Digital Directions: The Top 10 Ways to Kill Your Publishing Business
4. For online sales, sell your content—physical and electronic—only on your own Web site.
Channels such as Amazon take too high a percentage of the sale. The Web allows us to sell direct. Disintermediate these channels and benefit from the added margin.
5. Maintain your digital assets only with vendors and channel partners.
You don’t need to manage your content. There is a wide array of parties ready and able to maintain your content assets, including typesetters, printers, digital channel partners and digital asset distributors. Keep all copies of your digital content there. You don’t need to keep a backup copy of your content, do you? After all, should you need to access the right version of the right file, your service provider will surely know where and how to retrieve it, and will happily do so without charge. Right?
6. Determine which titles to distribute electronically only after reviewing physical book sales.
Since there may be incremental costs in e-book preparation, only those titles that have demonstrated strong physical sales should be considered as candidates for e-book distribution. At that point, the necessary licensing and royalty agreements can be secured.
7. Pick an e-book format and stick with it.
For your market, it might be Kindle. Or ePub. In any case, prepare your content for one device only. If readers truly want your e-book, show them where they can purchase the appropriate device.
8. Maintain your final content in PDF only.
PDF is the electronic print solution. It is the best format for ensuring your electronic content looks exactly as it does on the printed page. It is the only format required for completed works.
9. Focus only on efficiency of execution of traditional lines of business.
Kill all new and innovative product initiatives that do not have a track record of predictable revenue. Times are too risky to contemplate destabilizing change or new capital expense. Don’t do anything new.
