle, then back to New Orleans.

What "Patron Saints" Mean to Me: Some people think of saints as deities invoked for assistance. I think of them as your conscience, the voice inside your head that you disregard at your own peril. Do we think we're saints here? No. But we think some of our customers are saints, and some of the people we've met in publishing -- such as Alice Acheson and John Huenefeld -- are saints, and we're trying to honor them with our work and profile them on our web sites so that their contributions are celebrated, shared, and preserved.

What Online Book Promotion Means to Me: Our goal is to use the Internet to get information about your book in front of the target audience without bothering those people who are not your target audience. Mostly we do this by pushing promo materials out to Web Sites That Matter to your target audience. We make a spectacle while doing nothing unethical. That's our philosophy. What's yours?