Publishing is a business, or at least, that's always been the theme of this blog. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to self publish that don't involve a profit motive, but you don't need my advice on how to write a check. This post comes as the result of some recent news items and articles, not my usual fodder, so we'll dispose of them as quickly as possible. But let's start with new video about growing your website:
First, I read an article in one of the publishing newsletters that an organization sends me for free (I assume they print extra) advising readers to beware of online experts. That's an old subject with me, how he stretched it for a magazine article I'm unsure, but the ironic thing is I had no idea who the writer was or what he had done to make him an expert on online experts. Perhaps the only segment of the U.S. manufacturing industry to show stellar growth in recent decades is the manufacturing of experts, and I'm personally in favor of exporting the ones I don't agree with to help with the balance of trade.
Second, I read an article about the value of different types of web traffic in one of the glossy publisher magazines. The author posited that the best traffic to get is direct traffic (bookmarks, people remembering your website name and typing it in the browser), followed by referrals from other sites (links) with visitors from search coming in last. I believe that author had plenty of experience, but I also believe he is exactly wrong when it comes to publisher websites.
There are several problems with direct traffic, not the least of which is the number of false positives if you go by server statistics packages, but the primary problem being that direct traffic amounts to regular visitors to your site. If you're running a newspaper, maybe that's what you're after, but if you're selling books, how many times do you think you can sell the same person the same book? You can go nuts building visitor loyalty with all sorts of services and gimmicks, but for my money, you're buying friends rather than converting strangers.
Traffic from referral links remains the middle ground with us both. Links can bring in high quality visitors, and some of them stay on my site quite a while. But it can also bring visitors who just like clicking on links and cruising around the web, as opposed to people seeking something specific. While search delivers all sorts of people, many whom have been misaddressed and punch out instantly, search also delivers the highest proportion of people who are looking for an answer to a question. Some sites are 100% focused on trying to sell answers, my own philosophy has always been to give away as many answers as I can for free and hope that interests visitors in a book that may answers to questions they haven't thought of asking yet. I'm not claiming that my soft sell is the most efficient way to run a publishing website, but it works for me.
The final news item was a Friday story in the WSJ announcing that Microsoft had purchased Greenfield Online for just under $500 million. The value of Greenfield is a comparison shopping site they own in Europe that attracts 26.5 million visitors a month, though it isn't entirely clear if that's unique visitors or includes return visits. It comes to $18.34 per visitor per month, and if I used that math to value the equity in my FonerBooks website, it would be worth several million dollars. I'm waiting for offers:-)
The point being, even if millions aren't within your grasp or mine, a popular website can build serious equity value over time, probably more than the backlist for a small or medium sized publisher. And you would think that websites created by publishing experts would build great equity for their owners over time. So why do you regularly see publishing pundits closing down or abandoning their blogs and moving on with their lives? I think there are two reasons: the failure to build website equity and the passing of missionary zeal. Giving myself and fellow bloggers the benefit of the doubt, I think the passing of missionary zeal is the larger motivation in the shuttering of top publishing blogs and websites. For better or for worse, I'm not entirely out of zeal yet, though I'm going to try to stick with my reduced posting frequency going forward.
But I think the failure to build website equity is real reason for many, in terms of both long term value and monetization through book sales or advertising. Now replace the word "equity" with "traffic" and you'll reach the crux of the matter. Publishing blogs and publisher self-help sites just don't get much traffic. I spent a half hour or so looking at Quantcast estimates of traffic to various publishing blogs and websites (try it, it's fun), and realized that none of the sites I considered great successes had a lot of traffic. Some of the slickest blogs, with professional artwork and multiple bloggers barely had enough visitors to even show up on the radar of Quantcast, Google Trends (Websites tab) or the improved Alexa, and had very limited subscription bases as well. I'm not naming any of them here because they may prefer not to have the harsh realities of math messing up their good feelings about their work. My own feelings were inured a long time ago when I realized that my last couple years of blogging about self publishing haven't done much of anything to add to my daily visitor count, simply spread them out a little more thinly.
Interestingly enough, the publishing related websites that do get a lot of traffic are the ones that sell author services. Some of that traffic is from paid advertising, but a lot of it is from their forums, as they have tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of their own authors signed up. And a lot of that traffic (their best kind) comes from the fact that most writers aren't searching for advice, they're searching for a way to get their book in print quickly. I've never spent time on any of those forums, but it would be hilarious to find an author services company monetizing their forums by selling advertising for other author services companies.
So my advice to new publishers today is to avoid blogging about the publishing process at all costs! No, I'm not worried about the competition, I get plenty of that from my own blog posts of prior years. It's a question of focusing your efforts where you can expect the greatest return. If you're publishing books about publishing, go ahead and blog about it or build a publishing oriented website, but if you're publishing books about anything else, focus your efforts on the subject and not the process of publishing the books. Do your homework with Google Trends (phrases) as to how people really use search engines before you make any final decisions about the focus of your web publishing efforts. And don't let your final decision be the last nail in your website's coffin, a new direction is only a click away.
Interview with Brian Bischof
Interview with Brian Bischof of http://www.CrystalReportsBook.com
You took the traditional path to self publishing, printing books in quantity on offset. How large an initial print run do you go for, and where does that work out in cost?
Since I'm new to self-publishing, I had doubts whether I would sell any books at all. My first print job (Crystal Reports .NET Programming, ISBN 979-0974953655) was for 1,500 copies. When that sold out, I assumed that the book's life was nearing its end and did another 1,500 print job. I keep underestimating the demand and did this a total of five times. The book is now out of print b/c I'm releasing the update in two months.
The problem with using an offset printer is that I pay approximately $4,000 for setup costs and each book is a couple dollars on top of that. When considering the cost per book, you have to take into account that my books are 500-600 pages. Smaller books would be much cheaper to print (but you still have the $4,000 setup charge)
So I threw away a lot of money by doing too many print runs. If I would have anticipated demand properly, I would have done an initial print job of 5,000 copies and then did one more follow up run of 2 or 3 thousand. Someone told me that having too much demand is a good problem to have. I completely agree, but I cringe when I think about how I threw away $12,000 for no reason.
For my latest book (Crystal Reports Encyclopedia Volume 1, ISBN 978-0974953601), I knew to expect decent success, but it is in a much more competitive field now and one author in particular has dominated for the past five years. The odds that this book would be as successful as the previous was pretty slim. I did a print job of 3,000 copies. It's been out for exactly a year now and I sold 2,000 copies. I'll do a follow up print job of 1,500 or 3,000 copies again in a few months and let it fall out of publication. I'll replace it with a new edition early next year and print 5,000 copies.
I was told that my print costs are a bit on the high side and that there are cheaper offset printers that I could use. I agree, but I learned the hard way that you get what you pay for. My first printer had poor binding and I was getting bad reviews that my books were breaking at the spine. My second printer would repeat a block of pages and leave out another block altogether. More complaints and more headaches. I now use Malloy Printing and they have done a stellar job of printing my best quality books with no errors. I occasionally get emails from Indian printers saying that they can substantially reduce my printing costs via outsourcing. I shudder to think how bad this experience could turn out. Paying extra for a quality print job with worth every dollar.
Your cover designs have certainly evolved over the years. How important to you feel covers are, and do you have any suggestion for author/designers.
My first attempts at a cover design were done with MS Word. They were truly laughable. After doing some research on the web, I found www.BookCoverPro.com software which lets you design your own book covers. I downloaded the free trial, really liked it, and bought it for $187. It had built-in templates that made designing the cover a breeze. I was really happy with my cover now. I also found many stock photography websites that had great high-res images that I could buy for less than $5 and get full rights to reprint them. Why spend a thousand dollars for a graphic designer when all these cheap tools are on the web?
When I was finished with the cover design, I sent it to my printer for review. They rejected it because there were problems with the software mixing RGB and CMYK colors together. This was a major problem and I had to quit using BookCoverPro and switch to Photoshop b/c it handles CMYK colors great (of course). Unfortunately, BookCoverPro was so simple and Photoshop is one of the hardest programs I ever learned to use. I spent hours Googling for the smallest tip. It was a huge struggle to re-produce my cover with Photoshop. After everything was finalized, I got an update from BookCoverPro.com that they had fixed all the CMYK bugs and that the software was compatible with offset printers now. Great. After struggling through Photoshop and pulling my hair out, I highly recommend BookCoverPro as the easiest way to create professional covers.
A couple tips I have for cover design:
First, don't use competing colors. I thought that my first cover looked pretty good, but after it was printed I realized that the spine had black text on a dark blue background. It looks good on my computer monitor, but on the bookstore shelves I could barely read the book's title. For the second printing I switched the text to yellow so that it really stands out. Be certain that the color scheme of your background image lets the text be clearly read.
Second, use your software to see what the image looks like as a thumbnail. Many people buy books from Amazon and they will only see your book cover as a thumbnail on Amazon's site. Make sure that the title is big enough to read when the cover size is shrunk down to a 1 inch square.
The traditional self publish route requires a distribution deal and warehousing. Can you describe your current setup and how you arrived at it?
I originally sold all my books via Amazon's Advantage program. I was happy to have a way to sell my books, but it was frustrating at the same time. Amazon typically sells books at a 20-30% discount, but this isn't available for authors in the Advantage program. I had to price my books cheaper than my competitor so that I would hit a similar price point without the discount. This cost me a lot of money. Secondly, they are very slow about requesting new orders and my book was consistently out of stock. By accident, I discovered that I could send them more books than they ordered and they would still take them. So I just always shipped more than they wanted and I didn't have any more stocking issues.
I got really tired of going to the post-office every few days and I searched for a distributor. I found out that distributors will only work with people who have a solid sales record. For new authors, this means that you have to start out by selling the books yourself and if you can rank in the top 10,000 on Amazon then they will take you. I don't know if this is a hard and fast rule with every distributor, but it was what I was told at the time.
My distributor is Independent Publishers Group (www.ipgbook.com) because one of their sales teams is focused on the technical book market. They warehouse all my books in Chicago and get them distributed to book stores internationally. They also take care of marketing my books to major chains and at book shows worldwide. They charge 28% of Net. Oh yeah - using them also gets me the standard discount at Amazon.com and I can price my books higher and still be competitive. This helps offset their 28% fee.
I've been very happy with IPG. The only problem I have is that they have very strict requirements for filing new titles and release dates into their system almost nine months in advance (so they can market them for the next year). Personally, I have no idea when I'm going to publish my next book and I have to make all this up. Thus, I never meet any of my publishing deadlines and I keep making changes to the book info. Definitely not good.
The dream of all website owners is recurring revenue, and you're having success publishing some of your work in serial form on a subscription blog. What trade-offs have you encountered in going this route, and do you see it supplanting your paper book sales as a income source in the future?
The hardest part of creating an online membership site for my books was figuring out how to get my existing books onto the web. I have over 1,000 pages in MS Word that I need to convert. I could export them to HTML, but I don't like plain HTML pages. I like the blog format because it gives me a chance to have a one-on-one conversation with my members. They can post comments on each part of the book and I can respond. Having this two-way interaction will be key for keeping customer satisfaction high and getting them to renew their subscription. I looked all over the web for a way to convert Word to WordPress (the blog software). There are a few tools out there, but they are terrible. They lose all your formatting and don't have a way to split a long chapter into multiple blog posts. This was critical for me. Since I'm a geek who writes programming books, I decided to build my own converter. My tool works great and allows me to keep my book in MS Word format and quickly export new content to WordPress. I even debate whether I should sell this tool, but I'm behind on so many projects that I can't imagine adding another one to my plate.
Having my books online via a subscription model has some major benefits. First, of course, is that I make money every month for almost no money out of my pocket besides the basic web hosting fees. You can never go out of stock on the web! Secondly, it opens my market to the entire world because the paperback version of my book isn't available in every country.
The software I use to handle memberships is www.aMember.com and I use PayPal to handle the credit card transactions. I spent almost $200 to buy the aMember software and it was money well spent. It makes managing members a piece of cake and they installed the software on my server for me. Sweet! Unfortunately, the built-in reports are terrible. Some of the data isn't accurate and some of the stats just don't make any sense to me (and I build reports for a living). Bad reports aside, I still recommend the software. It doesn't have much competition in this area and there are a ton of features that makes it easy to have a membership site.
I've been disappointed with PayPal for processing my credit card transactions. I found out that many people just don't like paying via PayPal. I have no idea why because you don't need a PayPal membership to complete a transaction. People have emailed me saying that they are simply against using PayPal (for reasons beyond me). When people see the PayPal logo on my site they leave. I'm now looking at replacing PayPal with using CCBill.com. They work internationally and they also integrate with the aMember software I use. They charge 14% per transaction (ouch!), but they make it easy to process credit cards and they support recurring charges. Authorize.net looks pretty good, but they don't support recurring transactions and this is key to having long-term revenues. If using CCBill increases my memberships by 30%, then this will more than justify the 14% transaction charge.
Another downfall of having my book on the web is that there is no index. A great technical book has to have an equally great index b/c you need to look things up quickly. On my subscription site I don't have an index. I could add this feature to my converter tool, but it would be an enormous amount of work to perfect it. The blog does have a search feature, but this just doesn't compare to having a well prepared index. So I'm very disappointed that I can't give people an index to make my site easier to use.
I think that putting my books on the web in a blog format is a fantastic way to generate more income from my books. Since I've only had the membership site up for four months, I still have a lot to learn about my users as well as the options available to me. But, it's an exciting process!
You took the traditional path to self publishing, printing books in quantity on offset. How large an initial print run do you go for, and where does that work out in cost?
Since I'm new to self-publishing, I had doubts whether I would sell any books at all. My first print job (Crystal Reports .NET Programming, ISBN 979-0974953655) was for 1,500 copies. When that sold out, I assumed that the book's life was nearing its end and did another 1,500 print job. I keep underestimating the demand and did this a total of five times. The book is now out of print b/c I'm releasing the update in two months.
The problem with using an offset printer is that I pay approximately $4,000 for setup costs and each book is a couple dollars on top of that. When considering the cost per book, you have to take into account that my books are 500-600 pages. Smaller books would be much cheaper to print (but you still have the $4,000 setup charge)
So I threw away a lot of money by doing too many print runs. If I would have anticipated demand properly, I would have done an initial print job of 5,000 copies and then did one more follow up run of 2 or 3 thousand. Someone told me that having too much demand is a good problem to have. I completely agree, but I cringe when I think about how I threw away $12,000 for no reason.
For my latest book (Crystal Reports Encyclopedia Volume 1, ISBN 978-0974953601), I knew to expect decent success, but it is in a much more competitive field now and one author in particular has dominated for the past five years. The odds that this book would be as successful as the previous was pretty slim. I did a print job of 3,000 copies. It's been out for exactly a year now and I sold 2,000 copies. I'll do a follow up print job of 1,500 or 3,000 copies again in a few months and let it fall out of publication. I'll replace it with a new edition early next year and print 5,000 copies.
I was told that my print costs are a bit on the high side and that there are cheaper offset printers that I could use. I agree, but I learned the hard way that you get what you pay for. My first printer had poor binding and I was getting bad reviews that my books were breaking at the spine. My second printer would repeat a block of pages and leave out another block altogether. More complaints and more headaches. I now use Malloy Printing and they have done a stellar job of printing my best quality books with no errors. I occasionally get emails from Indian printers saying that they can substantially reduce my printing costs via outsourcing. I shudder to think how bad this experience could turn out. Paying extra for a quality print job with worth every dollar.
Your cover designs have certainly evolved over the years. How important to you feel covers are, and do you have any suggestion for author/designers.
My first attempts at a cover design were done with MS Word. They were truly laughable. After doing some research on the web, I found www.BookCoverPro.com software which lets you design your own book covers. I downloaded the free trial, really liked it, and bought it for $187. It had built-in templates that made designing the cover a breeze. I was really happy with my cover now. I also found many stock photography websites that had great high-res images that I could buy for less than $5 and get full rights to reprint them. Why spend a thousand dollars for a graphic designer when all these cheap tools are on the web?
When I was finished with the cover design, I sent it to my printer for review. They rejected it because there were problems with the software mixing RGB and CMYK colors together. This was a major problem and I had to quit using BookCoverPro and switch to Photoshop b/c it handles CMYK colors great (of course). Unfortunately, BookCoverPro was so simple and Photoshop is one of the hardest programs I ever learned to use. I spent hours Googling for the smallest tip. It was a huge struggle to re-produce my cover with Photoshop. After everything was finalized, I got an update from BookCoverPro.com that they had fixed all the CMYK bugs and that the software was compatible with offset printers now. Great. After struggling through Photoshop and pulling my hair out, I highly recommend BookCoverPro as the easiest way to create professional covers.
A couple tips I have for cover design:
First, don't use competing colors. I thought that my first cover looked pretty good, but after it was printed I realized that the spine had black text on a dark blue background. It looks good on my computer monitor, but on the bookstore shelves I could barely read the book's title. For the second printing I switched the text to yellow so that it really stands out. Be certain that the color scheme of your background image lets the text be clearly read.
Second, use your software to see what the image looks like as a thumbnail. Many people buy books from Amazon and they will only see your book cover as a thumbnail on Amazon's site. Make sure that the title is big enough to read when the cover size is shrunk down to a 1 inch square.
The traditional self publish route requires a distribution deal and warehousing. Can you describe your current setup and how you arrived at it?
I originally sold all my books via Amazon's Advantage program. I was happy to have a way to sell my books, but it was frustrating at the same time. Amazon typically sells books at a 20-30% discount, but this isn't available for authors in the Advantage program. I had to price my books cheaper than my competitor so that I would hit a similar price point without the discount. This cost me a lot of money. Secondly, they are very slow about requesting new orders and my book was consistently out of stock. By accident, I discovered that I could send them more books than they ordered and they would still take them. So I just always shipped more than they wanted and I didn't have any more stocking issues.
I got really tired of going to the post-office every few days and I searched for a distributor. I found out that distributors will only work with people who have a solid sales record. For new authors, this means that you have to start out by selling the books yourself and if you can rank in the top 10,000 on Amazon then they will take you. I don't know if this is a hard and fast rule with every distributor, but it was what I was told at the time.
My distributor is Independent Publishers Group (www.ipgbook.com) because one of their sales teams is focused on the technical book market. They warehouse all my books in Chicago and get them distributed to book stores internationally. They also take care of marketing my books to major chains and at book shows worldwide. They charge 28% of Net. Oh yeah - using them also gets me the standard discount at Amazon.com and I can price my books higher and still be competitive. This helps offset their 28% fee.
I've been very happy with IPG. The only problem I have is that they have very strict requirements for filing new titles and release dates into their system almost nine months in advance (so they can market them for the next year). Personally, I have no idea when I'm going to publish my next book and I have to make all this up. Thus, I never meet any of my publishing deadlines and I keep making changes to the book info. Definitely not good.
The dream of all website owners is recurring revenue, and you're having success publishing some of your work in serial form on a subscription blog. What trade-offs have you encountered in going this route, and do you see it supplanting your paper book sales as a income source in the future?
The hardest part of creating an online membership site for my books was figuring out how to get my existing books onto the web. I have over 1,000 pages in MS Word that I need to convert. I could export them to HTML, but I don't like plain HTML pages. I like the blog format because it gives me a chance to have a one-on-one conversation with my members. They can post comments on each part of the book and I can respond. Having this two-way interaction will be key for keeping customer satisfaction high and getting them to renew their subscription. I looked all over the web for a way to convert Word to WordPress (the blog software). There are a few tools out there, but they are terrible. They lose all your formatting and don't have a way to split a long chapter into multiple blog posts. This was critical for me. Since I'm a geek who writes programming books, I decided to build my own converter. My tool works great and allows me to keep my book in MS Word format and quickly export new content to WordPress. I even debate whether I should sell this tool, but I'm behind on so many projects that I can't imagine adding another one to my plate.
Having my books online via a subscription model has some major benefits. First, of course, is that I make money every month for almost no money out of my pocket besides the basic web hosting fees. You can never go out of stock on the web! Secondly, it opens my market to the entire world because the paperback version of my book isn't available in every country.
The software I use to handle memberships is www.aMember.com and I use PayPal to handle the credit card transactions. I spent almost $200 to buy the aMember software and it was money well spent. It makes managing members a piece of cake and they installed the software on my server for me. Sweet! Unfortunately, the built-in reports are terrible. Some of the data isn't accurate and some of the stats just don't make any sense to me (and I build reports for a living). Bad reports aside, I still recommend the software. It doesn't have much competition in this area and there are a ton of features that makes it easy to have a membership site.
I've been disappointed with PayPal for processing my credit card transactions. I found out that many people just don't like paying via PayPal. I have no idea why because you don't need a PayPal membership to complete a transaction. People have emailed me saying that they are simply against using PayPal (for reasons beyond me). When people see the PayPal logo on my site they leave. I'm now looking at replacing PayPal with using CCBill.com. They work internationally and they also integrate with the aMember software I use. They charge 14% per transaction (ouch!), but they make it easy to process credit cards and they support recurring charges. Authorize.net looks pretty good, but they don't support recurring transactions and this is key to having long-term revenues. If using CCBill increases my memberships by 30%, then this will more than justify the 14% transaction charge.
Another downfall of having my book on the web is that there is no index. A great technical book has to have an equally great index b/c you need to look things up quickly. On my subscription site I don't have an index. I could add this feature to my converter tool, but it would be an enormous amount of work to perfect it. The blog does have a search feature, but this just doesn't compare to having a well prepared index. So I'm very disappointed that I can't give people an index to make my site easier to use.
I think that putting my books on the web in a blog format is a fantastic way to generate more income from my books. Since I've only had the membership site up for four months, I still have a lot to learn about my users as well as the options available to me. But, it's an exciting process!
Publishing A New Website
I've finally launched a new website, and trying to build it up will be my main occupation for the next three months or until I say "Uncle." While it will be a self publishing website, in the sense that I'll be creating and publishing content, it will also include an element of Web 2.0 social networking, without the "social" part. I'm doing this through a blog that will include embedded YouTube videos of various do-it-yourself repairs and projects, along with my thoughts on the subject. While the blog won't be the main focus of the website (I hope), I'm interested in seeing how a text and video based blog on a wide variety of topics fairs for visitors.
The primary goal of the new website, ifitjams.com, will be to promote my interpretation of back-to-basics, though many might see it more as going to ground. For years I've been considering a series of books about financial basics for a future where credit will (hopefully) be limited, and where American may rediscover the old Yankee ethic of using and maintaining what you have until you can't patch it up anymore. While there are a huge number of DIY (Do It Yourself) websites in existence, their focus is largely on restoration or improved performance, rather than cobbling things up to get another six months of service. And when you take into account the expense of fixing something "the right way" it's often difficult to justify the cost versus replacing it with something new.
I've been preaching at both authors and publishers for nearly a decade that starting a website is the most important thing they can do to to get their work in front of the public. But I'm often met with the argument that it's too late, that the Internet is already taken, that launching a site in the Web 2.0 era requires tens of thousands of dollars of investment just in software infrastructure and basic programming. Building a dazzling website with all the modern bells and whistles has never been where I advised publishers to spend their time, and it's sure not on my to-do list. I created the skeleton for my new website in four or five hours, including some original starter content (a flowchart for diagnosing automotive ticking noises), the first few blog posts, and a couple of short videos.
And it's ugly. One of my first visitors pointed out that I had a typo in the newly designed site logo, and that the pages were too wide for some computer monitors. I fixed the logo but only made a minor tweak to the page width issue, I just don't want to get bogged down in aesthetics or even usability issues at this point. My focus will be on developing my own unique content, a mix of text, photographs and videos, that will be compelling enough to the core audience that they will be willing to forgive glitches in the presentation. If the site is successful on those terms, I may well go back and make a major redesign effort based on feedback, but WITHOUT COMPELLING CONTENT, THERE'S NO REASON TO BOTHER.
I didn't hold any staff meetings before publishing the new website, I didn't create a business plan, and I don't have a set budget. The first order of business will be renting a garage or comparable workspace to start shooting videos of various backyard mechanic repairs of my project car and whatever else I can find that needs fixing. Now this is the important part. After a couple months, I'll take a serious look at what's working in terms of drawing visitors and what's not working. Here's where a well founded start-up or a corporation with a business plan would congratulate themselves over ideas that were working and pour their resources into fixing the pages that weren't living up to expectations. And here's where I'll walk away from the ipages that aren't doing well and focus my energy on the efforts that are proven to work, and explore new ideas.
That's one of the things that the Internet has actually changed in the world - how people consume information and entertainment. Telling people what they want and how they want it hasn't proven to be a useful business model on the Internet. You have to respond to the market, and the only way to do that is to get out in front of the market and to see what happens. Don't waste your time and resources trying to launch the perfect website, it's not a book. The important thing is to get started, and as with my recent return to the ebook market, I'll be reporting about the progress of the new website on this blog. The future of self publishing is going the way of multi-media, and when it comes to Do-It-Yourself subjects, I won't be surprised if Internet video entirely supplants most books.
The primary goal of the new website, ifitjams.com, will be to promote my interpretation of back-to-basics, though many might see it more as going to ground. For years I've been considering a series of books about financial basics for a future where credit will (hopefully) be limited, and where American may rediscover the old Yankee ethic of using and maintaining what you have until you can't patch it up anymore. While there are a huge number of DIY (Do It Yourself) websites in existence, their focus is largely on restoration or improved performance, rather than cobbling things up to get another six months of service. And when you take into account the expense of fixing something "the right way" it's often difficult to justify the cost versus replacing it with something new.
I've been preaching at both authors and publishers for nearly a decade that starting a website is the most important thing they can do to to get their work in front of the public. But I'm often met with the argument that it's too late, that the Internet is already taken, that launching a site in the Web 2.0 era requires tens of thousands of dollars of investment just in software infrastructure and basic programming. Building a dazzling website with all the modern bells and whistles has never been where I advised publishers to spend their time, and it's sure not on my to-do list. I created the skeleton for my new website in four or five hours, including some original starter content (a flowchart for diagnosing automotive ticking noises), the first few blog posts, and a couple of short videos.
And it's ugly. One of my first visitors pointed out that I had a typo in the newly designed site logo, and that the pages were too wide for some computer monitors. I fixed the logo but only made a minor tweak to the page width issue, I just don't want to get bogged down in aesthetics or even usability issues at this point. My focus will be on developing my own unique content, a mix of text, photographs and videos, that will be compelling enough to the core audience that they will be willing to forgive glitches in the presentation. If the site is successful on those terms, I may well go back and make a major redesign effort based on feedback, but WITHOUT COMPELLING CONTENT, THERE'S NO REASON TO BOTHER.
I didn't hold any staff meetings before publishing the new website, I didn't create a business plan, and I don't have a set budget. The first order of business will be renting a garage or comparable workspace to start shooting videos of various backyard mechanic repairs of my project car and whatever else I can find that needs fixing. Now this is the important part. After a couple months, I'll take a serious look at what's working in terms of drawing visitors and what's not working. Here's where a well founded start-up or a corporation with a business plan would congratulate themselves over ideas that were working and pour their resources into fixing the pages that weren't living up to expectations. And here's where I'll walk away from the ipages that aren't doing well and focus my energy on the efforts that are proven to work, and explore new ideas.
That's one of the things that the Internet has actually changed in the world - how people consume information and entertainment. Telling people what they want and how they want it hasn't proven to be a useful business model on the Internet. You have to respond to the market, and the only way to do that is to get out in front of the market and to see what happens. Don't waste your time and resources trying to launch the perfect website, it's not a book. The important thing is to get started, and as with my recent return to the ebook market, I'll be reporting about the progress of the new website on this blog. The future of self publishing is going the way of multi-media, and when it comes to Do-It-Yourself subjects, I won't be surprised if Internet video entirely supplants most books.