Overshare Is Now Available!

My new book, Overshare, went on sale in Amazon's Kindle store early this morning, and because it's such an unusual book and I'm really pulling out all the stops...okay, as many stops as I can...to get some momentum going with it early on, I'll be periodically reporting on its progress here.

I first introduced the book and offered a free excerpt from it here, so readers could see what's so unusual about it for themselves. In terms of promotion, I'm primarily focusing on two selling points for the book.

The first is that it's a new kind of ebook, and in that sense, experimental digital literature. On the strength of this aspect, I've reached out to influential bloggers whose area of focus is ebooks, new forms of digital media, and experimental lit with advance review copies. There's been plenty of talk around the interwebs lately from people asking when we're going to start seeing new kinds of digital "books", and when authors are going to start exploiting all the possibilities digital media have to offer. Overshare forms a direct response to those questions, and I'm hoping it will inspire some of these bloggers to discuss whether or not it succeeds in this regard, and why or why not.

The second selling point is the book's very timely and topical subject matter: online privacy as it relates to the use of social media. With recent security lapses on Facebook and the omnipresent news stories of online stalking and bullying, most people who use social media have some degree of concern about what they're putting online. Plenty of real and virtual ink has been spilled on email and social media account hacking as well, but Overshare focuses on a much more disturbing point: that in the course of ordinary use of social media, users typically expose far more about themselves and their lives than they realize or intend.

Due to their very nature, which is to encourage maximum communication and the creation of huge, linked networks of people, social media have the insidious (if unintentional) tendency to lure us into a false sense of privacy and security. Even if you never post any of your private or financial details online, Overshare demonstrates that people can tell much more about you and your life than you probably realize when they take in the full picture of your online activity: Facebook, twitter and blogging. Add some wish lists from Amazon or eBay, some Likes, your Friends lists and shared links, and a total stranger can know as much about you as most of your real-life friends do.

Remember how, as a teen, you'd get an instant and complete picture of a new friend the first time you stepped into his or her bedroom? The sum total of your social media picture is like your teenage self's bedroom, but scaled upward geometrically by the sheer volume of information you (and others) make available online about yourself and your life. I'm emphasizing this aspect of the book in reaching out to people who regularly use social media sites and also like to read. This is only the first day Overshare has been available for purchase, so there's not much else to tell at this point. Stay tuned...