For today’s Shifting Careers column at NYT.com I got a chance to interview Herminia Ibarra, author of Working Identity, my all-time favorite book about careers. Ibarra, who has spent the past several years working in France had interesting insights about European vs. Americans attitudes towards work/leisure/unplugging.

My single girlfriends in NYC have long been wondering where all the eligible men are lurking. I found it. Happy Ending Lounge on the Lower East Side is home to Varsity Letters, a monthly reading series celebrating sports writing. (If you’re wondering about the name of the venue, the bar’s former life as a certain kind of massage parlor confirms that it was always a popular haunt for men.)

I went to the July 5th event because the beau and I were invited by our friend, Rich Ackerman, a sportscaster and contributor to Being There: 100 Sports Pros Talk About the Best Events They Ever Witnessed Firsthand, by Eric Mirlis. Ackerman’s radio voice turned a “reading” into a live broadcast. The beau, who has spent almost his entire career around sports, also knew one of the other readers, Lee Lowenfish, author of a new biography of Branch Rickey, who is renown as both a jazz writer and a baseball writer (Lowenfish trivia: he sports a perfect slash business card, featuring a baseball in one corner and a musical note in the other.)
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On Sunday, I spoke on a panel about freelance writing at a journalism conference with my friends and fellow freelancers, Chris Kenneally and Hannah Wallace. Chris’s new book, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language, is coming out later this week and during the panel, she mentioned that she is using a private blog (a blog she doesn’t publish) as an organizational tool for her next book. Now that I’ve discovered how easy and useful blogs can be for keeping track of writing thoughts, online links and other stuff you don’t want to lose, I loved this idea.
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Today my Shifting Careers column for The New York Times is a roundtable with questions from recent college wandering through what I call “the decade of drift.”

You can read it here:
“Young, Confused and in Need of Coaching”

If you happen to be one of those wanderers, or happen to live with any, work with any, or just care about understanding this period of life as it is lived today, make sure to read The Quarterlife Crisis by Abby Wilner and Alexandra Robbins and The Quarterlifer’s Companion, a follow-up book by Wilner and Cathy Stocker (with a very long subtitle I’ve left out.) These folks have also started an online community with some nifty resources (job listings, info on health insurance, links to online dating sites.)

In other Monday news, Penelope Trunk just linked to my blog in a post about using slashes on business cards. Her writings on “braided lives” will be interesting for anyone already on the slash bandwagon.

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I spent the past few days in San Jose at the O’Reilly Tools of Change Conference , a techie-meets-publishing idea extravaganza.

My dear friend, Sarah Milstein, is one of the conference chairs, and she and Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media, opened the event with an amusing romp through publishing innovations from the beginning of recorded time. (Sumerian tablets were nifty, but not too portable.) One of the highlights of their talk was a hysterical video called “Medieval Tech Support,” which has been making its way around publishing offices for some time.

If you haven’t seen it, watch it here.

The video captures the tone of the conference perfectly: new technology has always been a little scary for users; over time, we adapt and see its value.

I got a chance to speak with Wired editor and “Long Tail” author Chris Anderson in a panel about how publishers and authors can be better partners on book promotion. Some of the subjects we hit upon included:

• how to reconcile what might appear to be the misaligned interests of publishers and authors (e.g. Chris’s interest is promoting the Chris Anderson brand, which now includes earning income from speaking as well as from selling books, whereas his publisher might be primarily focused on selling books.) Upon further discussion, it became clear that these interests might not be misaligned.

• techniques for partnering and sharing innovative ideas with other authors and in the greater publishing community (what I am starting to call “Author School”).
• the need for all writers to become adept at self-promotion (for which we were properly challenged when an audience member questioned the wisdom of applying this same standard to fiction writers.)

It was a provocative discussion, the kind that left me with as many questions as answers.

Chris also talked about his latest slash, Booktour.com, a site he’s founded along with Adam Goldstein (who I coincidentally profiled in my book way back when Adam was a mere high school student/author/software developer) and Kevin Smokler (author/founder of Virtual Book Tour) where authors can list their upcoming events and potential audience members can search for events in their areas. Booktour would have been a godsend for me these past few months, but I plan to use it going forward for all my events. If you’re an author doing events, get there pronto. The site is still in Beta mode. I believe the official launch is next week.

Below is a small writeup about the panel on Mediabistro’s GalleyCat:

Tools of Change: Chris Anderson Will Take Your Call

Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson teamed up with NYT online career columnist Marci Alboher for a Tools of Change panel on getting more out of marketing with authors, and opened with a whammy: “All authors are underserved by the book industry,” he said of current marketing and publicity efforts. For the next half hour or so, the two discussed ways to change that situation, including building up an author’s “word-of-mouth in the permalink world” and giving authors the tools to become their own best marketers. “We need to destigmatize small success,” Anderson said, referrign to the disappointment some writers still feel when their book gets mentioned on a blog rather than in a newspaper’s book review section. And we need to look to the long term; “if an author is the best expert I can find for a topic in my column,” Alboher said, “I don’t care if the book’s three years old.”

In response to a query from the audience, Anderson made a bold promise, which he said when I introduced myself afterwards I can pass on to you: He’s willing to do a free conference call with any publisher who wants to discuss these marketing issues and bring their authors into the conversation. “As long as I don’t have to get on a plane,” he quipped.

I was considering limiting the number of times a week I use the Heymarci Blog to promote a friend’s new book, new class/workshop/product, or overall fabulousness. But it’s my blog and that’s one of the beauties of being able to make the rules. So as long as my friends continue to do exceptional things, you’re going to hear about them.

In that vein, here’s the latest offering from one of my exceptional friends, Faith Adiele, whose award-winning memoir Meeting Faith, an account on her experience becoming a Buddhist nun in Thailand, should be on everyone’s summer reading list.

Faith is teaching a few workshops in Iowa this summer and it’s a chance to study with a real star.

For more about Faith, visit her site. Faith is also a regular contributor to O Magazine (you can read her most recent O story on her site.)

What We Talk About When We Talk About Food: Food Writing Weekend Workshop, July 14–15

Politics & Poetics: Writing Yourself Into/Onto The World One-Week Workshop, July 15–20

Travel Tales: Making The Foreign Familiar & The Familiar Foreign
One-Week Workshop, July 22–27

TO REGISTER, AND GET MORE INFORMATION,
VISIT THE IOWA SUMMER WRITING FESTIVAL SITE.

Today a friend with a book coming out in the Fall asked me for 5 things I learned on my book tour.

Here’s the first five I came up with:

1. Events don’t fill up unless you do something to spread the word.
2. Because of #1, you can find yourself talking to an intimate group of 12 folks thrilled to have a private salon, while the bookseller pulls up a chair in your discussion circle in the middle of a bar. Be prepared to quickly modify your presentation for such occasions.
3. If you have young children, live in New York (near lots of media outlets), or have a job in addition to your book, think twice about whether your “tour” needs to involve leaving your home. Radio tours and online efforts (e.g. reaching out to bloggers) allow you to reach huge audience without going anywhere.
4. Partner with other authors. You’ll get a chance to build an audience among the other authors’ readers. And if the other authors happen to be enjoying the limelight, you’ll bask in that glow too. Choose some authors in your niche — for me writers like Tim Ferriss, Penelope Trunk, Josh Piven – all who had career books out around the same time, and some whose books are nice complements but not necessarily in the same niche (Sue Shapiro’s book on fix-ups made for a good program on fixing your love life/work life.) You’ll also learn a lot by thinking of how your book relates to the ideas in other books.
   And it’s just more fun.
5. Spend money if you can. I hired an assistant which was extremely helpful on pitching the press (both to save effort and to avoid having to blatantly flak myself) and organizing events. I’m still wondering whether I should have hired outside p.r. help.

Authors, please weigh in with your top 5. I’ve got many more 5s where these came from and I’ll post a few more after the next few weeks of touring. Cape May NJ, Denver, and San Jose all coming up. Gotta up those B-12s.

As I was promoting my book, I approached lots of writers I admired. Sometimes I wanted them to think of me as the expert on slash careers. Sometimes I was looking for advice about how to make that move from journalist to author. In other cases I hoped the writer would say some kind words about about my book in the form of a review, a blog entry, a blurb. Because I limited myself to writers I admired, I was sincere every time I wrote which made this process enjoyable rather than daunting.

Penelope Trunk was one of those writers I approached. I had heard of her, and read her Climb column in the Boston Globe; but after a reference in the Wall Street Journal to her blog, The Brazen Careerist, I started reading the blog, which developed into a daily habit. When I ultimately choose to write to her, I didn’t really know what I wanted to happen. I just wanted to meet her. I wrote on a day when something she posted on her blog had pretty much flattened me. I couldn’t get any work done after reading the post, and I was affected by how she took took a horribly difficult moment in her life as a parent and turned it into a brilliant piece of advice. Penelope immediately wrote back and we struck up both a friendship and a professional relationship that was one of the gifts of writing my book. (In the end, she did say some kind words about my book, and that was a bonus.)

Well, now Penelope’s book The Brazen Careerist is out and it is as smart, unpredictable and bold as she is. Perhaps the best praise I can give her book is that it has completely raised the bar for the rest of us who write about careers. Every time I think about my next article, column or blog post, I now think, “Penelope has probably already said something original, brilliant, and smart on this.” Then I run to her blog and realize that she has. So I have to try harder. And she’s the first person who will tell me this.

Thanks for the kick in the butt Penelope! And since we all need a kick in the butt, I encourage you to buy the book.

Since you’ll all ask me, here is the post that made me write to Penelope.

I don’t like to play favorites, but this Friday, I have a speaking gig that I am more than a little excited about. I’ll be doing the Authors@Google series (Visit the site at your own risk. You may never return).

I’ll be sharing the stage with Tim Ferriss, author of The Four Hour Work Week, whose Amazon rank has been hovering at around #10 for more than a week now (I bet I check as much as he does!)

I am a little nervous people might not show because apparently it’s a busy day at the Googleplex. John McCain is also speaking (after us). And everyone is going to see the new Spiderman movie as a company field trip. But a friend told me that maybe it’s good McCain is speaking as it will bring some of the telecommuters onto campus.

There’s a touch of irony about giving a talk about improving your work/life mix on a day when the potential audience is struggling with these kinds of stressful decisions:

1) Should I go to work today?
2) Should I see John Mccain speak?
3) What time should I do the Spiderman field trip?

A typical work day when you work for a company that’s always showing up at the top of those “best companies to work for” lists.

Google posts all author talks at YouTube, so you can watch it here.