On a recent teaching trip to Southern, CA, I visited with my college friend Cynthia. Among the many things we talked about was her oldest son’s new self-published book, The Top 10 Jewish… . She handed me a copy and from the first words of the introduction, I knew I wanted to learn more about Adam Diament’s take on organizing information for a book and on self-publishing.

I’ve always found learning much more fun when the topics were put into ranked lists. I might not watch a show called “Great Child Actors,” but call the same show, “The Top 10 Greatest Child Actors of All-Time,” and I’ll be glued to the T.V. So if you ever wanted to l earn about Judaism, the Jewish people, and Jewish culture, and  you’re drawn to ranked lists, then this is the perfect book for you.

–From the Introduction to The Top 10 Jewish… by Adam L. Diament

I emailed Adam about doing an interview and offering Writing It Real members an excerpt from his book.

Sheila
Tell us about you and your writing life.

Adam
I’ve always loved learning new things, no matter what topic it is.  My undergraduate degrees were in Religious Studies and Molecular and Cell Biology.  People ask me how those studies really go together.  I tell them they don’t; I just like learning different things.  After undergrad studies, I earned my Ph.D. in genetics, then afterwards went to law school. I’m now a practicing patent attorney focusing mostly on biotechnology.  My past writing life before this book had never been “for fun.”  It consisted of writing scientific journal articles on genetics and obesity for other academic researchers, not exactly something you’d find on Amazon or in your local book store.

Sheila
How did you hatch this particular idea?

Adam
Writing a book had been on my bucket list for several years.  I didn’t know what it would be about, but it was always in the back of my mind.  I’m not much of a fiction reader or a fiction writer so I knew it would have to be factual and about something I knew a decent amount about.  That limited me to either Jewish stuff, science stuff, or law stuff.  Sometimes I would come up with an idea that I thought was really cool, but when I’d do a search for it, a book on that idea would pop up on Amazon.  Someone always had beaten me to the punch!

I think for this idea, I remember coming across some web pages that had various Top 10 lists in Jewish topics.  I thought that would be good idea for book but figured it was probably out there already.  While I did find, “The Jewish Book of Lists,” which was similar to what I was interested in doing, when I leafed through the pages, I thought there was an additional space in the market for what I wanted to do, since the Jewish Book of Lists and other Jewish trivia books weren’t a rank order of Jewish people, places, and things, and that’s what I wanted to do.

There also wasn’t much humor in the other books. I thought it would be fun to have topics like, “Top 10 Best Tasting Unkosher Foods,” “Top 10 Jewish Stereotypes and Myths,” “Top 10 Unofficial Commandments” (like “Thou shalt never put up a Christmas tree”), and “Top 10 Jewish Pickup Lines” (You had me at shalom).

Sheila
I appreciate the way the names of your lists put a spin in there about our US cultural melting pot. Under holidays you have “Top 10 Things To Do At Shabbat Dinner” followed by “Top 10 Things You Wish You Could Do On Shabbat Dinner.” That juxtaposition illustrates the differences in religious Jewish culture and our mainstream US culture.

What are the responses you are getting from readers? 

Adam
It’s all been very positive.  Everyone who has read the book has told me that they’ve really liked it; even my non-Jewish friends have enjoyed it.  Of course, I don’t think any of my friends or family would respond back to me saying that they hated it, so I’m probably getting a biased response.  One type of comment, I get is, “I can’t you believe you ranked X higher Y! That’s ridiculous!”  Even though they might be right (which I would never admit to them) at least when they tell me that, I know they’ve read it.

Sheila
I think the fact that people are arguing about the rank orders is very lively. Your thoughts are sparking their thoughts and providing material for entertaining arguments. What more could a writer ask for? I don’t think they are just saying they like your book. I think your approach to educating people about Judaism and about the participation of Jewish people in the United States’ culture is brilliant. The lists entertain and the breadth of them inform quite well. Never being dry and didactic guarantees your readers will be learning something and not feel lectured to even if they disagree on the order in the lists or feel someone or something was left out. I think you’d better start considering a next volume, More Jewish, The Next Top Ten.

Had you published before?

Adam
I never published anything for general reading by the public (I don’t count the academic papers as “real” publishing) and this was really just a fun project for me.  I told myself when I started that if I sold one book on Amazon to a non-family/non-friend member, I’d be happy.  In the beginning, when I announced my new book to my friends on Facebook , I had quite a few sales, but I didn’t know if those sales were only to my friends and family. Since it’s been while since I announced my book, I figure that any sales going on now are to “real” people. I even got a 5-star review on Amazon from someone I didn’t know, which I was really happy to see.

Sheila
The list form–what are the joys of using it? What are the limitations you work against?

Adam
I really thought of this book as a fun little coffee table book.  Anyone can open to any page, invest 30 seconds or less of their lives, and learn something without feeling the pressure of having to finish a whole book (although I hope that when someone reads any of the lists, they’ll want to read more).  I also saw this book as something of a conversation starter for families.  Sitting around the table for a Shabbat (Friday night) dinner, someone could ask, “What do you think the 10 greatest Jewish movies are?” or “What are the top 10 Jewish things to wear?” Even if they don’t agree with me, checking their thoughts against mine gets the family to engage with each other.  You can kind of play it like Family Feud as well.  Try to guess all 10 with three strikes against you or less.  I also imagined this book as being a starter book for a Hebrew School/Sunday School book.  While kids may find learning different topics boring, if a teacher started out  with a list like, “Top 10 Rabbis” or “Top 10 Enemies of the Jewish People,” the kids could have fun battling out who was worse, Pharoah or Haman? Or who was a more important rabbi, Rashi or Hillel? Or what holiday should be ranked higher, Rosh Hashanah or Passover?

One limitation of the list idea, especially for my idea of having each list cover a single page, is that I was unable to expound on anything, or explain my rationale for including or not including certain people or events in the lists.  When I felt that I would get a lot of heat for including or not including some someone, I would get around that by including an “Honorable Mention” at the bottom of the page.  This was especially useful for categories like “Top 10 Jewish Comedians” and “Top 10 Jewish Directors and Producers.”

Sheila
I think that limitation was useful to you in keeping to the easy-to-read-and-use-and-learn-from-while-being-entertained tone your structure sets up. I like your work around of the Honorable Mentions very much. I also noted that footnotes also sometimes help you offer a little bit of background that will help the reader understand the place of the list in Jewish history or life.

Here’s a question on another aspect of your project. What was your experience with self-publishing?

Adam
This was my first foray into self-publishing.  I knew of a few people who did some self-publishing, but actually didn’t even ask their advice.  I actually wanted my work to be secret until it was all done, and a surprise to my friends and family, who I then gave my books to as presents.  I used CreateSpace, an Amazon.com service, to get the book on Amazon quickly, and then be able to have them handle all sales, shipping, etc.  I probably spent about four months working on the book.  I wanted everything to be accurate and not say a person was Jewish when they weren’t, or vice versa.  Since I have a wife, kid and full-time job, there wasn’t that much spare time to write the book, and I might only have gotten in a few minutes a day to put a list together.  I probably could have whipped it out in a week or so if I was doing it full-time because I really enjoyed creating the lists and the book production.

Since I wasn’t trying to make big bucks with my book, I wanted the simplest way to get the book out in the public, even if there were other ways to do it that would give me more long- term flexibility.  I figured that I’d do my first book through CreateSpace and seeing how everything went, then decide how to do future books.  I created my book cover and inserted a few illustrations by using iStockphoto.com.  The cover, illustrations, and pro-plan (which gave me higher royalties on my book for a low initial buy in), all together probably cost me less than $100. Not a bad price for being able to check something off my bucket list.  Of course, I paid out of pocket when I bought a bunch of books myself, but even after all that, I’m probably still a little bit ahead.  Like I mentioned, though, my goal wasn’t to make any money off the book, and I felt I would have been happy if even one non-family/friend member bought and enjoyed the book.

Sheila
Have you advertised your book? How?

Adam
I’ve really done practically no advertising.  All I did was that posting on Facebook. I thought of  buying a few ads on Facebook and Google but when I did the tracking, I decided it wasn’t worth it.

Basically I think 1 out of 7 people who clicked on the ad link would have had to buy the book to make it worthwhile.  I did make a webpage, though, so the page would pop up if someone did a search for “the top 10 Jewish.” I have a link on my page to the book’s amazon.com page. When I check the number of hits I get on my webpage, it’s like 1 a day or less, so it’s not really working well yet to let people know about the book. I don’t think it’s really search engine optimized.

Sheila
What will you do to optimize the page for web browsers?

My goal for the webpage was really to just have a space where if someone went to Google and typed in “top 10 Jewish” my page would pop up. I figure I can’t be the only person who has ever typed that in Google.  I included some of what I thought would be the most popular lists so if someone typed in, say comedians, actors, food, or holidays they  might get to the page and see a link to buy the book on Amazon.

From what I hear, the best way to boost your Google ranking is to get people to link to you, and for your page to have key words. I don’t think I have any links, so if I wanted to boost my search results, I’d reach out to webpages that are similar and offer a reciprocal link.

I can probably make it more user friendly instead of having just one long page of lists, but I thought that if I had multiple pages of different lists it might cut down on how the main page was ranked on Google.  Right now it doesn’t have a super clean look, but that probably shouldn’t influence how it comes up on Google.  I’ve thought about making a blog of the top 10 Jewish, and updating it every once in a while with a new list or have user contributed lists, that might help if people start linking to it.

Sheila
I think that is a very good idea and would  make your web presence dynamic. Here’s a website you might connect with to let others know about your book’s availability: Jew-ish.com.

And perhaps you can guest blog–offer one of your lists on other sites that are about being Jewish.

There are Facebook Groups on Being Jewish, too. Jewish Federation chapters have websites that might be of interest to you for spreading word about your book.  I think you might start a new list: Top 10 Websites for Jewish Information — and use it to publicize your book.

Speaking of spreading word, might you provide our readers here with one of your lists so they can see more of the flavor of your thinking and effective way of sharing information?

Adam
Here’s a list of the Top 10 Jewish T.V. Characters from the book

1. Fran Fine (The Nanny)
2. Grace Adler (Will & Grace)
3. Rachel Berry (Glee)
4. Charlotte York-Goldenblatt (Sex and the City)
5. Herschel Kurstofsky (Krusty the Clown in the Simpsons)
6. Ross and Monica Geller (Friends)
7. Kyle Broflovsky (South Park)
8. David Silver and Andrea Zuckerman (Beverly Hills 90210)
9. Ari Gold (Entourage)
10. Lillith Sternin (Cheers/Frasier)

I did put in a footnote because I did not put in Jerry Seinfeld. Jerry Seinfeld could be on this list, but he was really portraying himself, and not so much of a “character.”  Don’t worry, Jerry is still included on the lists of Top 10 Jewish Comedians, the Top 10 Most “Jewishy” Celebrities, and Top 10 Jewish Actors Born in the 1950s.

Now people can fight me on these, but I ranked this list based on the factors of 1) How memorable the show was to a broad audience 2) How memorable the character was, 3) if people automatically associated this character with being Jewish, and 4) How much “Jewishness” the character portrayed on the show.  Acting ability actually wasn’t much of a consideration.  I also did Top 10 Jewish Actors and Actresses of various decades in separate lists.

Sheila
Fun! Oh, by the way, I went to Amazon and posted a review of your book. I wish I could have been clever and made it in a “top ten” reasons to love it form but I just thought of that now. Asking people to post reviews on Amazon is a good way of helping the advertising the book. Also, you can create an author page on Amazon and link that to your webpage and vice versa.

Adam
Thanks for the review. I have an author page, but I don’t think I put a link to my other page on it.

Sheila
Do put a link in. Online, as you’ve noted, links beget links!

Thank you for this interview about your experience with the book.  And a happy Hanukkah (the top way to spell it according to your list “Top 10 Ways to Spell (C)han(n)uk(k)a(ha)”) to you. It is, as you say in your list of top 10 Jewish holidays, a minor one religiously speaking, but in our mainstream culture, it’s been elevated due to its proximity to Christmas.  And it is coming up “early” this year, December 8th.

Top ten gifts received on Chanukah over the years? Want to do a list?

Adam
Top 10 Gifts Jewish Kids Receive on Hanukkah

1. Hanukkah Gelt (a few pieces of chocolate)
2. A quarter from Grandma and Grandpa
3. Socks
4. Underwear
5. Jacket
6. Backpack
7. Pajamas
8. Dreidle
9. Books
10. Your own menorah

Sheila
Okay, I’d “fight” you on a few, but I love your list. It makes me remember my childhood. Thanks again for the book, the interview and the fun of thinking about creating ranked  lists for organizing information. I like the way that ties in so well with your initial idea that a book you’d write would have to be one about a subject you know well.

And so I ask Writing It Real members to think about what they know a lot about. What lists might be helpful for imparting knowledge to others? A personal essay, an e-book, or a full-length book might result from this thinking.