Re: Attn: Gordon: Your "Electronics for Dummies"

Gordon McComb wrote:

mlw wrote:
It is a serious problem. The media business is going digital, it has too.
Unfortunately, digital files can not be made un-copyable any more than
water can be made unwet. Pay for media, books, magazines, etc. are all
suffering.

The problem seems to be that the business model on which this is founded
is dead. The publisher's business is based on a difficulty of
deliverability. Now that everything is digital and the internet can pass
megabytes in seconds, there is no real way publishers can make money. It
is a dying business, much the same way that you no longer see hay stands
on the side of the road for horses. It will take time, but all
limitations will be artificial and something that can be circumvented.

The next person to make a billion dollars will come up with a way to pay
for the creation of media creation.

Why don't you beat the people to the punch, create a web site for the
book and smear it with google ads? Make it a good site, indexed,
searchable, with samples etc. You may end up making more money with the
site than with a publisher.

I can even host it if you can't find anyone.

Thanks for the ideas. I've already pretty much dropped out of writing
traditional published books because it's so hard to make a living at it.
There are a few old hands still in the biz, but they tend to fall into
either of two categories: They're merely revising existing books (far
easier than writing a new one each time) or they write books to further
another type of business, like consulting, speaking, or newsletter
publishing. I recognize almost none of the names on the roster of
authors represented by my agent.

Yea, I have done some stuff with mags and a couple book publishers in the
past. Nothing in my name, but collaborations. Not my day job, so to speak,
but a little extra income. Right now, there is nothing. I've gotten calls
from a few publishers asking if I had any ideas or knew anyone.

Practically every subject has a book and no one is buying books.


The thing about the ad-supported Web page concept is if it really paid
better than traditional publishing, everyone would be doing it. There
are no hidden secrets in this biz, and the action goes where the money
is. Publishers would be rushing to put their books up on their own pages
as, afterall, it's a lot cheaper than printing on paper.

Yes and no. I can't name names, but some big companies are looking into
this. The problem with paper publishers is that they don't get it yet.

Conceptually, the sort of books you write are not well suited for paper
publication. They are best suited for an interactive web site that can be
searched and read as needed. Also, web sites are easy to update with
improvements and commentary.

Without giving too much away (funny how we all have our secrets), IMHO the
business of informative and HOWTO books is dead, and rightfully so. The
internet replaces that sort of reading much more naturally. The problem
isn't what you write or do, Gordon, but it is the format and medium in
which you do it.

I believe there is still a strong market for good writers who do research
and present ideas well. The hard part is inventing the facilitation of the
product. The encouraging part is that you, as the author, can self publish
and take the middle men (publishers, teamsters, retail outlest, etc.) out,
but the discouraging part is that there is no longer a publisher to give
advances or manage the marketing.


There are still plenty of risks -- probably more than in traditional
publishing -- in ad-supported Web publishing. There are black hats who
know how to steal your keywords, dropping you from the top-10 Google
position to the bottom 100...or worse. There are even those who steal
pages outright, and change them with their own Gooooooogle ads. These
people know how to add and drop Google AdSense accounts faster than
Google can keep up with them. In a world where there are crooks with a
computer, really nothing is safe.

Well, as you have seen, that is true no matter what. There is always abuse
and cheating.

I've already mentioned here that I am working on something different
outside the traditional book market, but that's about all I can say
right now. I won't make a billion dollars with it, but if it helps put
new tires on my wife's car, I'm happy.


Cool, let us know.
.

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