2nd Edition of UP and to the RIGHT!
After finishing my first book, Surviving Cyberwar, I had an idea for two new books. One would be How to Succeed as an Industry Analyst, the other would be How to Influence Industry Analysts. A fortuitous meeting in Ann Arbor with Gene Kim, the recently retired (at the time) founder of Tripwire and soon to be the author of the fabulous The Phoenix Project, caused me to start with the second one first.
I had told Gene that I often helped security vendors with their analyst strategies. He said “If I had know you provided that service Tripwire would have paid you more than Gartner!” So in early spring 2012 I headed to a mountain top in Tennessee to write UP and to the RIGHT: Strategy and Tactics of Analyst Influence. On the way, we stopped to visit friends in Thomas Station. We explained what our plans for the week were. Karen would visit family during the day and I would write for eight hours a day. I expressed my desire for a tool that would track number of words written. “I just need a progress bar for my daily target. There must be a tool for that.”
There is. It’s called Scriviner. That night I found a Youtube video that explained how it works, bought and installed it, and started writing Monday morning after breakfast.
You often hear the advise to “write what you know.” Well, that’s what I was doing. In five days I wrote most of UP and to the RIGHT, one day I wrote over 10,000 words, apparently writing faster that P.G. Woodhouse who legend says wrote 9,000 words a day. It was during that week that I discovered how you can have original insights and ideas *as* you write.
UP and to the RIGHT was published on Amazon, May 1, 2012. Ever since it has been the top result for “analyst influence” and continues to sell today.
Someone at McAfee must have bought a copy, because the next January I received a request to deliver a seminar to their entire marketing team. It happened like this: One of their people had put off their vacation plans between Christmas and New Year because Gartner had promised to deliver the looked for MQ Questionnaire then. It was delayed, so this marketing person found himself with time on his hands. He reported that he was in the coffee break room and picked up my book from a shelf. He devoured it in one sitting, calling his wife to tell her he would be home late, he had to finish this book. He passed it on to his boss, Jill Kyte, who read it on a plane the next day. When she landed she emailed her entire team to buy the book and reached out to me to come visit. That episode was every consultant’s dream. Write a book and get business!
I moved on to write more books, including the annual Security Yearbook. In 2020, during Covid I worked with several other former Gartner analysts to write and publish Curmudgeon: How to Succeed as an Industry Analyst. My friend French Caldwell encouraged me to republish UP and to the RIGHT, so I started thinking about it between my other projects. (Like Net Zeros and Ones: How Data Erasure Promotes Sustainability, Privacy, and Security.)
In August this year Gianna Whitver posted to LinkedIn that she was interested in book suggestions. She was organizing the 2nd Cybersecurity Marketing Con and thought books would make a good give-away. I think somebody tagged me so I chimed in that I would be happy to come sign copies of UP and to the RIGHT. We hopped on a call during which I proposed that the timing was perfect for publishing a second edition. After all, I wrote the first edition in five days. I had two whole months to write the 2nd.
Long story short. The 2nd edition of UP and to the RIGHT: Strategy and Tactics of Analyst Influence will launch this Sunday in Austin at the CyberMarketingConference. It is dedicated to the memory of French Caldwell.
I will be signing books in the CyberEdge booth thanks to the support of Steve Piper who has purchased the books and arranged for them to get to Texas.
The second edition of UP and to the RIGHT went live on Amazon this evening. You can purchase it here.