Ocelopotamus

So, yeah. No beating around the bush. I kind of disappeared from this little corner of Lower East Blogistan for about four months.

What happened is that I was writing a book.

Yes, it’s a book about Facebook. A Facebookbook.

See, for the last nine years I’ve been freelancing for Peachpit Press as a tech writer and/or editor on various book projects. Last year when I started spending all my time on Facebook, and then started helping friends figure out how to use it, I idly asked my editor if Peachpit would be interested in a proposal for a book about Facebook — never really dreaming they’d take me up on it.

Well, they called my bluff, and I spent the second half of last year working on the thing.

And now it’s at the printer and about to hit the shelves. The official release date is February 22. (Sweet tea biscuits! That’s soon!)

It’s called Facebook Me! A Guide to Having Fun with Your Friends and Promoting Your Projects on Facebook. It’s one third a how-to manual, one third an etiquette guide, and one third a manifesto for using Facebook to promote bands, theater companies, comedy groups, craft shows, films, zines, little graphic design companies, and whatever other creative projects you might want to spread the word about. (Plus, there’s a whole bonus fourth third of it that’s just pure fun, baked right into the crust!)

The specs:

Facebook Me! A Guide to Having Fun with Your Friends and Promoting Your Projects on Facebook.
Paperback: 216 pages
Author: Dave Awl
Publisher: Peachpit Press (February 22, 2009)
ISBN-10: 032159195X
ISBN-13: 978-0321591951

And look at this splendiferous back-cover blurb I got from Ms. East Village Inky herself:

“No better Virgil than Dave Awl when it comes to orienting the uninitiated to this strange and many-circled world of Facebook.”
—Ayun Halliday, author of No Touch Monkey! And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late

If you’re itching to get your hands on a copy ASAP — and how could you not be? —
you can pre-order the book from Amazon.

(I also have it on good authority that Unabridged Bookstore here in Chicago will have the book in stock, along with plenty of other booksellers here, there, and everywhere across this great land of ours.)

Oh, and there’s an official Facebook Me! group on Facebook you can join for news and updates about the book.

So, that’s why things got so eerily quiet around here. Once I got started on the writing, I pretty much had to kick everything else in my life to the curb for a while — including poor, neglected Ocelopotamus here.

Now that the book is in the can, I’m hoping to start pumping fluids into the Ocelopotamus and see if I can bring it back to life.

I have some other news to post, soon, too. So if anyone’s listening — stay tuned.