by Joseph T. Sin­clair

Tra­di­tion­al­ly the writ­ing and print pub­lish­ing busi­ness has been one of throw­ing pub­lish­ing prod­ucts against the wall to see what sticks. Mar­ket­ing has been hap­haz­ard, and mar­ket­ing and adver­tis­ing by pub­lish­ers has been very unre­li­able from an author’s point of view. The tra­di­tion­al media has not had enough band­width to car­ry inex­pen­sive mar­ket­ing and adver­tis­ing for all pub­lish­ing prod­ucts (i.e., run-of-the-mill books).

The inter­net, how­ev­er, has changed the game. It hasn’t hap­pen overnight, but today it is clear­ly evi­dent that the old throw-it-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks pub­lish­ing has lost con­sid­er­able mar­ket share in regard to How2 books (and oth­er infor­ma­tion pub­lish­ing prod­ucts) and will con­tin­ue to lose mar­ket share in the fore­see­able future. Keep in mind I’m dis­cussing infor­ma­tion prod­ucts, not sto­ries. Today it is pos­si­ble to find out what con­sumers want. It’s no longer a spec­u­la­tive func­tion of throw­ing infor­ma­tion prod­ucts against the wall to see what sticks.

How has this hap­pened?

First, the inter­net (web) has enabled a new kind of pub­lish­ing: dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy com­bined with ubiq­ui­tous net­work deliv­ery.

Sec­ond, ana­lyt­ic tools now exist that enable authors and pub­lish­ers to ascer­tain what con­sumers search for on the web thus pro­vid­ing a defin­i­tive indi­ca­tion of demand.

Third, social media pro­vides authors and pub­lish­ers the oppor­tu­ni­ty to inter­act with con­sumers and there­by devel­op a sense of what con­sumers want.

Fourth, the inter­net has enabled new kinds of pub­lish­ing prod­ucts to facil­i­tate the sat­is­fac­tion of demand.

Fifth, much infor­ma­tion on the inter­net is now avail­able to con­sumers free.

Let’s con­sid­er these one by one.

Digital Technology and the Internet Enable a New Kind of Publishing

1. Pub­lish­ing writ­ings in dig­i­tal form enables easy and inex­pen­sive repli­ca­tion. It even enables easy and more effi­cient cre­ation and pro­duc­tion.
2. Deliv­ery via the inter­net is instant, low cost, and avail­able to almost all con­sumers. One doesn’t need to go a book­store to buy a book or mag­a­zine.
3. The inter­net is open to all authors and pub­lish­ers for doing busi­ness at a low cost. Any­one can be an author or pub­lish­er. The sup­ply gates have opened. You can sat­is­fy demand effi­cient­ly and inex­pen­sive­ly.

You Can Ascertain Demand with Web Analytic and Communication Tools:

1. Google AdWord Plan­ner and sim­i­lar tools enable you to mea­sure the search traf­fic for key words.
2. Forums (and oth­er online par­tic­i­pa­tion for­mats) on spe­cif­ic top­ics can give you an under­stand­ing of what par­tic­i­pants are inter­est­ed in.
3. Web­page ana­lyt­ics, par­tic­u­lar­ly click-through rates, enable you to test demand.

Social Media Provides Opportunities to Come to Know and Understand Consumers:

1. Face­book and the like enable you to have a give-and-take rela­tion­ship with large num­bers of poten­tial con­sumers.
2. Twit­ter enables you to keep in touch with your mar­ket while stay­ing aware of demand.

Digital Technology and the Internet Have Enabled New Kinds of Publishing Products:

1. With dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy there is no require­ment that an infor­ma­tion pack­age (e.g., a book) be a cer­tain length. It can be any length. Ebooks of 25 pages (com­pa­ra­ble to print books) are com­mon and answer real needs of con­sumers. Blog posts, text tuto­ri­als, and YouTube tuto­ri­als have reduced the pub­li­ca­tion of infor­ma­tion to small­er and more spe­cial­ized chunks. A con­sumer who wants to learn how to cook a Thanks­giv­ing turkey does­n’t have to buy a book on gen­er­al cook­ing or a book about cook­ing poul­try. He or she can find a spe­cial­ized tuto­r­i­al on the inter­net about cook­ing turkeys in a writ­ten, audio, or video for­mat. If the infor­ma­tion is tru­ly com­plex, one can find a short ebook on the sub­ject. Pub­lish­ing print­ed books to sell into the infor­ma­tion mar­ket is passé.
2. The ide­al of the free pub­lish­ing prod­ucts is pos­si­ble due to the very low mar­gin­al cost of repli­ca­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion. For instance, you can repli­cate a writ­ten tuto­r­i­al in a dig­i­tal for­mat and dis­trib­ute it for a very low cost com­pared to doing the same with a print­ed tuto­r­i­al prod­uct.
3. New for­mats such as blogs, pod­casts, online tuto­ri­als, YouTube tuto­ri­als, enhanced ebooks, spe­cial­ized web­sites, and the like have been suc­cess­ful.
4. Pub­lish­ing prod­ucts don’t have to be just ebooks. They can be enhanced ebooks infused with oth­er media to pro­vide con­sumers with a high­er val­ue to be sold at a high­er price. Or, they can be high-val­ue web-based train­ing cours­es to be sold at a pre­mi­um price. One prime tech­nique to use for pro­mot­ing high-val­ue pub­lish­ing prod­ucts, such as cours­es, is to use a blog to gen­er­ate an email­ing list. Then use the mail­ing list to fur­ther pro­mote your high-val­ue pub­lish­ing prod­ucts.

Price

A huge amount of the infor­ma­tion on the Inter­net is free (or very inex­pen­sive) for con­sumers. Are these inter­net pub­lish­ing prod­ucts real­ly free? Sure. Many are free to the con­sumer. But what about the pub­lish­er? How does an author or pub­lish­er make mon­ey?

1. Many infor­ma­tion prod­ucts are pub­lished by pub­lish­ers with no expec­ta­tion of rev­enue for their efforts. There are emo­tion­al and non-mon­e­tary rea­sons why some­one might give away their cre­ation-for noth­ing, and we all under­stand this. But for most peo­ple, doing seri­ous pub­lish­ing in the dig­i­tal realm does have an expec­ta­tion of rev­enue, and authors and pub­lish­ers gen­er­ate the rev­enue in var­i­ous ways.
2. One way to gen­er­ate rev­enue is to include adver­tise­ments as part of your pub­lish­ing prod­uct. For instance, it’s com­mon for blog pages to have AdSense ads; that is, Google auto­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­ates spe­cial­ized ads based upon the sub­ject mat­ter of the blog post. Google web­page ads are quite com­mon, and they’re not nec­es­sar­i­ly over­ly intru­sive.
3. Anoth­er kind of adver­tise­ment is the ban­ner ad. Although gener­ic ban­ner ads don’t work well, spe­cial­ized ban­ner ads that are relat­ed to the con­tent work much bet­ter.
4. Many web­sites pub­lish­ing free infor­ma­tion are sup­port­ed by affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing. Affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing is sim­ply high­ly spe­cial­ized adver­tis­ing appro­pri­ate for the sub­ject mat­ter. Affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing schemes have gen­er­al­ly become dis­taste­ful to authors and pub­lish­ers because they have been used gener­i­cal­ly. Who wants to see an ad for auto insur­ance while read­ing a blog post on the fin­er points of quilt mak­ing? Nobody. On the oth­er hand, who wants to see an ad for auto insur­ance on a blog post about how to cut your car expens­es? A lot of peo­ple. Affil­i­ate pro­grams (adver­tis­ing) are most effec­tive when care­ful­ly cho­sen and specif­i­cal­ly arranged by an author or pub­lish­er. (With AdSense Google decides through its mar­ket­ing algo­rithms what ads will go into a par­tic­u­lar web­page or YouTube video, and the adver­tis­er pays Google which then pays the author or pub­lish­er.) With affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing the author or pub­lish­er choos­es the affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing ads and gets paid through an affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing net­work (bro­ker).
5. There is a vast num­ber of infor­ma­tion prod­ucts giv­en away on the web today. They are sim­ply high-val­ue give­aways to pro­mote a ser­vice or prod­uct, usu­al­ly a spe­cial­ized ser­vice or prod­uct that requires infor­ma­tion for an intel­li­gent pur­chase or for sub­se­quent use. These give­aways are part of intel­li­gent and savvy mar­ket­ing schemes. For instance, you might pub­lish a book­let for real estate investors on how to read prop­er­ty descrip­tions in order to pro­mote your title insur­ance busi­ness. Indeed, this sort of mar­ket­ing has become very wide­spread, and there is high qual­i­ty infor­ma­tion avail­able free in regard to a wide vari­ety of top­ics.
6. Author and pub­lish­ers also give away infor­ma­tion prod­ucts to pro­mote the sales of their more hefty infor­ma­tion prod­ucts. Authors and pub­lish­ers give away free dig­i­tal copies of chap­ters and even free copies of ebooks to gen­er­ate inter­est in buy­ing their books (in either ebooks or print­ed for­mats). Authors blog for free to pro­mote their ebooks or print­ed books. Print pub­lish­ers insist that authors devel­op an author’s “plat­form.” The plat­form is acknowl­edged to be a pro­mo­tion­al plat­form, which may include blog­ging, arti­cle writ­ing, par­tic­i­pa­tion in social media, or oth­er pro­mo­tion­al endeav­ors online.

Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing A good exam­ple is to give away a free chap­ter of a book to entice cus­tomers to buy the book. More­over, a prime tech­nique for mar­ket­ing a book is to give away as many free copies of the book as pos­si­ble in order to get a buzz (word of mouth) going about the book. Those that hear about the book but don’t know how to get a free copy will buy it. If you need to give away 20,000 ebooks to sell 10,000, that’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly a bad deal; but it’s cer­tain­ly a deal you can’t match with print­ed books and still make mon­ey.

So gen­er­at­ing rev­enue is eas­i­er than one might expect. There are plen­ty of tools to assist one in gen­er­at­ing the most rev­enue for the least amount of mar­ket­ing effort. Fig­ure out demand and give con­sumers what they want for free. What a great busi­ness mod­el! The sales resis­tance is low.

Demand Marketing

Although mar­ket­ing pub­lish­ing prod­ucts is not the favorite activ­i­ty of authors, it’s easy to learn and easy to do. And it goes with the ter­ri­to­ry. Whether you do your mar­ket­ing to pro­mote your own pub­lish­ing prod­ucts as an author or whether you do your mar­ket­ing to pro­mote the pub­lish­ing prod­ucts that a pub­lish­er pub­lish­es for you, you will need to do some mar­ket­ing.

For instance, sup­pose you have your heart set on pub­lish­ing a pho­tog­ra­phy book on fire engines. You have pho­tos of hun­dreds of dif­fer­ent fire engines, most of them very col­or­ful and fun to look at. You also have infor­ma­tion on each fire engine. You do a search in Google Adwords Plan­ner and find that there is no demand at all for such a book. You use search words such as “fire engine,” “fire engine pho­tos,” “fire engine spec­i­fi­ca­tions,” “fire engine capa­bil­i­ties.” and you find noth­ing that will work to cre­ate any sig­nif­i­cant demand. In your search­ing via Adwords Plan­ner, how­ev­er, you use the words “fire engine his­to­ry” and find that there’s a healthy demand for such infor­ma­tion.

You have much of the data and enough exper­tise to write a book, com­plete with the req­ui­site pho­tos, that will sat­is­fy the demand. You will have to choose from all your fire engine pho­tos and infor­ma­tion a pro­gres­sion that demon­strates the his­to­ry of fire engines. And you will have to do some his­tor­i­cal research. That’s not the book that you want to write, but it’s a book that’s not only with­in your capa­bil­i­ties but one that is in demand.

Thus, by using Adwords Plan­ner you have avoid­ed the throw-it-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks tech­nique of pub­lish­ing. You can find out exact­ly what peo­ple are search­ing for and sat­is­fy the demand. If you’re good writer, like to write, and hope to make a liv­ing writ­ing, sat­is­fy­ing demand might not be the ide­al life. Almost any author would rather write what they want to write rather than write what read­ers want. But sat­is­fy­ing demand can be a finan­cial­ly reward­ing career for doing what you like to do (i.e., write).

Google Adwords Plan­ner is not the only tool avail­able to dis­cov­er demand. A savvy author or pub­lish­er will seek out oth­er ways to dig­i­tal­ly ascer­tain demand effec­tive­ly and effi­cient­ly.

Each body of knowl­edge has its own effec­tive for­mat. For instance, some infor­ma­tion is best con­veyed through videos while oth­er infor­ma­tion is best con­veyed via writ­ing or even an audio pre­sen­ta­tion. Like­wise, each pub­lish­ing prod­uct has its own most effec­tive mix of mar­ket­ing. You might reach most con­sumers by using affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing for one infor­ma­tion prod­uct, while video mar­ket­ing is most effec­tive for anoth­er infor­ma­tion prod­uct. There is no one-size-fits-all for mar­ket­ing.

Authors and Publishers

What should authors and pub­lish­ers think about the new demand pub­lish­ing? Those who are used to writ­ing and pub­lish­ing print­ed books might think of it as a big set­back in pub­lish­ing. After all, books (and sim­i­lar lengthy print­ed pub­li­ca­tions) have been the inspi­ra­tion of human­i­ty since ancient Greek times. But lengthy infor­ma­tion prod­ucts are sim­ply obso­lete for many pur­pos­es. In fact, the lengthy print­ed for­mats were dic­tat­ed by phys­i­cal and eco­nom­ic real­i­ties that result­ed in a type of one-size-fits-all pack­age. In mod­ern times the size of a print­ed book to be pub­lished eco­nom­i­cal­ly has been 200–600 pages.

In the dig­i­tal realm, the sub­ject mat­ter deter­mines size and for­mat rather than the phys­i­cal and eco­nom­ic req­ui­sites of print­ing on paper. This cre­ates huge oppor­tu­ni­ties for authors and pub­lish­ers.

Authors and pub­lish­ers can pro­vide straight-to-the-point writ­ings on sub­ject mat­ter that’s in demand. They can pro­vide such writ­ings free to con­sumers. And they can get paid for their effort by the var­i­ous means out­lined above. More­over, they can use such pub­li­ca­tions to lead into oth­er infor­ma­tion prod­ucts, which are free to con­sumers (and paid for by adver­tis­ing) or sold to con­sumers at very rea­son­able prices, prices low­er than pub­li­ca­tions in print.

For instance, sup­pose there is a per­son who has anger prob­lems, and he knows it. This par­tic­u­lar per­son is imme­di­ate­ly con­cerned that his anger prob­lem is affect­ing his job per­for­mance and mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to get along with oth­er employ­ees (peo­ple have talked to him). His imme­di­ate need is not for a book on anger man­age­ment in gen­er­al but for a specif­i­cal­ly focused short writ­ing on how to man­age anger in the work­place. That’s what he’s most like­ly to acquire imme­di­ate­ly.

Nonethe­less, once he acquires and reads a good and use­ful writ­ing on man­ag­ing anger in the work­place, he’s like­ly to expand his inter­est to addi­tion­al top­ics cov­er­ing oth­er anger prob­lems he almost cer­tain­ly has:

• Man­ag­ing anger in per­son­al rela­tion­ships
• Anger man­age­ment at home
• Anger man­age­ment for sports
• Avoid­ing anger and frus­tra­tion in rais­ing chil­dren
• Etc.

The writ­ings might be online mag­a­zine (zine) arti­cles, blogs, ebook­lets, email newslet­ters, and even ebooks. One leads to anoth­er, but each serves what the angry per­son needs and wants (demands). The per­son is not required to obtain (buy) a pub­li­ca­tion (print­ed book) that includes a lot of sub­ject mat­ter that’s not direct­ly rel­e­vant to their imme­di­ate and spe­cif­ic sit­u­a­tion.

There are many more advan­tages to dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing than just appro­pri­ate size. For exam­ple, in a pub­li­ca­tion that requires pho­tos, one can include many more pho­tos at lit­tle addi­tion­al pub­li­ca­tion cost, some­thing one can’t do in print.

Thus, authors and pub­lish­ers can break free of tra­di­tion­al forms in pub­lish­ing and respond to con­sumer demand effi­cient­ly and lucra­tive­ly by using dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy. It’s just a mat­ter of deliv­er­ing what peo­ple need and doing it with focused prod­ucts that gen­er­ate leads to oth­er relat­ed infor­ma­tion prod­ucts and ser­vices. The key is to dis­cov­er demand and then respond to the demand.

Stories

What about sto­ries? Well, this is a blog post about infor­ma­tion prod­ucts, not sto­ries. How you extrap­o­late this demand mark­ing infor­ma­tion to sto­ries is anoth­er sto­ry alto­geth­er.

Conclusion

The throw-it-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks pub­lish­ing mod­el didn’t work very well. There were lim­it­ed means of dis­cov­er­ing demand with­in rea­son­able expense para­me­ters. Many books pub­lished did not sell well, and the num­ber of books pub­lished was con­strained. Few books received the mar­ket­ing nec­es­sary for sales suc­cess. In the dig­i­tal world, how­ev­er, demand is dis­cov­er­able, ebooks (and oth­er infor­ma­tion prod­ucts in dig­i­tal form) are less expen­sive to repli­cate, and ebooks can be inex­pen­sive­ly mar­ket­ed and dis­trib­uted.

In a world that’s rapid­ly tran­si­tion­ing from paper to LED screens, authors and pub­lish­ers can look for­ward to finan­cial suc­cess by using and devel­op­ing new busi­ness mod­els that start with dis­cov­er­ing demand and use dig­i­tal pro­duc­tion to pub­lish in new for­mats.