Low Cost Digital Publishing Experiments

I've taken quite a few photographs in my life, and between the series of how-to books written for McGraw-Hill and my websites, I've published over a thousand of them. One of the things I've learned is that panoramic pictures almost never capture the same feeling you get when you're looking at some distant attraction. It cost me dozens of rolls of 35 mm film and hundreds of dollars in developing to learn how to frame photographs in the view finder so the final print didn't shout - "Why didn't you move closer, dummy!"

Then the new millennia arrived, and in 2000 I bought a Olympus D-360L, a 1.3 Megapixel camera with no zoom for $300. It took me a couple days to really internalize the fact that taking photographs was now very cheap. In fact, the more I've used the camera over the years, the cheaper each individual photograph costs as it's amortized against the original $300 purchase. I almost feel like NOT taking photographs is costing me money.

Web sites follow the same economics as digital cameras. Once you're paying for a website, adding web pages doesn't cost anything extra. It's NOT adding web pages that makes a website site seem like a waste of money. Starting a website with a half dozen pre-planned pages and never updating it is like buying a digital camera and never even filling up the memory card. Imagine if you had a friend who claimed to be a big photography buff, and every time you visited he just showed you the same half dozen photographs. How often would you go visit him?

The primary value of all this digital stuff to publishers is that it makes it cheap to experiment. Whether you're talking about blogs, eBooks, print-on-demand, eMail newsletters, videos or podcasts, production cost is limited to the first copy. Reproduction, as pirates all know, is basically free. That's why I'm such a strong advocate of the incremental approach to publishing. Why tie up all of your time and money in creating a comprehensive work before you know how it will be received? Take it a web page at a time, see what interests your readers, try to find a compromise between what people want and what you want to give them. The old publishing world said, "It's our way or the highway." On the Internet, the highway is just a click away, so try to unbend a little.

Unfortunately, the ease of creating digital products has led to quite a few con artists "publishing" eBooks that serve no purpose other than enriching the publisher. All it takes is a good sales pitch and some cut-and-pasted together garbage so that the buyer doesn't cry "Fraud" and reverse the charges through their credit card company.

Besides, some of the best digital publishing experiments involve giving work away for free. I try writing about new subjects on a regular basis to see whether there's enough interest for me to start thinking about writing a book, and if that writing isn't always top-notch, at least I'm not charging anything for it. And sometimes the results of a digital experiment will even surprise me. For example, I've known for a decade that my hands are too shaky to take photographs at night (the exposure time is long even for a digital camera), and I know that taking pictures of celestial bodies is a waste of time. But I made the experiment on a bright moon shining through the clouds the other night and was impressed with the result. Click on the small picture for the full size version.

The Day The Self Publisher Took A Vacation

I should have been in New York for Tools of Change this week, as evidenced by an inbox full of invitations to press events, but I stayed home. This is no reflection on Tools of Change, which I think is THE conference for publishers trying to stay ahead of the curve and for working media in the publishing field. However, I'm trying to get away from blogging, and conferences are primarily about networking, establishing relationships. Since I'm not interested in any consulting or speaking work, I don't see the point.

Instead of traveling to Manhattan, I ran five miles this morning, will do laundry this afternoon, and follow-up with McGraw-Hill about getting the rights reverted for the last book I authored for them. "Build Your Own PC - 4th Edition" was published in 2004, and is horrifically obsolete at this point, but they only exhausted the stock from the last print run in recent weeks. I haven't done any writing in that area since 2004 because the original contract (signed in 1998) included a non-compete that's open to interpretation. Rather than interpret, I've just stayed away. But when I get the right reversion, I'll build a couple new PCs for the website, at least it will give me a definable project.

In the meantime, I'm reading the works of Charles Lever, which have the most interesting illustrations I recall seeing in years. Both the plates and the embellishments that start each chapter reflect the text, are well executed and clever. I'm not sure how that's supposed to help me as a self publisher, but it's good for a pleasant few hours every evening.

That's all the news from Northampton, Massachusetts this faux spring day. It took eleven minutes to write, so I think I'm finally on my way to beating the blog disease. All I need now is to see my subscription number start dropping in Google:-)

Wikipedia, eHow and Long Tail Content Factories

Everybody already knows about Wikipedia which has come to dominate the search results for reference information queries, and with good reason. I probably visit Wikipedia more often than any other website, and I've found it to be highly reliable for the subjects I research. Years ago, I worried that Wikipedia would end up stealing all of my how-to web traffic, but Wikipedia is primarily a reference work which steers clear of procedures and doling out advice.

In the past few weeks, it seems like every day there are a couple new articles on eHow.com that link one of my pages in their references. Normally, organic links would be a cause for celebration, but eHow nofollow's their reference links (I just returned the favor) so that search engines ignore the links and don't give the referenced site credit. eHow is the largest property of the Demand Media Network, drawing over 60 million global visitors a month, about two thirds of the Demand Media Network traffic.

If you've never heard of eHow or the Demand Media Network, you might be surprised to see me mentioning them in the same context as Wikipedia. But according to Yahoo! site explorer, eHow.com has published 58,862,418 pages as of the moment, compared to 83,235,428 for Wikipedia.org, and guess who's growing faster. While Wikipedia is way out front for inbound links, they have over 213 million compared to 12 million for eHow, eHow has a special link generating mechanism which should continue to boost them over time. Quantcast ranks eHow the 21st most popular site on the Internet, and Wikipedia in the 9th spot. Alexa shows very different rankings, but the picture captures the trend very well:



eHow is a community based site, where most of the content is written by members who stand to earn a share of the advertising revenue from their articles if they get traffic. I think eHow's own writing guidelines describe the mission of the site best when they state, "The ideal article has from 400 to 600 words including the title, introduction, steps and tips and warnings." The main thrust of their writing advice is search engine optimization. Most of the eHow articles I've seen follow the formula quite closely, and leave me wondering, "Where's the beef?" I wrote last year that there may be a special place in Hell for Internet article writers who paint by numbers with words.

eHow's advice to writers on how to drive more traffic to their eHow articles includes: linking them from the blogs and websites of friends and family, from any social networking site that allows you to create a profile, from question and answer sites, like Yahoo! Answers, from Wiki's and from your school and business. The advice says nothing about following the guidelines of these sites for responsible behavior or whether or not the links would be relevant for readers. They also suggest blogging about eHow, and somehow, I didn't see them suggesting the use of "NOFOLLOW" tags:-)



I think at some point, Google and the other search engines will face what they will call, "The eHow / Answers Question." Answers.com is very similar to eHow in their search profile, though they take a different approach to content generation. It's interesting to note that according to Yahoo! Site Explorer, Answers.com attracts their traffic with "just" 8,320,896 pages and 3 million incoming links. I think it speaks to Answer.com's content being generated around what are apparently real user submitted questions, as opposed to articles in search of a query. The main downside with Q&A sites is they tend to fill the Long Tail of search with results for which there is a question, but no answer. It's reasonable to assume that search engine users are normally looking for answers, rather than questions to have a go at.

Even though both content generation systems are down in the basement with blogging for building website traffic, they could simply overwhelm the current quality control mechanisms for search by covering the Long Tail with hundreds of millions of uniquely titled pages built around key phrases. While a search on a short phrase like "Self Publishing" will rarely lead you to such content factory pages, a search on a phrase like "How to self publish a book for $99" will eventually be covered, along with $98, and $100, ad infinitum. As people use longer and longer phrases in search, the ability of content factories to jump the line will increase until Google is forced to penalize them by name in their basic search algo.

When I shot the video below talking about the Long Tail of search for publishing websites, I didn't envision human content factories. The main issue for the Long Tail at that time, and one Google seemed capable of dealing with, was program generated spam. Other than establishing "Jordan Rules" for particular websites, it's possible the search engines may overcome the content factory problem by increasing the value of synonyms, something I believe I've seen signs of in the search phrases bringing visitors to my site, though I could be confusing it with the anchor text effect of links.