In light of Penelope Trunk's comments last week that you may be better off not writing a book, bestselling management advisor Tom Peters makes an interesting comment in a recent interview with Debbie Weil, the social media consultant who wrote the book on corporate blogging:

"I [started blogging] because I thought it would be fun, and then suddenly I discovered over a period of time it's the best marketing tool that I've ever had... It's changed my business; it's changed my life; it's changed my outlook on the world. I've done fifteen books. I've said to many people; I think it's true: I'm not going to do another book, because the conversation that's the blog conversation is de facto my books now."

Obviously, this strategy is not going to work for every author—or even every nonfiction author. Heck, there may only be a handful of business, religious and personal-development writers (and possibly some political scientists, plus maybe one or two scientific scientists) who could pull this off, because the books are really a marketing tool for the name on the cover. But they could make it work: Peters still gets plenty of speaking gigs, even though he hasn't published a new book in three years, and the four books that came out in 2005 were primarily repurposed content from a book that had come out two years earlier.