Help other publishers

Publishing is not a zero-sum game.  If a customer were to only purchase one product (book, song, etc.) in their lifetime, then yes, that customer would no longer be available for any other publisher or vendor.  But it doesn't work that way, of course.

We all know that consumers consume, and some of them do it quite often and in mass quantities.  However, what they consume and how they consume it is fickle.  There was a time when consuming media meant a newspaper or a book.  Times have shifted toward multi-media information from the internet, electronically printed books, audio books, movies, etc.  So help generate a feeding frenzy for what you have now.

What this means is that as a publisher of a particular media type or genre, it behooves you to embrace your competitors!  If everyone but you abandons a field, you are alone, so you surely do not want your customers leaving your area of interest.

Seek out your competitors and start communicating.  Perhaps you could team up to develop a convention or even a #tweetchat.  When you brainstorm with your competitors new comrades, you will come up with many ways to target this common market that can be mutually beneficial.

Don't think that you have to "go it alone," as that is not the best way of doing it.

I'd love to hear your experiences of working with other publishers.

Independent publishers' days are numbered

In yesterday's post I wrote that most current eBooks are simple text, whereas multimedia eBooks are the real future. Since everything is in transition, know that I do believe there is a large market for text eBooks. I'm just pointing out that eBooks are becoming mainstream, so if you want to be on the leading edge, you have to go out further. Text eBooks will become the dominant force over the next few years. But what about beyond that?

We know the story. When radio came out, people said newspapers were dead. When television came out, radio was a goner. Now that movies over the internet are becoming more popular, broadcast and cable television will lose the spotlight.

You might be inclined to say that none of the obsolescent media have gone away. Although that is true on the surface, the fact is that their value has been eroded. Which is cheaper advertisement today, not counting production costs: three minutes of radio or television?

In terms of production costs, those has gone through the roof. When you add pictures to sound, the cost goes up. Likewise, when you add video to eBooks, the costs will rise.

Although anyone today can compose a novel and place it up for sale as an eBook all by themselves, collaboration is the key to greater works. Do you want to have nice photos, video, or the programming required for interaction? Here is where the networker or larger publisher will have the advantage. Greater investment will be required for the future's interactive multimedia. Publishers will have to hire the talent or contract for it. If independent publishing means an individual doing it all, they'll be left behind.

Simple eBooks are not the future of publishing

Most people are pretty sure that traditional print publishing will be overtaken by electronic publishing. Currently, electronic book sales are a small challenge to print book sales (1% and growing), but as more people become comfortable with reading books on an electronic handheld device, this will change. The convenience factor of having all of your books with you at all times, even if the actual storage is on the internet and you only have a window into them, will overwhelm the value of the printed page. Stuck at an airport? You're not stuck with paying airport prices for a limited selection of books. Buy from more online, and start reading within minutes.

But I think that the current eBooks are kind of funny. They remind me of so many technology transitions of the past.

When I was young, my family moved to the country where we could explore far and wide. For me, one of the most amazing things we found was in the old decrepit barn. Tucked away in the corner, and camouflaged by color and cobwebs, was a small electric lantern. Yes, electric lantern. You see, prior to electricity, folks used oil-filled lanterns with large globes and wire bails (hoops for carrying). So it appeared that when the manufacturer of this lantern decided on an electric wire and lightbulb, they packaged it into a form familiar and presumed convenient for the existing purchasers of lanterns. How quaint!

Likewise, most of us have seen the original automobiles that look like horseless carriages. These are evolutionary changes, and so it is with the majority of current eBooks. Most are just transcribed books from print.

What do I want from eBooks, then? I always want more value. The convenience of buying and receiving instantly is great. The convenience of having my reading with me whereever I am is luxurious. But I'm reading them on a handheld computer that has much more potential. Yes, I'm talking about multimedia in all its rich, interactive forms.

There are a few good examples out there. Take a look at "Buddy the Bus" for the iPhone. This app uses full color, can read to you, and offers five language choices for both the text and the audio. And if you consider the now aging Leap Frog book reader, where you can touch the props on the pages and have them yelp, you can imagine books that go far beyond our old printed pop-up books. It won't be just kids who will appreciate full animation. Can you visualize the advantages of a "How to fix" book with video clips?

Come on; use your imagination, and you can be a leader in this expanding world of publishing!

Automating sales orders

Did I fail to mention that we released DashBook 3.0? I tend to get much more excited about "the next thing," so after the beta, I'm ready to move on. More information about the changes for DashBook v3 are available here.

So that DashBook can calculate royalties or licensing fees, it needs to have events or transactions that cause the calculation. We made the brilliant decision to group these events together in what we call an "order." Amazing, right?

Well, many publishers are not very focused on the individual orders; they just want their royalties calculated. They may not be interested in knowing about orders to know who receives a shipment. They may have no desire for DashBook to handle inventory changes, especially if they are using electronic books (ebooks) or a print on demand (POD) printer.

Well, our upcoming update to DashBook not only handles this issue for publishers not focused on orders, but also helps to automate a time consuming and potentially error prone process. DashBook version 3.1 will add the ability to import the order information directly from the electronic reports that publishers receive from their distributors!

With a simple click - boom! a new order is created, containing all of the products sold and returned, according to the distributor's sales report. Our initial work includes the most popular book distributors used by publishers not handling inventory. Print on demand is led by Lightning Source, and ebooks are spread across Fictionwise, Amazon, and MobiPocket. We also received a sample from All Romance Ebooks (I understand Romance is a pretty big category for ebooks), so we've included them as well.

Please go to our website, www.DashBook.com to read more and request a beta to try this new feature yourself. Our new import is customizable, so you can add your own distributor's report for importing. If you do, please send the map file to us so that we can provide it to others. Or, contact us to create a map or import from your source.

Thanks for helping us make DashBook even more powerful!

Royalty Calculations for your Enterprise

We will release DashBook version 2 soon, and one of the advances we made was supporting SQL Server in a new level of DashBook. Although DashBook was designed to handle multiple users, we had not finished our quality assurance testing of multiuser when version 1 was shipped, so we did not offer a multiuser version for sale.

So in addition to our inexpensive single-user license of DashBook, we will now have two additional levels. Multiuser will allow multiple simultaneous users to communicate with the DashBook database as it resides in a Microsoft Access database, while our Enterprise license allows multiple users to access the DashBook database on a SQL Server.

We were very pleased to see that even for a single user, running the database on SQL Server can result in a much faster system. Unfortunately, SQL statements are not very compatible between Access and SQL, but we've done the work so that not only will DashBook be able to process your data in either, but all of our included reports now have dual SQL statements so that any report will automatically use the correct SQL for your given database.

Now DashBook can handle businesses from small startup through large enterprise!

Beta has begun!

We have now released Dashbook into the world of beta testing. Dashbook is a Windows program that assists publishers with the sales of products such as books by tracking inventory, sales, returns, and royalties. Although there already are programs that do this, Dashbook does it better.

Dashbook was designed from its core as a Windows program, taking advantage of tabs to organize related information to reduce clutter and confusion, and it is infused with the innate ability to communicate through the web thanks to the Microsoft .Net Framework platform.

We have spent a lot of time designing Dashbook to work intuitively for both publishers and authors. Even though we worked closely with an established publisher, Trivium Publishing, we are anxious to get this into the hands of many more to learn how we can further improve our product.

Our site, www.dashbook.com has a sales tab which allows anyone to participate in the beta. Please download it, try it out, and give us feedback so that we can make it better for you.

Thanks!