I wrote The Elements of Content Strategy because as the internet worms its way further and further into our lives, digital content becomes centrally important to the ways in which we live and work. And it follows that content strategy—the practice of planning for, designing, and managing content—is also getting closer to the center of both web projects and entire organizations.

So I wrote this book in the hope of providing a compact, useful reference—both for those of us already doing content strategy work, and for those who want to know more about working with (or becoming) content strategists. Like the two superb books that precede it at A Book Apart, Elements is meant to be a handbook, in the literal sense, which the OED has, charmingly, as “A small book or treatise, such as may conveniently be held in the hand.”

But it’s also meant to be a book kept close at hand for use during spells of intensive effort. In that way, it’s a book I wrote because I needed it myself, if only to remind myself of things I’d already learned: not just deliverables and processes, but principles, rationales, and traditions that might be called into service when weird new problems arise.

Old-School Publishing for the New World

What can I say about A Book Apart, except that they have been ideal publishers in every way? Jeffrey, Jason, and Mandy do extraordinary work with an attention to editorial rigor and design integrity that is unsurpassed in our field, or most others. It’s also a genuine honor to join Jeremy, Dan, and (soon!) Ethan on the ABA shelf.

Beyond this, though, I hope that the viability of A Book Apart’s approach is a sign of good things to come. On one hand, it’s a very new-school publisher, built on a web-based brand and the ability to sell books directly to readers with little friction. But on the other hand, it’s a very old-school house, built on editorial and design values too often abandoned by the traditional presses.

Many of my favorite books of the last few years have been published by small presses like Unbridled, Akashic, Subterranean, and the astoundingly great Small Beer, or by micro-presses like Temporary Culture and Graphics Press. In a moment of economic disaster for so many publishing and media companies, these presses demonstrate that old-fashioned editorial care is still viable if you make it the center of what you do. The existence of publishers like these, within our industry and outside it, fills me with optimism.

I am so grateful to Jeffrey, Mandy, and Jason for giving me the opportunity to write precisely the sort of book I wanted to write, and for making my manuscript into such a beautiful little object. I hope the result proves useful enough to reward their confidence.

If A Book Apart hadn’t been interested in this project, it wouldn’t be happening. This isn’t “a content strategy book” slotted into their lineup; it’s a specific project conceived to take advantage of their ambition, editorial chops, and unswerving commitment to their readers.

Which is to say: I’m writing this book because I think we’re at an inflection point.

Yes, content strategy is a real thing that real clients and employers really need. But beyond that, we’re in the infancy of a ubiquitous internet—one fully integrated into our lives and environments. The publishing world has been bitten by a radioactive wombat, and we don’t know if journalism’s going to die or mutate into something speedy and awesome. Our brains are changing in ways we don’t understand. Content work matters—yes, now more than ever—and as this thing spins faster, we’re going to need every advantage we can find.

Some propositions:

• Our practice revolves around a set of shared assumptions, grounding principles, and professional ethics. These are every bit as important as the tools and methods we use.
• We don’t have time to reinvent everything, and we don’t have to. Our discipline is rooted in old-school, long-lasting professional fields that offer practices and approaches we need and can immediately use. This also means that people from these allied fields make great candidates for content strategy positions.
• Just as porn built the internet, commerce has been the impetus behind the development of content strategy; we have to get commercial content right. We must also remember that our educational, cultural, and governmental institutions are increasingly dependent on the online world. These are not afterthoughts or fluff jobs for idealists, and they demand that we know how to be user advocates.
• The economics of content is our problem, after all. Unless we understand resources and costs, we can’t build sustainable publishing processes, teams, and systems.

My aim is to produce a short, clear reference that deals with the roots, principles, core skills, and central processes of content strategy in ways that content people will find helpful, and that designers, information architects, and project managers will be able to use as they work with and around content.

This is where you come in. I’m finishing up the draft of the manuscript now. If there’s something you want to know about content work, but aren’t getting from your current resources, let me know. This is a short book, so I won’t be dealing with anything comprehensively, but I don’t want to miss whole areas of interest, especially for people who don’t do actually content work. So leave me a comment or find me on Twitter or send a note to erin@ this domain name, and I’ll do my best to give you something you can use.

“It’s impersonal,” goes the narrative. “It’s a buzzword.” “It takes all the humanity and warmth out of our stories and insights and makes them sad and grey.”

Tactical Fail

Here’s the thing. Most people who do content work have had a difficult time selling it, even to clients who desperately need it. We are just beginning to get mainstream companies and organizations to care about “Content Strategy” thing. This is not the time to go on a vision quest in search of a perfect, non-buzzwordy neologism to describe what we do.

More importantly, though, there’s nothing wrong with “content.”

There Is a Problem, and It’s Not the Word

The tradition of speaking about content vs. form goes back to Aristotle’s distinction between an argument (logos, pathos, ethos, and d’Artagnan) and its presentation (lexis). True, when we speak about “web content,” we mean both the ideas and their rhetorical formulation, but the leap from Aristotle’s breakdown to the one we use on the web—content, presentation, and behavior—is a small one. And in the context of the website-making world, it makes perfect sense to talk about “stories” or “insights” or “ideas,” however they’re presented, as content.

I’m a true believer about the power of crappy language to throttle the intellect and numb the conscience. And if you’re feeling lousy about writing or reading lifeless, perfunctory content that tastes like moldy cardboard, it can be tempting to blame it on the lexicon.

But “content” isn’t the problem. The problem is believing that quality is optional, that publishing more is automatically better, that this nonsense and its ilk are anything but an antisocial exploitation of a temporary loophole, or that paint-by-numbers content or social media or SEO or anything else is going to save your ass when you’re not creating something genuinely valuable.

People of Earth, Remember

Good content people, whatever medium they work in, understand that storytelling is the main way we get knowledge out of the head of one clever primate and into the head of another. They get that you need to sound human, and that the only way to do that is to BE human. Nothing the Cluetrain guys said in ’99 is any less true today, even if their neohippy lean got a bad reputation during the post-bubble dry spell.

Stop dithering. Go forth and make great stuff.

1. Liz Danzico on Obama’s editing
2. Robert Gracey, “Content Transparency: Can You See Me Now?”
3. Tiffani Jones, “Before You Hire a Writer”
4. Jeffrey Zeldman, “Love Me Long Time”
5. Nicole Jones’s rowdy new blog, Contente.org (what is it with these Apple kids?)

Bonus: Poynter‘s Roy Peter Clark on getting word order right (video)—the three-minute preview is free and includes one of my favorite lines from Shakespeare.