Last December 4, I woke up suddenly at 6am in my hotel room in Los Angeles with a really great idea for a wiki. A really fantastically great idea. I wouldn’t say that I was positive it would make me billions, but I figured the odds were at least fifty percent.

I should point out that I’m a magazine writer, not a computer person, and I hadn’t programmed a computer since high school, in the days when the most sophisticated way to store data was on a tape recorder. However, my idea seemed so self-evidently genius that the only worry nagging me was that someone had already thought of it.

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Have you ever wondered how Web 2.0 stalwarts like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter and the rest grew so fast? They went viral, of course. To use their products induces you to spread them. (What’s the sense of being on Facebook or Twitter if none of your friends are?)

My forthcoming book, the VIRAL LOOP, looks at how many of today’s most successful companies are being built to facilitate viral growth. But don’t confuse all this with a viral marketing campaign, which may yield an impressive one-time cascade of online traffic. Viral loops by definition must be replicable and are engineered to grow at staggering rates—far beyond any viral ad or Mentos-Diet Coke video. Reproducibility, in turn, suggests anyone should be able test features of a viral loop.
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Fiction writer Jason Brown recounts his experience publishing his new book Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work with the New York based independent publisher Open City.

I knew I didn’t have the force of a major publishing house spending the money to market the book, so at first I despaired. I didn’t have the slightest idea how to do it on my own. My first book, also a collection of short stories, was published by Norton eight years ago and although they did not market it aggressively, they did a few things. Despite this, I knew I wouldn’t be better off with a bigger publisher for this book. Short story collections are not sought after in the industry and, even if I got incredibly lucky and sold the book, marketing would surely neglect it. Publishers, which are owned by large media companies, are increasingly hit driven. It’s a situation that is bad for fiction writers. So, with a certain amount of anxiety and relief I tried to figure out what I could do to promote the book on my own.
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