It has begun! Countdown to Bumrush the Charts

To quote a line from Highlander (one of the greatest movies ever made), "It has begun"

I wanted to run through a topline bulleted list of key points for Sunday's Bumrush the Amazon.com charts for my new book, "Join the Conversation"

• All affiliate proceeds will be going to charity. I'll provide a snapshot of my affiliate page as verification at the end of the day.
• All purchases should be made in increments of "1" i.e. if you want to purchase 5 copies of the book, do it 5 times (you can always bundle the books together after the fact or take advantage of Amazon.com PRIME i.e. 2-day delivery free shipping)
• If you can't make the purchase on Sunday, do it on Saturday (or even today) It's all part of a weekend concentration of effort and communal activation...but just to be clear, Sunday is first prize.
• When you've made your purchase, add yourself to the Facebook Join the Conversation Group and confirm your purchase on the Event page/wall. At the end of the day, I'll be selecting one person to co-develop and co-present at next year's Podcamp NYC (Feb 29/Mar 1, 2008)
• Throughout the day, I'll be twittering via "jointheconvo" (add yourself), blogging @ Join the Conversation (and fyi, you can become an author of this blog as well), podcasting and chronicling our progress via Facebook.
• I'll be available from roughly 10am-5pm EST via ooVoo (handle: jointheconversation) for multi-person video chat and skype (handle: jaffejuice). You can also send in audio comments for my podcast, Jaffe Juice, to +1 206 203-3255
• The affiliate link is here
• Finally, if you're so inclined, spread the word to your clients and colleagues, and/or if you are a blogger, twitterer, podcaster etc., do likewise. Sunday's "event" will be what you and I make it. Simple as that.

At the end of the day, this is both an experiment (putting my talk into walk) and an active display of "UNM2PNM" i.e. practicing the principles espoused in the book to demonstrate and validate the power of community, dialogue and partnership.

My belief is that if we (and I stress, "WE") succeed on Sunday i.e. propel JTC into the Amazon.com stratosphere, we all win. Some of the more cynical of you might be scratching your heads and questioning the assertion that the benefit to this experiment is lopsided. On one hand, I can't help the fact I wrote the book (d'uh), but by donating the affiliate proceeds to charity, sharing all the data and stats with you, putting myself out there and being prepared to fail, AND recognizing that this can become a case study for us all (plus if the book does well, it validates so much of what so many of us believe in), hopefully we'll all feel a sense of ownership and pride to be a part of this effort and community.

I'm not sure what will constitute success or failure. It's all relative and it's all subjective. Breaking into the top 250 should be doable...I found this image from my LA30 folder, which seems to indicate that I was able to hit 226 about a month after the book came out (that's with pretty good press pick-up etc). Emulating that seems realistic.

As for a stretch goal...I won't get too presumptuous or ambitious, but sufficed to say that if we break into the top 10, drinks are on me and you're all invited to a geek get-together, where and when, TBD.

As I wrote in the book, this is not my conversation. This is not your conversation. This is our conversation. Let's make it count (literally)