Free Self-Publishing Event for Readers in Britain

There's a free one-day self-publishing fair in London on Sunday, August 3, 2008, from noon to 6pm. Check the link for more info.

Blog Ahead of Time

One of the big challenges in blogging is to keep it going day after day - or even day after every other or every third day. Miss frequency, and you don't gain readers. But posting more often means having time. Here's a trick that just became available in Blogger.com (which I use), and which has been around for some time in some of the other blogging engines: post-dated publishing.


What you're reading today I wrote on Sunday, when I had a bit of time and was knocking off some blog entries in advance. I write when I have a chance, and then set the date and time when I want the post to appear, and then publish. Voila! Instant literary (or not) time travel. It doesn't solve the overall issue of time commitment, but it does let you work on your schedule a bit more. Then, if something comes up that is timely and you want to cover that instead, get to the post before it goes up, change the date, and keep it for another time. In Blogger, you get to this by going to Blogger in Draft; that's the version with all the new features that haven't quite made it to regular Blogger. As for other blogging engines, you're on your own there.


I'm still experimenting with this, and the feature doesn't seem completely solid yet in the way it works. But, hey, it's free, so I'm not going to argue

Comparing POD Choices

Someone on a private writers' discussion group mentioned a site that I pass along. Print on Demand Publishing was put together by some NWU members. I haven't double-checked the facts, but it does bring up some basic condierations of using print on demand and compares some of the more popular providers.

Learning Everyday Business Analysis

A writer on an online forum recently noted in passing that Writers Digest seems to have shifted its editorial focus, targeting would-be writers rather than experienced working writers. There's a lot to learn from this observation, and much to be gleaned for the way that I think writing is moving.

Why WD would shift audience definition comes down to money. Compared the the number of people who think they would like to be writers, I suspect there is a relatively small pool of those actually in the business.

The publisher needs to make a lot of money to pay for articles, marketing, design, production, printing, and everything else that is part of publishing. The money has to come from a combination of advertising and subscriptions. Remembering the concept of different business models in the writing and publishing world, either you pay, the audience pays, or someone else pays. One aspect of third parties paying is that they must think they'll get more back in business or value than they money they pay to the publisher. In the case of a publication aimed at writers, I suspect the expectations are low, because we are, let's face it, such an incredibly cheap lot.

That means the money coming from readers - subscriptions and news stand sales - are going to be the big driver of revenue. There are two ways of getting this money: charging a small number of people a lot, or charging a lot of people relatively little. In other words, you have to balance real niche publishing (vehicles that address the interests of small audiences who badly want something) against mass market (getting less money per copy, but selling many).

To make niche publishing work, you'd have to charge a premium price and get the audience to pay. Think of it this way: you have a collection of four targeted articles in a month. Each runs 1500 words. If the articles' writers are going to get even $1 a word, that's $6000 in labor. A subscription base of 1000 would have to pay at least $6 a month, or $72 for a subscription, just to cover the writing labor, with no money for design, marketing and sales, and production. Roughly double that to cover other costs and leave some profit for the publisher, and consider whether the audience members will pay $140 or $150 a year. Are you providing something of such value that it becomes worth it to them? And are they the type of people who will recognize the value and appreciate it?

There are newsletters that get have these types of subscription fees, and some that charge much more. But I'm not sure writers are good candidates for being willing to pay that sort of premium. And so, the publications like WD fall back to the least common denominator, publishing articles for people who aren't in the business but wish they were. Get an audience of 20,000, and the money you need from an annual subscription of those four articles (at least distributed electronically) goes down to $7 or $7.50 - low enough that many people will take it on impulse.

I think this is an example of the types of calculations we're all going to have to start making. What is the audience for a particular piece of writing? What will they pay? How much does it cost to reach them? Quotidian business planning and analysis is as necessary as a firm grasp on grammar, and a darn sight more important than excellent spelling. You can always use a spell checker, but there's no such thing as a business checker.

A Note From the Music World

Debra Cash sent another great link - this time to an article by musician David Byrne (at one time in the Talking Heads). He analyzes the current music business and identifies six distinct business models that musicians can consider for their recorded music. It's not that a writer can make direct use of all this, but many of the issues are similar, and the important thing is to see an example of a creator looking at his or her markets with a sharp business eye.

His analysis makes makes me think that there are (at least) nine basic models for writers:

• Doing someone else's writing Whether ghosting or true corporate work, there is a class of writing in which you sell your skills, but not necessarily the writing you want to do. You might get credit, or not. You might get royalties, or not. In general, you should charge more, because you're not getting much of anything else out of this. (Note that charging can include royalties, in something like a book deal.)


• Sell all rights for a fixed fee The positive part is that, if you are getting an economically reasonable amount of money, you avoid having to do the resales and don't have to wait for months or years to collect additional money. Unfortunately, writers often settle for sums that don't approach the potential value of the work, and they also give up all control over the writing going forward.


• Sell all rights for a combination of fixed fee and royalty In this case, you get an ongoing payment stream while, presumably, not having to sell. That can be good if the company obtaining the rights is good at what it does, and bad if they couldn't sell a blanket to a shivering person. Also, you still lose control over the writing.


• License all non-exclusive rights You don't get as much up-front (presumably), but you also don't completely lock yourself out of doing something else with the writing. It means little if you don't consider what else you might do with your intellectual property.


• Judiciously sublicense rights License a small set of rights, possibly allowing one publisher to make one type of use and letting another do something different. In this scenario, you need to understand the concepts of rights and how to divide them into sets that can be profitable but that won't preclude each other. (For example, if you license an exclusive in a major city to one publisher, you can't make a sale to a national publication that would require distribution in the same area.


• Self-publishing, subscription-based Here you produce your own content - whether in print, on the web, in an exectronic format, through skywriting - and get your audience to pay. You keep control of everything, but also have all the production and distribution expenses. It's maximum profit, but maximum expense, as well. If something doesn't sell, you are the only one out money.


• Self-publishing, advertising-based You produce the material and get advertisers to support it. You see this model in web sites, in newsletters, and you might eventually see it in books. (It's come and go in that world before, although not successfully.)


• Self-publishing, subsidized You write and get someone else to pay. It's different from advertising in that there is a closer arrangement. One entity, whether company or individual, pays to make the material available to others. We saw this model in art and music for centuries, in which Rembrandts and Mozarts needed patrons or wealthy nobles who would pay for their creativity. There's the potential of losing control here, particularly when dealing with a corporate sponsor.


• Self-publishing, self-subsidized In this model, you'd give away what you have because what you can get in return - whether speaking engagements, conversions of ebook readers to print copies, consulting work, and so on - more than makes up for the investment you've made in time and money in giving your writing away. Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and creator of the phrase "the long tail," is apparently touting the concept of giving things away now, as you can see in this interview in Media Magazine.

There is no absolute answer for any of us, and there may well be many other models I'm not addressing. The issue is to start thinking - to get outside the "I write and then a publisher pays me" assumptions that may become even more economically unviable than they are today.

Turning Niche Publishing into $20 Million Annually

This is a pointer to a USA Today article about how an ex-musician turned graphic designer took his interest in one piece of software and turned it into a personal duchy - as I'm not sure that $20 million gross quite translates into an empire. (Then again, I'd be happy with a duchy, or even an upscale neighborhood.)

The important point isn't the amount of money in this case, but seeing that writers don't have to depend on publishers. It comes down to the degree of profitability you can see from niche publishing. Say you get paid $1,200 for an article on small business. If you added a bit more information, could you turn it into something worth $1.95 to a specific segment of businesses that have the particular problem you address? It would take about 615 copies sold to make the same amount.

Yes, the trick is finding the way to make the sales - and that might include tossing the idea of doing one article, combining a few different takes, and creating a $7.95 e-book. And then you only have to sell 151 copies. Catch enough of an audience and you might even switch back to traditional publishing if it makes sense. Or maybe you'll find a way to have ads accompany the book, or an ad-supported video on the subject. But you're already selling your ideas to editors. When you broaden the potential market to the readers, you have a much easier time of some group of them saying yes.

What's necessary is to stop thinking the same old way and to stop assuming that you have to work for someone else. That may seem a strange thing to say to freelance writers, but many continue to display attitudes of dependence once they've gone out on their own, waiting for someone else to make the decision, to give them the permission to succeed. If editors say no, go to other editors, or go around the editors. Directly address readers and sell to them. You could even do that with articles you've already written. Or you could put some of those together as a free e-book and give it away as a promotion to drive traffic to your site, or to help bring in sales for another book.

It's a different way of thinking. Instead of being the supplicant, you become the business owner and act accordingly. You don't have to succeed overnight. While you're still doing editorial or corporate work, start experimenting. Try different things and see how they go. Keep the ones that work and those that don't. And don't forget a big lesson: write about something that you enjoy and where you either have or could develop some expertise. Like Scott Kelby, you might find yourself with an empire. Or a duchy. Or a comfortable neighborhood.