Publishing

How Will Publishers Humanize the Ebook?

April 13, 2010 By Charles 1 Comment

The delectable scent of fresh pages, the curious art of the dust jacket, the weight of a title in our hands—how will the ebook ever measure up to its sliced-tree ancestor? The immediate and obvious answer is it can’t—there is no nostalgic substitute for ‘curling up with our favorite (paper) book’. But that’s certainly not an answer future readers will accept as we enter the age of digital reading. Ebooks must offer a Proustian experience equal to if not better than that of traditional books. The publishers who pick up on this will be the ones who stay in business. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Business and Marketing Tagged With: amazon kindle, e-book, ebooks, electronic publishing, human experience, humanize, iPad, iphone, kindle, mass media, printing books, Proustian reading experience, publishers, Publishing, traditional books

3 Proven Ways to Succeed in Publishing

February 22, 2010 By Charles 2 Comments

As I’ve mentioned before, now is a good time to start a commercial publishing operation. Startup costs are low, marketing is free and of course — great content is always in demand. The question that has everyone stumped, however, is how to make publishing profitable. Print as we now know it is a slippery slope. Slapped-up Adsense and banner ads aren’t cutting it, either. And those magic, get-rich blogging formulas — so tragically 2008. Here are 3 models that work. Of course, success with any one of these rely heavily on editorial integrity and what David Meerman Scott calls [Read more...]

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: authors, blog, e-book, ebooks, electronic publishing, modeling, online magazine, online magazines, Publishing, revenue model

Where Content Marketing Meets Branding

September 25, 2009 By Charles 4 Comments

After years of gawking over web design, flash animation, scripting languages and relational databases, I think we can now safely agree the internet is made of and for content (it’s King alright). It’s the impetus for nearly all innovation on the web. But if you’re a content specialist like me, the career path feels a lot like the Wild West: opportunistic (make thousands a day from home with Google!), risky (do I blow my next paycheck on the latest and greatest blogging course?) and discouraging (out of work writers/journalists/editors). Thankfully a few qualified content specialist genres exist. Let’s briefly examine them: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Business and Marketing Tagged With: blog monetization, bloggers, branded content marketing, careers on content, content strategy, Monetization, Publishing

How to Walk the Walk of Content Marketing

September 18, 2009 By Charles 1 Comment

Be a publisher first, marketer second.

When your content is stellar, your marketing become easier. Certainly not the other way around. Keep a healthy, obsessive focus on this.

Actually do something.

Stop talking. Go out and build a site around some great, marketable content. Publish it. Get people passionate about it. Sell them something cool. Measure it. Do it again.

Be experimental.

There are a few emerging theories on content strategy and marketing, but it’s your job to go out and test them as well as try out some of your own stuff. Content marketing is a slowly blossoming industry and now is the time to take some chances.

Limit your consulting.

This may sound strange to some, but I see more value in setting up your content marketing business as a B2C rather than B2B. This means building content-rich sites for consumers rather than helping other businesses set up their own websites. There’s higher risk but much higher reward.

Think Big, Act Big

If you can build one successful site, you can probably build another. And another. And another. And so on. Pretty soon you could be sitting on a small publishing empire. Imagine the possibilities.

Photo by wili_hybrid.

Filed Under: Business and Marketing, Writing Tagged With: content marketing, new media business, Publishing