I’m working on a book with @mindofchester (Anthony Imperioli). There’s that’s it. Almost short enough to tweet. But for the longer version keep reading:

As most anyone who follows me online knows I string sentences together like the best of them. I’d call it typing, not writing. I like playing with words, like trying to be clever, funny, moving, like to get a reaction. Usually this is accomplished by being an idiot. Sort of like masturbation it’s the easiest way to get off. I’d like to do more sophisticated writing, short stories, poetry and the like, but that requires a lot more effort, so I tend to just go for the quick fix.

I have a website dedicated to this very goal: jackassletters. So a while back I created a twitter account (@jackassletters) with the goal of promoting my letter writing stupidity.

It went fairly well. I got a modest following, I was seeing an uptick in daily readership. I was learning the medium and defining a 140 character persona. Sometimes pissing people off, sometimes helping them out (mac tips, plumbing tips, midwifery tips), and often being annoyed. It takes a while to figure out who you like to follow, takes a while to get followers, takes a while to learn how to dip in and out of a conversation, just takes a while to “get it.” It seemed like a lot of the people choosing to follow me were just there like me to promote a product, site, or brand, and the majority of these people were annoying as fuck (yes, I do see the irony). So I started making fun of them on a lark. People seemed to like this mockery of marketing, often repeating what I’d said, favoriting the comments as well.

So I started the random “Attn. Social Media Marketers” tweets. On twitter you only get 140 characters. I burn 30 of these with this little intro, so my messages to marketers have to come in at 110 or less.

As of this writing a search on “twitter” on Amazon returns 12,827 results, marketing returns nearly half a million titles, and “social media” returns 30K, so I figure people have an interest in this sort of thing. So of course I got the idea to turn these into a little book. I figured something along the line of “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff.” Just a little book filled with my stupidity.

I was a bookseller for four years. I can imagine “Attention Social Media Marketers” selling well, especially since it could be shelved in business, computers, marketing, etc. So I set myself the goal of writing 100 good ones. I figured I’d have to write about 140 to get 100 that don’t suck (they can’t all be great), and of course once I had this thought I knew thematically that I needed 140 “good ones.” Some are too twittercentric to appeal to the wider marketing audience, some cross the line into being plain mean, and some I don’t intend to ever actually tweet.

Quick tangent: my memory sucks, and the story is convoluted regardless, but I guest posted a letter on @mindofchester’s site. He drew a graphic that I asked to use for my twitter avatar. I thought it rocked. So somehow I got the idea of asking Anthony to do some illustrations for the book. Tangent over.

At this point I was figuring he’d do like 6 drawings and I’d just make a PDF out of them, and “direct message” a link to the PDF to any marketer that DMed me first, but Anthony seemed excited by the idea, and crazily wants to do all 140! So I’m building a website around these cartoons, and have all kinds of ideas for that site. Newsletter/mailing list, podcast, Kindle edition of the book, daily updates, etc. So puppypotpie.com was born!

I’ve gotten about 100 updates written, have posted about 80, and Anthony has illustrated a half dozen of these. I’m going to write up an actual book proposal to see if we can’t get it published. Of course if there are any publishers reading this post feel free to contact me.

I also have quite a few ways to market this. I created @SMmonkey to tweet the best of these, my @jackassletters account is closing in on 4,000 followers, and @mindofchester has over a thousand. The site name is #1 on a google search for “Puppy Pot Pie.” And for some reason I think this whole thing will catch on.

Here’s an example of what we’re putting together:

At a minimum we’ll do the Kindle edition and have the cartoon on the site change weekly. Do I imagine we’ll actually get this published? Probably not. But like all things worth doing, we’re doing it for fun.