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If a publisher built a website that drew everybody in the world on one day, it would crash. Whether or not it would sell some books for the publisher before crashing depends entirely on why the visitors were arriving. The sell-through for most websites is a closely guarded number because publishers don't want their competition knowing what's hot or learning from the efficiency data for the book selling platform. That's because copying is a time honored tradition in the trade industry. New publishers have trouble building websites that attract any visitors at all, but experienced publishers have trouble building websites that sell books. When you're getting visitors to your website and not selling books, or not selling as many books as you'd like, the tendency is to redesign your order flow or shopping cart to see if a little tweak here or there will double sales. But I've found that online book buyers are willing to jump through modest hoops to buy a book, so a minor tweak in the sales pitch or process will rarely make much difference. The key to a publishing website with good sell-through is attracting the right visitors in the first place and not unselling them once they've arrived.

The graph below shows sales for my latest ebook plotted against the number of visitors per day for an online excerpt from that book. The normal organic traffic for that page, primarily from search engines, has been steady at around a hundred visitors a day for the past six months. But a couple weeks ago, somebody tagged it as a page of interest on StumbleUpon, a sort of social networking or collaborative page ranking service. The problem with visitors from sites like this is that they are almost never looking for the particular book or information that is getting attention, it's more of a passing interest, a sort of internet windows shopping. My websites occasionally get these surges in visitors from casual visitors on a guided tour of some Internet segment, and the sell-through averages out to zero percent.



The page that normally draws a hundred visitors a day started drawing thousands of visitors a day from StumbleUpon alone. On some days, these visitors outstripped the total number of visitors from all other sources to all of the topics on my website. But sales of the ebook actually went down during this period, which can hardly be the fault of window shoppers, since there weren't enough of them to get in the way of the real buyers by crashing the site. What happened in fact is an excellent example of polluted data:-) At the same time that this traffic surge was occurring, the paperback version of the book was released, and on 6/16, I began promoting it on the website. I didn't remove the "buy" links for the ebook, I simply channeled most potential buyers through another page that included information about the paperback. Ebook sales crashed, and after a week I gave up and went back to sending everybody who expressed an interest in the ebook directly to the ebook ordering page. Sales jumped right back to the long term average of between two and three ebooks per day.

Selling visitors on the idea of buying an ebook for instant download anywhere in the world and then distracting them with a more expensive paperback that would take days or weeks to arrive is not a minor tweak to the ordering process. I was literally unselling some visitors who had made up their minds to purchase the ebook. The right visitors are a precious commodity for publishers, which is why it's important that somebody in your publishing company keeps an eye on the server statistics as well as the sell-through for order pages. And don't jump to conclusions based on raw data without understanding the context. If I was a manager running the fonerbooks website and didn't know about the paperback being released and promoted, I would have assumed that casual visitors were somehow depressing sales, rather than just the sell-through. Remember, sell-through depends on the total number of potential buyers, and by including a huge number of window shoppers in the total, the sell-through number is artificially brought low.

The only real measure of how well your website is performing its marketing function in selling your books is to keep an eye on the bottom line. This may be frustrating to webmasters or hired SEO guns who can "prove" to management that the website is humming on all cylinders, but if it's not selling books for the publisher, it's just another expense. I talked about this in a video last winter, which I'll embed here again for anybody who missed it.

Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

Time for another update on my new and revised ebook business. As I reported in an earlier post, my initial problems with customers not seeing the download link on e-junkie and sometimes losing the confirmation e-mail to spam filters was my fault. The fix was letting e-junkie show their "Thank You" page which includes a download link, rather than my own thank you page, which I'd set up years before for selling books direct with PayPal. Since I made the change last month, the sales process has been nearly flawless, I think I've only had to send one follow-up asking why the customer hadn't downloaded the ebook yet.

I just did a quick scan through my e-junkie account reports, and I can already count ebook customers in 18 foreign countries. The list now includes: Japan, Bermuda, Australia (8), Mexico, Sri Lanka, Netherlands (3), Ireland (3), Cyprus, France, United Kingdom (13), Italy, Honduras, New Zealand, Canada, Chile, Brazil, Austria and Saudi Arabia. It seems to me that in my first month selling ebooks, the split between the US and overseas sales was around 50/50. It's now running around 75/25 in favor of the US. I'm not sure what caused the change, perhaps statistical insignificance, perhaps a change in the wording of my sales links.

The business model of publishing ebooks is remarkably similar to publishing print-on-demand books in one obvious way. While publication takes place when the first copy is sold, or made available to potential customers, the publishing process doesn't involve the creation of stock or warehousing. A single electronic copy is all that the publisher need produce, after which the customer copies are generated by electronic reproduction or printed on demand. Since the books I publish are nonfiction how-to books, rather than literary keepsakes, I'm not married to the idea of killing and grinding up trees for the sake of being a book publisher rather than an ebook publisher.

In the case of my latest book, the ebook is priced at $13.95 and the 191 page paperback (8.25" x 11") at $24.95. An attempt to promote the paperback version immediately led to a crash in ebook sales. I only pushed hard for a week, but I easily lost two ebook sales for each paperback sale generated. That doesn't jive well with my previous ebook experience, where the ebook sales and the paperback sales seemed to be tapping two distinct markets. But there are some fundamental differences with this book as compared with my previous ebook releases. First, the ebook and paperback aren't priced the same. Second, the paperback version on Amazon falls just under the free shipping amount, so customers who are initially attracted to Amazon may get halfway through the buying process and then decide to put it off (forever) because of the shipping cost. When I went back to emphasizing the ebook sales over the paperback sales on my website, the ebook sales bounced right back to where they left off. But the relative shortage of paperback sales may also be influenced by the Slow Tail sales cycle, the idea that a good proportion of customers simply take time to make up their minds. Maybe I'll see a handful of paperback sales this week based on last week's promotion.

Another interesting point about ebook sales vs print-on-demand or offset published distribution sales is the additional visibility into the customer base. My print-on-demand books sales are generally more trackable than regular offset printed sales would be, yet I can only estimate where the books are selling by comparing Amazon and BN.com sales ranks with Ingram sales reports. With the ebooks, I know where each and every copy is going and with a little more work, I could determine exactly which page on my website generated each sale. Unless things change, I can heartily recommend e-junkie for publishers looking for a download solution for their ebooks that ties in easily and painlessly with a third party payment system, like PayPal.Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

Passion for a subject is a great reason to write about it and all the reason you should need to launch a website. But if you see writing and publishing as a path to financial independence or a second income, it's important to consider how far you can go before you start the journey. New or planned publishing websites can be categorized by their potential into four loose groups, which I'm labeling: obsession, niche, commercial and the next big thing. Assigning your planned website and book to one of these four categories is tricky, and certainly doesn't guaranty that you'll fail or succeed in your goals, but should help you manage your expectations and investment.



Writing about your obsession serves an end unto itself, but if nobody shares that obsession, it's hard to see how you're going to draw readers. There may be rare, rare cases where your personal attributes or writing are just so superior to the run-of-the-mill that people would sign up in droves to read about your summer watching a snail move down your garden path. Maybe once a month somebody in the world hits it big for a day with the equivalent of snail TV out of the millions who try. If you search the web for the subject that you're writing about, and the most popular sites related to that subject don't show a dozen incoming links, it's the opposite of popular.

Niche subjects are those that draw enough interest to support a couple of titles on Amazon, but which don't draw tens of thousands of visitors a day as websites. A small niche site may draw a hundred or so visitors a day, and if the site is compelling and the subject is commercial, can help a publisher sell a couple books a day. But niche subjects are also tricky, as a topic that can draw serious traffic on a website may fail to convert into significant book sales due to the subject or reader demographics. Niche books work well when the subject is perceived as having depth, as being worthy of purchasing a book. But take a niche subject like airport parking options. It might work great as a website, drawing people from all over the country or the world checking the parking situation at their departure airport, but a very limited audience would be willing to buy a reference book on the subject.

Commercial websites for publishers are those that can draw enough visitors that they create their own business opportunity. If you have a very popular website, you can sell advertising, sell merchandise, even sell subscriptions to walled-off resources. You don't need to bring out a book to monetize your web publishing efforts, and in some cases, that book would have very little chance of selling. Any site that shows up in the top 10,000 on Alexa or Quantcast, or draws 10,000 visitors a day from Google, can usually be considered a commercial website.

If I knew how to create a website that would be the next big thing, I'd be working on that rather than sticking with this self publishing blog, which is more of an obsession than anything else. Creating a website that will draw hundreds of thousands of visitors a day has more to do with knowing people than with knowing the web. My suggestions about using the available tools to estimate the potential for a website just don't apply to the next big thing, which has no related sites until after it arrives and establishes itself. But that makes doing your homework all the more important, because if you dream is to create the next big thing, you aren't going to do it with something that a hundred other websites have already worked out.Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

You've been around the publishing block a few times, working with trade publishers, subsidy presses, and an agent. What's got you looking at self publishing for your tenth title?

Control.

Like it or not, once you sign a contract with a trade publisher, you lose control of your own work. Authors-to-be will often naively ask how that can happen; after all, it's your book. Publishers, however, go through the mechanics of getting a book published and will typically have a better idea of what needs to be done in getting the book from manuscript to publication. That's why, at least for your first book, I'd subscribe to the idea of NOT self-publishing. With one book under your belt, and with the publisher sort of holding your hand during the entire process, you have a better idea of what to expect with your subsequent efforts. For a new author, it's a learning experience. Take the disadvantage of not being as savvy as a trade publisher and turn their experiences into a positive publishing event, a learning experience for you.

If you have a couple of books in you and you're still uncomfortable with striking out on your own with book two, I'd hesitantly suggest that you try a subsidy press, something that's usually described incorrectly as a POD publisher...1st Books, something like that. There comes a point however, where you'll begin to see what it really takes to sell a book, whether its through a trade publisher or a subsidy publisher. It's really the efforts of the author---especially aggresive marketing--- that makes the difference. At that point, true self-publication, going through someone like Lightning Source, is the next logical step. You've given up control of your earlier efforts; now it's time to regain control of your efforts and use the learning experiences of your initial fling(s) with a trade publisher or a subsidy press. You could jump right into self-publishing, but if you don't know what you're doing, your not helping yourself by trying to be independent, to have control. You might even hurt your book sales by blindly plodding through the process of getting your book to market.

I think some seasoned authors will never try self-publishing because they get too comfortable with having a literary agent shop their manuscript and become content with the agent getting them a nice little negotiated advance. From then on, the publisher still makes most of the decisions on the book, not the author. If the authors are lucky, they'll also enjoy a brief window of marketing efforts by their publisher and then realize that the acquisition editor or the marketing contact isn't calling like she/he used to. You're on your own.

With self-publication, how-to guide books written by people like Morris Rosenthal, and companies like Lightning Source, experienced authors have the opportunity to make the next logical step in doing a self-publishing approach and regaining control of their efforts.

Did you have a career in brewing before moving to journalism, or did you jump into writing immediately after studying brewing technology?

I studied brewing in order to build a background for the opening of a brewpub. I knew I also needed restaurant experience. After completing my studies and establishing a small deli in Chicago, dealing with 70 hour work weeks, meeting payroll and trying to pay vendor bills on time, I came to the conclusion that it might be cheaper to write about beer rather than making it on a professional level. I had already established industry contacts during my "beer school" tenure so starting out my writing profession, centered around the themes of beer and brewing, seemed to be a logical step.

Your websites, and magazine journalism give you great head start a platform for self publishing, but you've also been successful at getting TV and radio exposure. Have you been able to work out which of these has done the most to help sales of your previous books?

I'm a firm believer in using well-written news releases in generating interest in what I do. I say "news releases" because too many people use press releases to blatantly promote their efforts rather than truly offer the media what they really want---news. I also like to piggyback one book on another work. If customers like one of your books, they might be willing to invest their time and money in something else you've done.

Do you actively seek to opportunities to do interviews or offer expert commentary in broadcast media, or do you just respond to media requests? If you do market yourself to media, do you pay for a listing in one of the subscription resources for speakers and experts, or do you work your contact directly?

I've never paid for publicity. My first book was about Chicago's old brewing industry, taking a wide historical approach of how the brewing industry influenced Chicago's economic, political and social developments. That approach gave me crossover with people interested in Chicago's early history. Since my Chicago history approach was so unique, and because I'm the only one to have written about the brewing industry, I've got a list of future speaking engagements at local libraries, historical societies---including a stint with a traveling program by the Smithsonian---that broadens my appeal beyond people simply interested in the old Chicago brewing industry. I've also done consulting and organized focus groups for advertising agencies that work with breweries that are trying to stimulate sales in the Chicagoland area. Because I also took a historical look at past beer advertising and marketing efforts in Chicago, I was the person to turn to for a historical analysis of what has worked---and not worked---in beer advertising in Chicago. I did a follow-up edition called "BEER: A History of Brewing in Chicago" that has solidified my reputation as the "Chicago beer history guy" and this book is my ticket to local lectures---paid lectures---where I also sell my books.

I also did two books a few years ago that had widespread commercial appeal. These were deliberate attempts on my part to go beyond the niche of Chicago beer history or Chicago history in general. I broadened these two efforts towards the then hot low-carbohydrate trend, and using my brewing industry contacts, gathered the carbohydrate content on more than 1,000 beers, 400 wines and scores of liquors and liqueurs. Along with a strong news release campaign and a lot of follow-up e-mails and telephone calls, I found myself on ABC's "The View," ESPN2 and the FOX News Channel as the "beer guy" or the "Low-Carb Bartender," reflecting a title of one of my books. I must have done 100 radio interviews in a peiod of about three months, many of them national, some with Canadian programs and even a few in Europe. I even received a call from brewer Anheuser-Busch to fly out to St. Louis. They were about to go public and correct the misleading assumptions about beer, promoted by a famous diet book author, and wanted my input on beer, carbohydrates and how to work the moderate consumption of beer into a low-carbohydrate diet.

I used this momentum at the time to become a columnist for a glossy-page national magazine, adding this job to my pile of freelance writing jobs for the "Chicago Tribune" and national magazines like "Draft." When you're "hot," one thing leads to another. I still get calls or e-mails a few times a month for one-on-one interviews about beer or booze in general, or as a contributor in a boozy story that utilizes input from a number of people. I recently was asked to comment on a story for CNN.com, for instance.

During the research of my last book, "Beer & Food: An American History," I sent an e-mail out to The Boston Beer Company for some beer-related food recipes and wound up with brewery owner Jim Koch doing a book intro for me. It's amazing what can happen if you simply ask for some help.

I've tried trade publishers, subsidy presses, and publishing with an agent and without one. I now have the kind of established platform that has encouraged me to put the finishing touches on another book with nationwide commercial appeal. I've kept a record of all my media contacts, and when I release this new book in the fall, the news releases and upcoming Internet efforts will pave the way in creating buzz about the book.

I also have a blog, www.beerinfood.wordpress.com that links back to other websites that I've let fall into disarray, but their presence on the Internet still keeps my name out there. In preparation for the new book, I'll be spinning off another website that will be heavy on instructional video presentations (vlogs) and podcasts.

I just wish that I had begun my writing career twenty-five years instead of getting started with an article in the "Chicago Tribune" back in 1997. It was this 1,000-word piece that gave me the impetus to jump full time into writing.Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

In an earlier post about the publishing jungle, I made it clear that I'm in no position to judge the legality of corporate actions. An argument can certainly be made that in today's global economy, with sovereign wealth funds, public pension funds and private equity firms wielding cash like a weapon, a large corporation that fails to establish a dominant position in its industry can expect to be bulldozed. This weekend's news that the largest publisher in the UK is now pushing back against Amazon's pricing demands is being read by many as a sign that Amazon may have advanced a bridge too far. But I've been following Amazon for ten years, and have probably written as much about their growth and numbers as anybody. So for those who are trying to read the tea leaves for what's in publishing's future, I think I can declare that the leading Amazon expert and analyst is - Jeff Bezos.

I believe in the cowboy movie line, that sometimes, if you just listen carefully to what a man says, he'll tell you exactly what he's going to do. This has certainly been the case with Steve Riggio's drive to vertically integrate Barnes&Noble by publishing a growing share of the books that they sell, and it's always been the case with Jeff Bezos. Jeff has always made clear that Amazon was first and foremost about growth, and he's been prescient, as the growth numbers for Amazon North American Media Sales the last five years show:

2003 +14%
2004 +14%
2005 +18%
2006 +15%
2007 +23%

Jeff has also been saying for years that Amazon is "comfortable being misunderstood" which is another way of saying, he's not afraid to break a few eggs. Lately, Jeff has been talking about the centrality of Kindle to the future of books and Amazon, and I don't think he's kidding. Reading between the lines of both recent Amazon actions and their earlier run of acquisitions, I'm more convinced than ever that they want to become that dominant player in the publishing world whom none can gainsay. That would be a great thing for Amazon shareholders if they can pull it off, but how it would affect the rest of the publishing ecosystem depends on whether or not you think that central electronic storage, reproduction and sales of most trade books is somehow inevitable. I don't think that it's inevitable, but I do think it's probable if Amazon manages to divide and conquer any trade publishing opposition through a misunderstood application of carrots and sticks.

Many small publishers feel their hands are entirely tied by Amazon, which they rely on for the majority of their income. My own publishing business doesn't have that reliance on Amazon, part by plan and part by fortune, and I have as much sympathy for the medium and large trade publishers as for my own peers in this dust up. Publishers that have multi-year leases on buildings, large payrolls, bank debt and even stockholders to whom they must answer, can't make business decisions based on feelings or hunker down in the basement. With a few notable exceptions, like Microsoft, large corporations can't drop a customer that makes up 20% of their business and not immediately cut 20%+ of their employees and operations to compensate. Large companies are all about scale, and loss of scale often means loss of an independent existence. A large publisher who shuns a shotgun marriage with Amazon may disadvantage itself amongst its own peers to the extent that it becomes lunch. Amazon is the world's largest book retailer, and that's saying something in an industry with a limited number of large players. If the large trades want to stand up to Amazon without breaking the law by colluding or forming a cartel, they'll have to do it based on faith in a common goal and the sort of follow-the-leader tactics airlines use to raise seat prices.

The bottom line on this father's day is how the big trades will respond to the question: "Who's your daddy?"

I suspect the answer for most will be "Amazon".Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

I just took a moment to search all of my recent blog posts, and was surprised to find that I haven't been writing much about the reasons to self publish lately. Maybe it's because I spend so many keystrokes writing about how to self publish, or the drawbacks of self publishing. The funny thing is, in person, I usually recommend self publishing to working trade authors. But when writers contact me through my website with their questions, it's frequently apparent that self publishing is unlikely to be the solution to their particular puzzle. It's rarely a road to fame and riches, and the energy spent trying to achieve fame and riches through self publishing might be more efficiently applied elsewhere.

The best reason to self publish books is because you've studied the publishing industry and decided that self publishing is the path that will most likely bring you a steady income and satisfaction in your work. It's also the least common reason people cite when asked why they decided to self publish. In fact, the few authors I can remember telling me that they had studied the publishing industry and decided to self publish because they would make the more money for less hassle were basing their arguments on the advertisements of author services companies!

Not surprisingly, the authors in the best position to weigh the pros and cons of self publishing against signing a trade publisher contract are authors who have already worked for trade publishers. But most authors who write for trade publishers earn advances and develop an "I get paid upfront" attitude that makes self publishing look very unattractive to them. I can't make an argument in favor of bestselling authors self publishing their literary fiction or nonfiction because I don't think it makes much sense. Bestselling literary authors get the best book contracts and other perks that should discourage them from going to the expense of setting up their own publishing companies, unless they aim to publish other authors books as well. An unhappy bestselling author is probably better off changing publishers than changing careers.

The authors who would likely benefit the most from self publishing are those who are in the worst position to give it a try; the hand-to-mouth writers who rather than advancing in their careers are spinning a squirrel cage to keep up with the bills. The problems keeping those authors from breaking through with some titles that would have a reasonable shelf life and contribute to the author's income and peace of mind over the long term are sometimes their publishers problems. Assigning or accepting book projects that have limited market opportunities because the publisher is risk averse is a major issue. Trade publishers have a need for product, and they will stick with reliable (ie, deadline meeting) authors whose books don't embarrass them, but which rarely sell enough copies to earn the author more than the advance. It's a tough way to make a living, and because such authors aren't all that difficult to replace, a single misunderstanding or shift in publisher personnel may leave the author out in the street.

Laying aside all of the complications of going into business for yourself and all the downsides of working for "the man", the question comes down to how much the publisher is really doing to sell the author's books. If the publisher's marketing effort is limited to listing the books online and getting them a brief stint on some chain shelves, the author is giving up the majority of the title's revenue for some design and editorial services that could be outsourced to freelancers. If the publisher is employing the author for titles in strongly branded series that pay five figure advances, it may be that the author has benefited greatly from the association. But it's important for trade authors who aren't advancing in their careers to at least look at their options in self publishing. If they're afraid of trade publishers noticing and adding them to a blacklist, I've never heard of such a thing, but there's always the mighty pen name.Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

I've been thinking about running a contest for web published fiction, so I've been doing a little research. If you want to have some fun, try Googling "fiction contest" and "canceled" or any variants thereof. It seems that launching fiction contests online and them canceling them for a wide variety of reasons is at least as common as continuing them through to the prize awards. The reasons for cancellation vary from prosaic (lead judge required back surgery) to the failed next generational plans of the major trades and agents. Some educational institutions run contests for young writers that are paid for by grants or endowments, and special interest groups may do the same. But when it comes to a straightforward, submit your manuscript and compete for a prize competition, there aren't as many legitimate looking contests as you'd think.

The main fault I see with the majority of writing contests is their business model, which is they are run for a profit. It's not the profit motive in itself that renders them suspect, but the impression that the profit motive is the only motive. In other words, collect fees from a bunch of hopeful rubes that cover not only the prize amounts but also the overhead and a generous allowance for the time of the contest managers, and if enough fees aren't forthcoming, cancel the contest. I'm highly suspicious of anybody whose business model doesn't include a substantial risk in terms of time or money. Some people would call elimination of risk in business wise - I call it stealing.

Another type of contest which I've mused about running in the past is one where the prize is an advance payment on the manuscript, which the publisher running the contest acquires for publication. Arguments about whether a given author is best served by a given publisher aside, I think that's a clever way to drum up interest for submissions, provided there aren't any fees involved. As soon as the publisher starts charging authors a fee to submit their manuscripts, it turns into a scam, even if the winner gets published.

I have several concerns about running a contest, but the primary concern is getting electronically buried in manuscripts. I can justify a contest as a business expense, so giving out some modest cash prizes isn't going to break my bank, but I can't justify hiring help to vet submissions. The main trick used by other online contests is to require the authors submitting manuscripts to rate one or more other manuscripts, in order to thin the field. My own modification on the process would be that I'd only accept entrants who followed (or follow) my advice and publish their fiction online. That would help cut down the potential pool of contestants and save a lot of file management overhead on my part. I'd just post a daily list of web addresses, perhaps on this blog, and come up with a way to count votes before reading a handful of finalists cover-to-cover. Speaking of cover, I'd probably draft a few friends to read the finalists so I wouldn't be the sole buck stop.

Whether or not I'd want to get involved in actually publishing a winning manuscript, assuming the writer wasn't already published, is another matter. But running a contest for nonfiction doesn't strike me as very interesting, and despite making a living as a nonfiction author and publisher, I don't feel that I could judge other author's nonfiction works in an objective manner without being conversant with the subject matter. Judging fiction is much easier in that it's strictly subjective to start with, though stories set more than a hundred years in the past or the future are objectively better than contemporary tales:-)

Another issue, at the risk of shocking the better half of my readers, is that women and men tend to like different books. Or to put it a little more bluntly, I'd define about three quarters of the novels that pass my way as "women's fiction", though I wouldn't be surprised if women make up over 75% of the fiction reading public. But I suppose there would be some educational value in reading past the first page for a change. If you have any thoughts about running an online fiction contest, feel free to comment on this post or drop me a line. It's a thought in progress.Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

All publishers want to get more visitors to their websites. Sometimes, they are sophisticated enough to follow top SEO related blogs, like Google's lead Webspam detective, Matt Cutts, but they get often lost in the technical details. Google drives the majority of English language search traffic on the Internet, and they are very, very careful to be vague about exactly how they rank pages in their results. I've written a lot about search engine optimization and website design for publishers in the past, and it continues to come down to a couple basic principles. Write and publish high quality content and get relevant links. If you need an SEO company to write your content for you, it's not clear why you should be in the publishing business.

So what can a professional SEO company actually do for a publisher? For starters, it depends on how bad a job you've done for yourself. If you've published your website with a content management system or web authoring package that doesn't take search engine visibility into account, they can point that out to you and help you migrate your website to a different platform. Of course, you can figure that out for yourself as well by just checking if your pages appear in Google and looking at your page titles. An SEO professional can certainly point out if you or your designer has done things that search engines consider bad practice, and which get you penalized. But some SEO professionals follow bad practices themselves, to get their clients a short lived bump in the search rankings and prove that they've "earned" their pay.

But beneath it all, the main thing a search optimization company can do for a small publisher is get you more links. A cheesy SEO expert will get you a lot of worthless links, perhaps from his other clients websites, or paid links from grey area neighborhoods and link-sharing networks which will likely do more harm than good. A quality SEO expert will use research and tools to identify the appropriate websites to solicit links from, and then do it in your name.

Just a week or so ago I got a particularly persistent link request from a legitimate site in one of my publishing areas. So I took the time to reply and tell them I don't trade links, something I don't bother doing for the more incoherent or dicey link requests. To my surprise, I got back an e-mail from the individual offering to write a whole article about me and link my site from it in return, something which I again, politely denied. Then I happened to notice in the e-mail header that while the return address was for the well known site, the real originator was an SEO company. It was a legitimate SEO company using a return address identified with their client's site to make it look like the link request was an internal mom-n-pop affair, rather than a professional search engine optimization effort the client had purchased.

All of which is perfectly legitimate, but it struck me as kind of funny after I checked up on the SEO company, a business that's been around for a few years and claims offices in a half dozen countries with a large staff. I'll bet they pitch their clients on their in-depth knowledge of how search engines work, with all sorts of graphs and technical gibberish, but in the end, the real value of their service is based on getting relevant links for their clients by asking for them, persistently, and trying to barter for them if asking fails. Because after getting your content right, it's all about the links.

There is another way to get incoming links without going through a drawn out process of begging for them or paying for an SEO firm to do the begging for you. If you're a nonfiction publisher, publish some of your best material online, and if that doesn't do the trick, the odds aren't very good that a book will do much better. Despite all of the competition for eyeballs, there's always a shortage of quality content, and most websites have no way to generate that content internally. Increasingly, companies count on social networking, blog comments and forums to get their customers and visitors to generate free content for them. Some of it is actually pretty good, but as a professional publisher, hopefully you can do better. And sign up for Google's Webmaster Console to find out what Google really thinks of your site.Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

Most writers today see an agent as an absolute necessity for getting their manuscripts considered by literary fiction houses. To what extent is that really the case?

There are always exceptions, especially today when a self-published book or blog can attract a publisher's attention and lead to an offer. But the rule is pretty much that you have to have an agent. Publishers have vacated the responsibility for discovering new talent and left it to the agents. Most trade book publishers will not consider a solicitation that does not come from an agent.

Nonfiction publishers have been on an "author platform" kick for years, seeking authors who can sell their own books. Have fiction publishers gotten the platform bug? Is it easier to get a novel published if you have a popular blog, newspaper column or MySpace page?

If a publisher has to ask "Who's that?" when an agent pitches a novelist, the game is half lost before it begins. If an author doesn't have a platform, he/she or the agent must create one that will at least give the illusion of familiarity when an editor reviews the author's work. At the very least an author must have a website.

Do agents typically lend value to manuscripts by creating a marketing plan and an irrefutable proposal, or does it come down to knowing what particular publishers are looking for and maintaining personal relationships with the editors and executives?

Agents have an advantage in that they can get in the door by relying on their relationships with editors. But once they're there, it still comes down to a good book. Marketing plans don't usually help sell the book, but, once sold, a good marketing plan will be welcome by the publisher.

What has been the greatest change to the title acquisition process of publishers you've seen in your 30+ years as a literary agent? Was it a turn for the better or the worse?

It used to be that if an editor liked a flawed manuscript, he or she would say, "I'll buy it and we'll fix it." Now editors say, "Fix it and we'll see." That's bad enough, but usually when the author fixes it, the editor rejects it anyway.

Richard Curtis Associates, Inc, is a leading literary agency representing over 100 authors.Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

I’m concerned with my new reader-friendly ebook publishing model, thanks to a post I read on William Patry’s blog. That post, titled “First Sale Victory in Verner”, describes a U.S. district court ruling which challenges the enforceability of certain software license agreements. I don’t have the legal knowledge to determine whether or not it will affect my ebook click license agreements, the comment thread of the post does touch on renting, physical copies and the idea of a “sale” in addition to a “license” version being available. Perhaps if there was no physical package involved, the opinion would have been different, though I couldn’t explain why myself. Patry ends his post with a quote from another blog about books and DRM, which reads, “To any publisher who sees the wisdom of DRM: don't.”

I’m worried about this direction, and that worry is coming from somebody who writes and publishes as living, rather than somebody who writes as an adjunct activity to an otherwise profitable career. I’m pointing this out because for many, especially academics and consultants, the writing of books is a necessary credentialing process for their careers that doesn’t usually generate a significant portion of their income. They often stand to win by wider distribution and fame, without regard to payment for the books. Just as there are two worlds of ebook publishers, the “book” crowd and the “get rich quick” crowd, there are two worlds of authors, full-time and part-time, and we don’t always see things the same way.



Back in the 1960’s, libraries in America may have been the largest customer for published books. I’ve spent so much time in libraries myself that it’s surprising I haven’t turned into one, though my taste in literature is solidly fixed in the 1800’s, meaning the books I read are well beyond their term of copyright protection. Even though libraries have lost some of their importance as a market for trade books as they expand into providing other services for their patrons, I don’t know anybody who argues that they shouldn’t be able to buy books from publishers and loan them out as long as they last.

Now fast forward to the Internet Ebook Library, which doesn’t yet exist. The Internet Ebook Library can serve the entire globe, the ebooks it holds don’t wear out after ten or twenty readings, they don’t take days or weeks to reach their patrons through inter-library loans, and they don’t get lost through improper shelving. The ebook library is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Everybody knows about the Internet Ebook Library, just like everybody knows that Google is the place to go to search the web. It’s that successful.

The Internet Ebook Library pays to license a copy of one of my ebooks, which are printable. I’m a publisher who saw the wisdom of DRM, but decided to gamble on the honesty of people and the validity of my license agreement which holds the ebooks nontransferable. The Internet Ebook Library loans out the ebook, the patron hits “print”, the ebook is returned as soon as the print buffer is empty. Maybe five minutes, maybe fifteen minutes, depends on the speed of the printer. If another patron shows up at the Internet Ebook Library seeking the title while it’s out, they get a message like, “Your expected wait is three minutes.” The copy of the ebook sold (if “licensed” is turned into “sold” by the courts) to the Internet Ebook Library represents the only revenue I earn, barring those individuals who actually like reading ebooks on the screen and decide to buy one from me as an act of charity.

As a publisher and as an author, my reaction would be the exact opposite of the blogs quoted above. I would implement restrictive DRM, the kind that marries an ebook to a particular computer and causes the customer all sorts of headaches if the computer crashes or is upgraded. On the other hand, I might just stop publishing ebook versions of any new titles available and stick with killing trees. And if the library doesn’t completely wipe out the market for new copies, a secondary market could easily spring up places like eBay, where nobody other than the seller would know how many copies of a single paid-up ebook were being resold.

My understanding of why copyrights are granted is that they encourage the production of useful and original works. As I’ve commented before on this blog, few of my favorite authors were aristocrats with trust funds, they wrote for a living and couldn’t have produced a body of work without the protection of copyright law. Perhaps I’m conflating the concepts of copyright and licensing, but I’m not a lawyer. I’m just a crazy guy with tinfoil on his head trying to predict the future of ebooks and DRM.Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

As a result of writing about my ebook publishing experiences lately, I've been getting more e-mail on the subject. What I hadn't realized is that there are two completely different groups of ebook publishers. The first group, in which I put myself, are publishers who see ebooks as a supplemental or substitute method for delivering books to customers. The second group are primarily interested in ebooks as a way to make money off the Internet. Call me innocent, but until I started Googling around, I didn't realize that there was this whole subculture of publishing ebooks as a sort of "get rich quick" scheme. Perhaps the most successful of these ebook entrepreneurs are those who sell ebooks about how to get rich selling ebooks. The basic pitch runs something like this:

Start by using a variety of Internet tools designed for advertisers to determine what sort of interest there is in any number of subjects or key phrases. Next, run some test advertising campaigns to find out how expensive it will be for you to get traffic (visitors) using online advertising. Stick the information into a spreadsheet so you can determine the most favorable looking prospect, and then put together an ebook that won't leave your customers feeling completely ripped-off or get you sued for copyright infringement. Last, use internet based advertising to drive potential customers to a serious sales pitch page, and use all of the modern advertising methods available to tweak it for performance.

How the third bit is carried out, actually creating the ebook, determines whether we're talking about a publishing business or a spam business. Most successful publishers do what they can to determine whether or not there's a market for a title before embarking on writing or acquiring it, especially in the how-to and self-help genres. Most publishers don't run test advertising campaigns to gather e-mail addresses for nonexistent books that may never be published, but I'll let that slide as being Internet savvy. It's the way the creation of the ebook is treated as a chore to be gotten through that really gets my goat. Simply drawing up a list of hot subtopics under a more general title and then hiring a copywriter to churn out 30 to 50 pages (that seems to be the target range for purpose-written ebooks) is a good way to end up with the ebook equivalent of webspam. Even if you go the extra mile of interviewing "experts" in the field or including some nicely formatted public domain statistics, it's highly unlikely that a writer who doesn't have any experience or expertise in the subject matter can create value for the reader. At best, it's a form of journalism that might produce an mediocre magazine article or blog post, but not something a person would pay for if they knew what they were getting.

I write and publish books for a living, so I'm clearly not some academic snob who sees authorship as a sacred activity that needs to be its own reward. And as an avid reader of 19th century (ie, "real" literature:-) I can tell you that the vast majority of the classics were written by authors who were not only trying to make money, but some who would have watched their children go hungry had they failed. I believe there's a line to be drawn between books and between text content of sufficient length to be sold as if they were books. I'm not sure whether or not this distinction matters to the folks who promote ebook publishing as a way to make money online, but I do get the impression that they feel they're doing something smart rather than something wrong. Yes, market research and modern advertising methods are smart, but setting out to produce and sell products that have no inherent value is wrong. Of course, these ebook entrepreneurs could throw in my face all of the consumer products that are not only valueless but harmful, and I'd have to eat my words. As long as they're salty and crunchy, I won't complain.Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

You left a prestigious academic post at Harvard Business School to become an independent consultant, author and speaker, which suggests you have a great passion for your work. Is it possible to teach passion to businessmen, or do you find yourself telling some clients that they're in the wrong business?

No, I don't believe that you can "teach passion." However, you can get people thinking about their work lives, whether they are fulfilled by their careers, and whether they want to do anything about it. I would very rarely tell someone they are in the wrong business - revolutionary changes are not what most people need. They just need to believe that life could be better, and that they can do something about it. (I write about my own career choices in my latest book, STRATEGY AND THE FAT SMOKER.) In many ways, it's like sports coaching - you don't say "Here's the world record, go!" Big changes like that intimidate rather than motivate. Instead, you ask "What's the one improvement you could make that would make things better?" Like all diet and exercise programs, it's about the rules of the journey, not setting ridiculously ambitious targets.

In addition to consulting, lecturing and writing books, you publish podcasts, videocasts, DVDs and subscriptions. As a businessman, do you see all of these outlets as potential revenue sources, or are some of them chiefly intended to enhance your platform?

My activities on the internet have all been a big experiment. I'm very glad I have done them, but I have found that it's very hard, indeed, to monetize things like blogs, podcasts and vidoecasts. They are mostly things which serve to build a reputation for my consulting and speaking services, which is pretty much my dominant (if not quite exclusive) revenue stream. Over the years, I've made some good royalties on my books, but it's always been a very, very minor portion of my income. My books are, in effect, also reputation-building tools, not stand-alone money-makers.

You published your latest book, "Strategy and the Fat Smoker," through your own press, rather than giving it to a trade publisher. What motivated you to make the transition to self publishing?

Like many of my friends and colleagues, I have been disappointed over the years at dealing with publishers. Basically, it's hard to see what added value they provide. Even if they publish your book, it's up to you to market your own book and hire your own PR people (if any). In the old days, they provided a convenient way to get things like typesetting, design and editing done, but even these tended to be done in a cursory way. I know of no-one who has been very happy with what was done on their behalf. Nowadays, of course, all of these services are obtainable easily, so you don't have to do a "package deal" with the publisher.

It's still true that the "supply chain" of book distribution is designed around the large publishers. For example, while you can get a self-published book listed on Amazon, it's very hard to get one into the retail chains or the airport bookstores. In addition, it's hard (though not impossible) to get the media to take seriously and review a self-published book. I made it happen through a great PR guy (Mark Fortier at Fortier Public Relations) but it was a lot of work.

Do you see yourself continuing to publish your own books in the future, or did you find the extra work and up-front expenses a poor trade-off for full control of the process and the publisher's share of the profit?

The jury is still out. Both sides of your question are true - it WAS a lot of administrative detail and hard work taking responsibility for the book production and distribution, but it also DID feel good to be able to make all my own decisions. Right now, I'm in the "post-partum" stage, so the thought of another book is the last thing on my mind.

If I thought I could find a publisher who'd really get behind my books, I'd switch back in a minute. But I'm not holding my breath!


David Maister is widely acknowledged as one of the world's leading authorities on the management of professional service firms. For twenty-five years he has advised firms in a broad spectrum of professions, covering all strategic and managerial issues. His first book on professional businesses, Managing the Professional Service Firm, was published in 1993, followed by True Professionalism, The Trusted Advisor, Practice What You Preach , First Among Equals and Strategy and the Fat Smoker. His books are currently available in 14 languages.Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

Today a class action lawsuit was filed in response to Amazon’s threat to remove the "Buy" buttons of publishers who refuse to sign up with their on-demand printing subsidiary, Booksurge. If certified, the class action will most likely include all publishers who use on demand printing to print their books for distribution. If it functions like the class action lawsuits involving credit card or telephone billing that we all find ourselves party to on a regular basis, publishers will automatically be included unless they opt out. The primary plaintiff in the suit is Booklocker.com, Inc., the company that first broke the silence about the heavy-handed tactics Booksurge was using against Lightning Source's larger publisher customers. Quoting from the complaint:

…to obtain injunctive and monetary relief against Amazon.com, Inc. (“Amazon”) with regard to an anticompetitive tying arrangement that violates section 1 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1.

America is known the world over as a litigious society, and there is often a stigma attached to people in the publishing world who turn to the courts. But if you talk to entrepreneurs who have owned businesses for any amount of time, you'll soon find that businesses have limited options when dealing with legal problems. You can't call the cops if somebody infringes on your copyrights, breaks contractual obligations or doesn't pay their bills. A publisher can avoid litigation by ignoring small problems and hoping the mid-sized problems will resolve themselves, but a publisher that hides from large problems to avoid legal entanglement is just begging to go out of business.

Three years ago, the most popular page on my website disappeared from Google, and I lost over five hundred visitors (and potential customers) a day. After a stressful period of knocking my head against the wall, I found out that Google had indexed a page on the website of a large American company that had incorporated (verbatim) the draft version of a chapter from my book. Since their website had a higher trust ranking than my own, Google had apparently imposed a duplicate content penalty. The loss of five hundred potential customers a day was a direct threat to my business model, so I contacted that company and was told by a tight-lipped employee that I'd be hearing from their lawyer. We ended up in Federal court, and after two years of pre-trial maneuvering, settled the case. I even came out ahead, and I sure learned a lot about the way copyright law and the courts work.

Lawyers are the closest thing to business police in the American system. There's nothing new about business litigation, and what's more, it’s probably one of the hallmarks of a healthy society. I've been reading Scott's Waverly novels (I'm up to volume 20) and I was amused by an incident he writes about in the late 1700's. A Scottish farmer insists on suing his neighbor over grazing rights to a tiny parcel of land, despite the lawyer explaining to him that the legal costs would be far above the value of the grazing. The farmer persisted for the principle of the thing, and as the lawyer points out to a friend, if it had been fifty years earlier, they would have settled the issue with claymores or daggers.

Lawsuits are modern society’s replacement for blood feuds and murder in the street and anybody who yearns for the days when justice came from the barrel of a six-shooter is yearning for a time when justice was the exclusive right of the strong. The anti-trust laws on which the class action filing against Amazon rests are beyond my professional understanding, much less my ability explain, and it will be up to the court to determine whether the complaint has merit. But without the lawyers doing what they do for a living and filing the class action suit, the publishers using Lightning Source who are threatened by Amazon's moves would have no hope of a preventive injunction and little hope of prevailing otherwise.

For Amazon, litigation risk is just another line item in the corporate filing. It's business, not personal, and Amazon is quick enough to turn to the courts and the legislature when their own business model is at risk. For the publishers in the class, it's business as well, but much more than a line item or a minor change in strategy, as for many, Amazon represents the primary outlet for their books. For all of the parties involved, a class action lawsuit may not sound romantic, but it beats reaching for our guns.Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

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.Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

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!Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

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.Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

I got an e-mail the other day asking if $30,000 was enough to open a business. When it comes to self publishing, $300 will buy your first block of 10 ISBN numbers, which is all the infrastructure you really need. But if your goal is to open a small literary press and be the envy of the Indy publishing world, you're going to need some start-up cash to to get off the ground. People who dream about starting a literary press need to put together a little kitty of cash since it's essentially a marketing proposition. But first, a brief video on where not to spend the money:-)



Anybody who is frequently asked for advice about new publishing ventures can tell you that a good proportion of start-ups waste a lot of money "playing business." Why some publishers think they need to stock up on new office furniture in order to start a small press is beyond me, who do they expect will see it or care? What's the point of rushing into a business phone listing unless you want local folks to find you in the Yellow Pages and call you about publishing their memoirs? Even business cards are overkill if you aren't attending any trade shows, and if you are, not handing out business cards is a great way cut down on spam.

Outside of the publishing meccas where editors still "do lunch" and attend industry breakfasts, the business is conducted by e-mail. If you have to leave voice-mail reminders asking people if they've checked their e-mail, you know you haven't arrived yet. Since literary presses are unlikely to be traffic magnets on the Internet, the face of the business on starting out will most likely be from paid advertising. Just a few years ago, that advertising would have been limited to glossy print ads, wherever they might appear, but today, targeted Internet advertising is the better value proposition, providing you can find a way to effectively target your potential readers.

Creating a successful brand is one of the most powerful ways to build value in a business, and that was true even in the days before modern advertising. In a sense, branding is the same thing as reputation, and in both cases, it's possible to have a great reputation or brand even if the product or service is lacking. That's where marketing comes in. Spending a lot of money associating your company name with attractive young people in scanty apparel is a quick way to earn a reputation for being cutting-edge, but is it an effective way to sell cutting edge books? Well, it makes more sense than distributing thousands of baseball caps with "Cutting Edge Books" embroidered on them.

But like other commodities, branding is valuable precisely because its scarcity. Branding attempts are what keep many publicity and marketing firms afloat, but the genuine successes are few and far between. In publishing, branding successes rely primarily on the books, or at the least, the covers. So if you are just starting out with a small literary press, put together a tight list, so the branding dollars you spend will impact all of your titles. If you try batting to all fields and publishing titles for different demographic groups in order to prove your breadth, you're diluting your brand before you've even established it. And don't commit to a launch schedule until you've found at least one manuscript that knock your socks off. Remember, you're easy to impress, you're already a fan of the genre.Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

I started selling a new ebook three weeks ago, procrastinated posting this week until I could pull some data together and resolve some customer service issues. I used Microsoft Word from Office 2007 to produce the PDF file, which worked out pretty good, and I didn't employ any copy protection this time around. After discussing it with my lawyer, I went with a "click" agreement on the order page that states:

Your paid download of this ebook from Foner Books grants you a non-transferable license to retain an electronic copy of the PDF file for reading and to print one copy for personal use in your home or business. You may not create copies of this ebook or excerpts therof, whether electronic or printed on paper, for sale or distribution.

The order process is pretty balky, I'm using PayPal for the payment processor and E-Junkie for the download service. I looked at a couple other download services, but their legal agreements struck me as bizarre, like insisting they could do anything they wanted with your ebook content for the sake of promoting their own business. If somebody gives me a lead for a better method that I end up using, I'll offer a free Foner Books T-shirt as a bounty:-)

In the first 20 days, I sold 30 copies, with exactly half of them being purchased by US residents. The majority of the non-US sales were to UK and Australia, but included single sales to Austria, The Netherlands and Ireland. I was slightly surprised by the 50/50 split, because a strong majority of my web traffic is from the US. It's possible that the weak US dollar made the $13.95 ebook look very inexpensive overseas, but I suspect it has more to do with higher ebook acceptance outside the US.

The 30 ebook sales have already resulted in two claims being filed with PayPal, though it's impossible for me to know whether they were actually fraudulent usage of accounts or buyer's remorse. In one case, the ebook was never downloaded, so I refunded that one immediately, in the other case, the ebook was downloaded from E-Junkie twice, so I'm going through the dispute resolution process to see what happens.

In three more cases, the customers went for days without downloading the ebook, so I wrote them directly to ask if there was a problem. One e-mail bounced, so I just issued a refund. One downloaded the e-book right after I wrote (I pointed out that the buyers should check their bulk or spam folder to make sure the download link wasn't trashed) and the other wrote back to admit confusion with the whole process. I resent him the E-junkie link to download the ebook, and he succeeded.

My goal when I started out was to sell one copy a day, so I'm happy enough on that account, but I wonder if the balky ordering process is costing me sales. I've fooled around each week with a different sales pitch and progression to the order page, but I haven't seen that make any difference in the sales tempo. I think it goes back to the concept that there are buyers and browsers, and the people who want to buy the ebook will jump through a couple hoops to get there.Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

John Oakes started at Grove Press in the mid-1980s, saw that crash and burn, then joined Henry Holt for a brief period. John then spent 17 years building Four Walls Eight Windows, which was sold to Avalon in 2004. He spent two years as simultaneously the publisher of Avalon's Thunder Mouth Press and co-publisher of Nation Books. John is currently executive editor with Atlas and Co., Publishers.

When Four Walls launched in 1987, did you have a detailed business plan and long-term funding, or was it a seat-of-the-pants start-up?

We profoundly didn't know what we were doing. I'd met Dan Simon at a party not long before, and we discovered a mutual interest in art and politics--most people I knew seemed to be interested in one or the other. I was at Henry Holt at the time, and he was working for a medical publisher, and I suggested we start up a publishing company. How hard could it be, right? He'd done one book at Writers and Readers with the late Glen Thompson under the imprint "Four Walls Eight Windows," and because we couldn't come up with a better name, we started with that--and we continued to work together for seven years, until I initiated a split. At that point I continued to run Four Walls, and did so until 2004, when I sold it. I think now I may know a little bit more about starting up a traditional publishing company than I did in 1987. Sadly, because of the advent of the Internet, those skills are less relevant today.

How long was it before you realized that Four Walls was a success, and was there a particular title that put you over the top?

You're kind to characterize it as a success. Four Walls was more like one long, drawn-out battle--not a war, which implies some respite from battle; a battle. There was never a point of victory; it was a constant struggle. Solvency became less of a joke as our backlist started to gain heft; but at that point I was exhausted and glad to sell.

How did your vision for the Four Walls list change over the years, and did you move to subsidize literary titles with more consumer oriented fare?

I never liked the how-to stuff, because I could never understand how people can find their own bodies so endlessly fascinating. We always had a weakness for pushing the literary envelope, and by definition that's risky publishing. Two of our most successful (or merely lucrative) titles were a history of Mormonism and a meditation on Fermat's last theorem. But I would argue that some of our most successful (or intellectually adventurous) titles were the novels by Michael Brodsky, the memoirs by Jean-Paul Kauffmann, and the post-punk rants of Steve Aylett. Towards the end of the company's life, I tried to balance each season with an edgy literary work, a classic reprint (for example, we brought back Sloan Wilson's classic The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit), a couple of political books, an anthology, perhaps a memoir...I also very consciously tried to give editors working for me some latitude, so that on every season's list of eight or so titles there'd be at least a few that came from the editors, and not from me.

Given the tremendous changes in the industry, especially the consolidation in both retailing and publishing, could you repeat the Four Walls success if today if you were 20 years younger and just starting out?

I think, despite everything, there's still room for innovative and committed publishers, so yes. Look at Melville House: they started as we did, on a wing and a prayer and some dedication. When I started out, Bob Bernstein of Random House told me I'd need millions. We had $20,000. With new problems come new possibilities, and to me the Internet is a great gift to open-minded publishers.Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

I went to look at an author's blog the other day, and was surprised to see it had no page rank, despite being over a year old with over 100 well written posts. A couple quick checks showed that she didn't have any meaningful incoming links (and barely a half dozen meaningless ones), which can only come from lack of trying. But let's say you've done everything right and your blog enjoys a reputation in your field. How can you tell if people are really coming to visit? You can't extrapolate from the number of comments. I reject the majority of comments posted to my blog as being spam or for trying to ask me questions that have nothing to do with the post and should be sent to me direct . And most readers aren't commenters in any case. But how reliable are the data logs I look at every morning?



The answer is, they are very accurate counts of requests made to the website server, which doesn't mean much of anything. Take the graph for my self publishing blog feed shown above. The "hits" number shot up last month when I wrote a popular post about potential changes at Amazon, may have led some subscribers to keep checking their readers to see if there was more news. Or possibly, I picked up a handful of new subscribers who check their newsreader several times an hour. But most likely it's a badly written piece of distributed software that keeps checking the feed every couple minutes. For what it's worth, Google's Webmaster Tools reports that the number of subscribers to my blog they're aware of is 67, and considering I've never attempted to build a subscriber base, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if that's accurate. The rest of the 400 or so daily "visits" to my feed are probably from legitimate multiple checks or other noise of one sort or another.

The second example I'm giving is from a static publishing page on my website, one that's hardly changed since it was first posted five or six years ago. About two years back, it showed a sudden jump in traffic that left me scratching my head. The data in my server logs reported that this surge was from "direct" visitors, always a highly suspect category for a publishing website. If you're running a news site or a bank, you can expect a lot of direct traffic from from people who type in the site name or who have you on their favorites, but when most of traffic to a static book excerpt shows as "direct", something is fishy.



Sure enough, when I added a a script based counter to the page, it ignored all of the direct traffic and showed that the 80% of the visitors to the page continued to come from search. This fake traffic persisted for over a year and a half and could come back at any time! Was it due to a crude attack on my site, a bot net, an angry reader with nothing better to do with their time? I have no idea and don't really care. The important thing when you're publishing for a living is to be able to recognize unnatural patterns in the statistics so that you don't get tricked into wasting your resources on publishing books for a ghostly audience. The best rule-of-thumb I can offer is to ignore visitors that aren't coming from a referring link or a search engine.Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog