Publishing Business Model Choices

As some of my readers enjoy telling me, I don't do a very good job maximizing the potential of my publishing business. I'm quick to admit that the main flaw in my business model for publishing is me. I just don't have the fire in the belly that I had ten or twenty years ago, and the idea of taking on a lot of potential aggravation just to make more money isn't compelling. But in the next couple weeks I'll be wrapping up all of my open projects (with the exception of house/property hunting), so I thought I'd write down some of those business model criticisms and give them some thought.

#1 You should publish other authors books

Strangely enough, I get this one a lot from unpublished authors:-) But the point is taken, especially given the breadth of my website platform, I could publish non-fiction books in a number of areas and have a running start on marketing. I think my main objection at this point is that publishing other author's books would end up eating all of my energy, if not all of my time. If I was trying to build a publishing business with the eventual goal of selling it, that might make sense, but I don't think that's my goal.

#2 You should sell other publishers books

It's true that with the exception of a few Associates links, I make no attempt to leverage my business model to sell other books. In fact, I've never followed up with buyers of my previous books to tell them when a new book is released, much less promoting other publisher's books to them. My publishing business is based on passive marketing because I've never cared for businesses that pursue their customers and try to milk them of every last penny. But it is certainly true that my title list isn't comprehensive in any way, and that if I could find high quality synergistic titles, it would be a benefit to my customers. But I'm not looking for more customer service or fulfillment issues at the moment.

#3 You should offer consulting services

The general rule in consulting is that the customer is buying the consultant's time, not paying for results. I'm a results oriented person, and I hate selling my time, so it's a bad match. The problem with selling results as a business model is that forces the consultant to only accept customers who are certain to be successful, otherwise the consultant will be working for free. Since most of the people who want to hire me as a publishing consultant are engaged in projects that have a low likelihood of commercial success, I'd have to charge them an hourly rate that I don't believe they'd ever earn back in sales. The other problem is that the results depend far more on the client than on the consultant.

#4 You should become a publishing coach, like Dan Poynter

Despite all the little publishing lectures I've been putting out on video, I don't see myself ever getting on the speaker circuit for self publishers, or any other kind of publishers. I really have the wrong attitude to be an inspirational speaker. I don't believe that most people will succeed in publishing or any other business for that matter unless they happen to be at the right point in life to do so. The closest I've come to wanting to get involved in working directly with new publishers is the occasional fantasy about setting up a retreat center. I think with the right staff and pre-screened participants, a three or four day retreat would be enough to get most authors a good start for their own publishing company. The primary aim would be to teach marketing and market research (ie, choosing titles that have a chance) but a couple sessions on book design a couple sessions on website design would be useful. But it's not something I'd ever try by starting at zero and making a big investment of time and money, I'd have to grow it from something much more modest.

More On Selling Ebooks

Last Friday I expanded my "new" ebook business by publishing updated versions of two of my existing titles. This includes a PDF version of Print-on-Demand Book Publishing for $9.95, but it's absolutely not worth getting if you already own the paperback. The updates are very minor and consist largely of removing descriptive material about Internet sites and functions that are no longer available.

My main complaint about e-junkie fulfillment to date remains the process of e-mailing a download link to the customer rather than presenting one on screen. I've looked at a half dozen ebook selling sites by now, and they all use e-mail to send a download link to the customer. Bryan Rosner suggested Yahoo! stores on my last ebook sales post, but I can't see setting up yet another new account and paying their fees while still using PayPal as the processor.

What I'm really looking for is an ebook download site that acts as the merchant processor and provides an immediate download at the time of the transaction rather than e-mailing a link. Otherwise, I'll just stay with e-junkie for the time being and send out reminder e-mails to anybody who pays for an e-book and doesn't download it. If a few days go by without a download, I'll just issue a refund, since I'm in business to sell ebooks, not to collect payments from people who don't quite get the process.

I'm reminded of an incident from four or five years ago when I received an angry e-mail from some guy who'd purchased an ebook about PC hardware and was threatening to sue me, since he felt it was a waste of $6.00. The only problem was that I wasn't selling any ebooks at the time, so after exchanging a couple e-mails, it sounded like somebody had stolen material from my website and was selling it as an ebook. When I looked into it further, it turned out that nobody had stolen anything, the ebook he'd purchased simply contained a link to my site which had led this individual to believe I must have been involved. My sympathy at this point shifted to the guy who was selling the ebook, because even though he'd refunded the $6.00, the loopy buyer was threatening to sue him for fraud. I'm not going to pass judgment on the ebook he was selling, but I believe he quit the ebook business because he didn't feel it was worth the aggravation.

It's important for people new to small business to unlearn the old adage about the customer always being right. Sometimes the customer is wrong and sometimes the customer is a lunatic. My customer service ends at issuing refunds I think a refund is in order. I've always suspected the instant gratification element of ebooks leads customers to make more impulse buys, which can lead to buyer's regret. But it's no longer clear to me that impulse buying is a major factor in selling ebooks, especially after I checked my e-mail this morning and saw that somebody had purchased an ebook from me using an e-check. Since the download isn't available until the e-check clears, the buyer will wait longer to read the book than if it had been ordered as a paperback with 2nd day shipping!

Interview with Dave Taylor, Information Entrepreneur

What led you to make the leap from the "safe" world of trade authoring to your current role as a leading information entrepreneur?

I think it was more of an evolutionary ooze than a thoughtful leap, actually. :-) I've always been interested in online information dissemination and even back in the 1980's I was working with email systems and online conferencing systems. In my first book I included an email address, and by my second or third book I was including a Web site address. I admit, those first few Web sites were crude, but that was the state of the art back then, and it didn't take long for me to be writing books about HTML and web page design myself, so at that point my skills increased significantly in terms of what I could accomplish.

Nonetheless, even as recently as 3-4 years ago, I looked at book publishing as a safety net for my career: if things were moving really slowly, I could still make a buck writing a few books in a year. Then one day an entrepreneurial colleague told me about Google AdSense and commented that with the traffic to my Web site, I could probably make a few dollars that way, without having to "do" anything. I was hooked.

Then I remember the glorious month when my Google AdSense check was more than my hosting bill for my site and online connectivity. Suddenly it was as if a light bulb had lit over my head: my online activity could be a profit center, not a cost center! (I have an MBA, I think in business jargon) Then I really started looking at the online world and online publishing in earnest. A few months later, my Google check paid my mortgage and I realized that there was more profit in writing 100,000 words and putting them online with ad revenue than in selling that same tome to a publisher and hoping that it'll find sufficient market traction that I'd make any money at all
beyond the initial advance.

You're the author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Growing Your Business with Google. Does Google send the majority of the over 1 million visitors a month to AskDaveTaylor.com, or do you rely on a subscription/syndication model?

I am a strong proponent of the "Long Tail" idea, where there's more value in providing information that eschews the "top ten" topics in a given marketplace but covers everything else. For example, there aren't many books on Windows XP coming out nowadays, but if you look at the statistics, there are still a TON of people using it. That's a long tail opportunity.

The implication of this is that rather than have thousands of devoted readers (the magazine model) I really am more of an online resource, a reference work where people can find what they need when they need it, but are otherwise not likely to stay engaged in the long term. It's like a car mechanic: you don't want to be friends with them and see them every month, but when something's wrong, you know where to go.

What I'm leading to is that, yes, Google and other search engines account for the lion's share of my monthly traffic. I do have quite a few repeat visitors, subscribers to my email newsletter and RSS feed, etc., that amount to approximately 15% of my 1.2 million unique visitors/month. That's not bad if you do the math, it's 180,000 monthly readers.

Alexa used to show five years of history for websites, and I used to send people to graph your site against my older site to show how rapidly an informative website can go from new to successful. Can you give point to a few milestones from your site's early history that explain it's meteoric rise?

Gosh, I wish I could, because it'd help me duplicate it! I think it's really just been about plugging away and trying to stay on top of the major technical challenges in the community. For example, two years ago I was writing about how to use Firefox, and now I write about Facebook IM and Twitter configuration issues.

Are you working on any books currently, and given your Internet platform, do you consider starting your own publishing company or would you just leverage your presence for a larger advance?

Yes, but before I talk about that, I want to say that there have always been two different types of books in the trade space, though I don't know that most people acknowledge it. They are user guides/tutorials and reference works. The former is "how to" or a Dummies guide, while the latter is a dictionary. This is an important differentiation because I believe that the rise of the Web has directly led to the demise of the latter category. It's far, far faster for me to look up a word online than to pull out a dictionary, and as Web access becomes more and more pervasive (e.g.,cellphones and smart phones, pervasive wifi, etc) I think it's folly to try and publish anything that's not a tutorial or learning guide.

So the book I'm working on is actually a sequel to my popular "Wicked Cool Shell Scripts" (NoStarch Press) and is going to be based on a compilation of my shell script programming column in Linux Journal. No announced release date, but I view it as repurposing existing material in a form that'll make it more useful, more interesting and certainly more educational.

Will it be a successful book? It's so hard to say. Publishing's always been about guessing, dice rolls, the toss of a dart, the peek into a crystal ball, but I think one realization that major publishers now have is that successful books are now more driven by personality or community. That's why bloggers writing books is currently such a fad.

In terms of my own publishing company, well, I think I already have that with my Web sites and the frequent guest contributions I publish.