New Interactive E-Book Publishing Platform

Hi all, I follow PaidContent.org a lot, they are a great resource on what is going on with digital publishing and the entire industry. Things are changing fast, it is becoming the wild west of publishing out there. We now have all kinds of options for producing our books, print on demand, e-book, pdf, iPad, Nook, with video, sound, all kinds of things. We will be writing about these in upcoming posts.

For today we have a great post from PaidContent.org on a new cloud based platform called Inkling Habitat from Inkling.com. A few weeks ago Apple announced their iBook Author platform and this looks similar but on a bigger scale. We have been also testing out the BookCreator app for the iPad and it is pretty cool.

Here is the article from PaidContent. "Free Interactive E-Book Publishing Platform-From Inkling, Not Apple"

Is Barnes & Noble Headed for Bankruptcy?

I was asked this question recently, do you think Barnes & Nobel is heading to bankruptcy? I think at some point it probably is, they continue to loose money as the book publishing market changes. When you walk into a Barnes & Noble store the first thing you see is the counter for the Nook e-reader, I noticed my local BN store doubled the size of their Nook counter over Christmas and now you have to walk around it to get into the store, The Nook is advertised on their bags, their boxes, on TV, it is like they are advertising the end of their company. Don't buy a book, buy a Nook and put the books out of business, don't come to our store.

I think the future of book publishing isn't the end of the book it is the end of the distribution element, the end of the national book store. This is the same thing that happen in graphic design, type went first, then photo, then printing. Everything is turning digital and on-line. The physical elements went away but we still do the job.

I don't think books will go away, how they are delivered and in what format will be changing a lot. There won't be any place to stumble across those fun books, the browse experience, the coffee table books, the little more unusual books. In fact I think that the books we discover in the book store and go oh wow will gradually fade away because there won't be any place to find them and it won't be worth printing them. Products need distribution to be successful. Maybe this means the rebirth of independent bookstores or what I think, more books in speciality stores. Cook books in cooking stores, home improvement books in Home Depot.

The Future of Publishing
I believe that in the not to distance future your success as a publisher or author will be your ability to manage the web, social media, and email sides of your business. People will have to stumble across your book on-line as they are looking for the things they love. You search on fly fishing and oh there is a cool book on fly fishing. Handling your niche marketing will become very important.  This is a challenge because managing the web is work but if you can do it you will have a huge market to work with, think global. With the explosion of print-on-demand and e-books, tablet, Kindle and Nook, etc. we will have a lot of different ways to get our products out. Books will become more than just a cover and some paper, they will become interactive and up-dateable.

What this also means is if you can do all this stuff you can be successful because there isn't any inventory anymore or shipping or really any of the hard costs that publishing house had to deal with. There is very little cost to setting up a publishing business, every author can have a publishing business. Amazon, Lulu, Apple, and Barnes & Nobel are your printers, distributors and bill collectors.

It is easy to get started, we are producing ours.

5 Tips to Help You Sell Your Book on Amazon

Bruce takes you through 5 quick tips to help you sell you book on Amazon.com

New eBook, Vote 2012 Presidential Election Coloring Book

We pulled together a fun book for the upcoming election, Vote 2012, Presidential Election Coloring Book. A fun coloring book for all ages to get us all involved in the process.

Get ready for the 2012 US Presidential campaign with the Vote 2012 Presidential Election Coloring Book. Containing over 50 pages you can color of pictures of the major candidates, politics, Americana, US Flags, the White House, the Capital, historical locations and election themes. Get your crayons and colored pencils out and get in on the fun. Our book is great for school students and anyone interested in following the election and the issues of the day and having a little fun.

Includes drawings of the nine main candidates: President Barack Obama for the Democrats, and the Republican Presidential Candidates for 2012: Rep. Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Speaker Newt Gingrich, Ambassador Jon Huntsman, Rep. Ron Paul, Governor Rick Perry, Governor Mitt Romney and Senator Rick Santorum. You can pick up a copy today from our eStore.

Boston Internet Marketing Meetup, Rapid Ebook Session 3

Thank you to everyone who came last night to our third and final live session of the Rapid Ebook Publishing to Email course. We have a special thanks to Bill Smith and Neve of ICL Imaging who completed the entire course and have launched their ebook and mailing list. In the session last night we interviewed Bill on the steps he took and what he learned.

Lew Sabbag in conversation and other attendees networking before the meetup.

 Bill Smith and Neve of ICL Imaging with their ebook, congratulations Bill on pulling it all together.

Bruce Jones speaking during the meetup. A huge thank you to Foley Hoag for the use of their conference room.

1. Essential Steps for the Rapid Ebook and Email Publishing System

This blog is about writing and producing an ebook that you can use as a free gift to build a mailing list, use for learning about your market or testing a market. The course takes you through this process. The following series of posts will be a shorter version of the entire program that is broken down in the Modules in this blog.

The basic system for building an online presence, developing a book, publishing and distributing it and, at the same time, building a mailing list to go along with the book takes a bit of work but is very doable. And also other than the mailing list hosting, this technique is basically free.

In the course of writing this system I put together a number of short books to illustrate and learn about how to do this. You could either start with an existing book or product or let one result from the effort and things you learned from this process. The latter is what I did, but I also use this process to promote a book.

The eBook / eMail System
This system consists of a web presence on your topic, either a website or a blog, it doesn’t matter.  Setting up a way to collect an email from a subscriber in exchange for some information usually delivered as a pdf file. Continue connecting with the subscriber and then selling them some additional product or service or using the knowledge to build or develop new products.


Essential Parts

1. Website or Blog with Your Content
For the system to work you need some kind of web presence where you talk about what you do, show pictures, blog about it, video, etc. If you are working on or have a book then blog the book, page by page. Lots of pages, lots of posts, every post is a web page. Don’t worry about people just reading this and doing nothing else, most people don’t want to read a book this way but Google loves all these posts on one topic. A site like this attracts the search engines. If you are doing cooking, blog every recipe, if it is a fiction book-write the book on line, information, then show all the different aspects of your product or topic.

One of the things I do is sell editable maps for business presentations, graphic designers, education, schools and homeschoolers. My site www.freeusandworldmaps.com has samples of all the maps I sell. I sell the editable ones, but I give away the jpg images for free. Around these, I put ads and links for my pay products.

Next post will talk about using an ebook to attract attention

How to Make and eBook and Set Up Your Email Gathering System

A busy Labor Day weekend with a lot of ebook information being shared. I gave a short presentation this weekend at the Boston Media Makers monthly meetup on the entire, using an ebook to build an email list system. As we work on rewriting and pulling all the modules into a teachable program I thought I would write out what I talked about in the presentation.  You can read the entire piece on ebook to email page here on the site.

Writing a Book in 4 Hours

Lots of people are getting their books out the door, great tips on getting started from the ultimatebookcoach and Kirsten

Figuring Out How to Build an Auto Responder Series

A key part of any email system is how you manage the communication with a potential customer after they have signed up on your list. To many emails and you become spammy, not enough and they forget all about you. All your visitor really wanted was just the free ebook or information you were giving them. What we are looking for is a new customer. So the order of the emails and how many you send out is important. .

Friday we spent some time trying to figure this out. Some things I have learned from building these kinds of systems.
1. Try and make the emails relate to the ebook and the subject matter.
2. Asking a few simple questions about the ebook can be very valuable, such as, was it helpful, what was missing, did it solve your problem, the goal is to try and get a dialog going.
3. I try to make the emails an extension of the book, add additional tips or information.
4. Remind the person to download the book, give them the link again, and then again. It is surprising how many people that sign up never download your book.
5. Add some coupons in the book.
6. Put an affiliate link or two in the book.
7. Coming up with an auto responder series can be very hard, I find I spend all my energy creating the stuff and then have a really hard time with the followup. But my success has come from the followup 

What things have you learned from sending out emails to your customers?

Shuffling the Rapid Ebook course Modules Around

We have been working on the Modules for the course and looking at the ones we have and if they make sense. We think we are basically right but with some tweaking. The course shows you how to research, write, produce, host and deliver an ebook that you can use as a free gift in exchange for someone signing up for your mailing list. We show you how to set up your email host, mailing list and build an auto responder series so that you can continue to keep in touch with your client or potential client.

1. Course introduction
2. Researching your customer and topic
3. Writing your book
4. Producing your book
5. Distributing, what format it is in and how you deliver it
6. Leads, email list, email host
7. Communication, Auto responder
8. What else can you do with it.