Interview with Dave Taylor, Information Entrepreneur

What led you to make the leap from the "safe" world of trade authoring to your current role as a leading information entrepreneur?

I think it was more of an evolutionary ooze than a thoughtful leap, actually. :-) I've always been interested in online information dissemination and even back in the 1980's I was working with email systems and online conferencing systems. In my first book I included an email address, and by my second or third book I was including a Web site address. I admit, those first few Web sites were crude, but that was the state of the art back then, and it didn't take long for me to be writing books about HTML and web page design myself, so at that point my skills increased significantly in terms of what I could accomplish.

Nonetheless, even as recently as 3-4 years ago, I looked at book publishing as a safety net for my career: if things were moving really slowly, I could still make a buck writing a few books in a year. Then one day an entrepreneurial colleague told me about Google AdSense and commented that with the traffic to my Web site, I could probably make a few dollars that way, without having to "do" anything. I was hooked.

Then I remember the glorious month when my Google AdSense check was more than my hosting bill for my site and online connectivity. Suddenly it was as if a light bulb had lit over my head: my online activity could be a profit center, not a cost center! (I have an MBA, I think in business jargon) Then I really started looking at the online world and online publishing in earnest. A few months later, my Google check paid my mortgage and I realized that there was more profit in writing 100,000 words and putting them online with ad revenue than in selling that same tome to a publisher and hoping that it'll find sufficient market traction that I'd make any money at all
beyond the initial advance.

You're the author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Growing Your Business with Google. Does Google send the majority of the over 1 million visitors a month to AskDaveTaylor.com, or do you rely on a subscription/syndication model?

I am a strong proponent of the "Long Tail" idea, where there's more value in providing information that eschews the "top ten" topics in a given marketplace but covers everything else. For example, there aren't many books on Windows XP coming out nowadays, but if you look at the statistics, there are still a TON of people using it. That's a long tail opportunity.

The implication of this is that rather than have thousands of devoted readers (the magazine model) I really am more of an online resource, a reference work where people can find what they need when they need it, but are otherwise not likely to stay engaged in the long term. It's like a car mechanic: you don't want to be friends with them and see them every month, but when something's wrong, you know where to go.

What I'm leading to is that, yes, Google and other search engines account for the lion's share of my monthly traffic. I do have quite a few repeat visitors, subscribers to my email newsletter and RSS feed, etc., that amount to approximately 15% of my 1.2 million unique visitors/month. That's not bad if you do the math, it's 180,000 monthly readers.

Alexa used to show five years of history for websites, and I used to send people to graph your site against my older site to show how rapidly an informative website can go from new to successful. Can you give point to a few milestones from your site's early history that explain it's meteoric rise?

Gosh, I wish I could, because it'd help me duplicate it! I think it's really just been about plugging away and trying to stay on top of the major technical challenges in the community. For example, two years ago I was writing about how to use Firefox, and now I write about Facebook IM and Twitter configuration issues.

Are you working on any books currently, and given your Internet platform, do you consider starting your own publishing company or would you just leverage your presence for a larger advance?

Yes, but before I talk about that, I want to say that there have always been two different types of books in the trade space, though I don't know that most people acknowledge it. They are user guides/tutorials and reference works. The former is "how to" or a Dummies guide, while the latter is a dictionary. This is an important differentiation because I believe that the rise of the Web has directly led to the demise of the latter category. It's far, far faster for me to look up a word online than to pull out a dictionary, and as Web access becomes more and more pervasive (e.g.,cellphones and smart phones, pervasive wifi, etc) I think it's folly to try and publish anything that's not a tutorial or learning guide.

So the book I'm working on is actually a sequel to my popular "Wicked Cool Shell Scripts" (NoStarch Press) and is going to be based on a compilation of my shell script programming column in Linux Journal. No announced release date, but I view it as repurposing existing material in a form that'll make it more useful, more interesting and certainly more educational.

Will it be a successful book? It's so hard to say. Publishing's always been about guessing, dice rolls, the toss of a dart, the peek into a crystal ball, but I think one realization that major publishers now have is that successful books are now more driven by personality or community. That's why bloggers writing books is currently such a fad.

In terms of my own publishing company, well, I think I already have that with my Web sites and the frequent guest contributions I publish.

Small Press Branding

I got an e-mail the other day asking if $30,000 was enough to open a business. When it comes to self publishing, $300 will buy your first block of 10 ISBN numbers, which is all the infrastructure you really need. But if your goal is to open a small literary press and be the envy of the Indy publishing world, you're going to need some start-up cash to to get off the ground. People who dream about starting a literary press need to put together a little kitty of cash since it's essentially a marketing proposition. But first, a brief video on where not to spend the money:-)



Anybody who is frequently asked for advice about new publishing ventures can tell you that a good proportion of start-ups waste a lot of money "playing business." Why some publishers think they need to stock up on new office furniture in order to start a small press is beyond me, who do they expect will see it or care? What's the point of rushing into a business phone listing unless you want local folks to find you in the Yellow Pages and call you about publishing their memoirs? Even business cards are overkill if you aren't attending any trade shows, and if you are, not handing out business cards is a great way cut down on spam.

Outside of the publishing meccas where editors still "do lunch" and attend industry breakfasts, the business is conducted by e-mail. If you have to leave voice-mail reminders asking people if they've checked their e-mail, you know you haven't arrived yet. Since literary presses are unlikely to be traffic magnets on the Internet, the face of the business on starting out will most likely be from paid advertising. Just a few years ago, that advertising would have been limited to glossy print ads, wherever they might appear, but today, targeted Internet advertising is the better value proposition, providing you can find a way to effectively target your potential readers.

Creating a successful brand is one of the most powerful ways to build value in a business, and that was true even in the days before modern advertising. In a sense, branding is the same thing as reputation, and in both cases, it's possible to have a great reputation or brand even if the product or service is lacking. That's where marketing comes in. Spending a lot of money associating your company name with attractive young people in scanty apparel is a quick way to earn a reputation for being cutting-edge, but is it an effective way to sell cutting edge books? Well, it makes more sense than distributing thousands of baseball caps with "Cutting Edge Books" embroidered on them.

But like other commodities, branding is valuable precisely because its scarcity. Branding attempts are what keep many publicity and marketing firms afloat, but the genuine successes are few and far between. In publishing, branding successes rely primarily on the books, or at the least, the covers. So if you are just starting out with a small literary press, put together a tight list, so the branding dollars you spend will impact all of your titles. If you try batting to all fields and publishing titles for different demographic groups in order to prove your breadth, you're diluting your brand before you've even established it. And don't commit to a launch schedule until you've found at least one manuscript that knock your socks off. Remember, you're easy to impress, you're already a fan of the genre.

New PDF Ebook Sales Data And Problems

I started selling a new ebook three weeks ago, procrastinated posting this week until I could pull some data together and resolve some customer service issues. I used Microsoft Word from Office 2007 to produce the PDF file, which worked out pretty good, and I didn't employ any copy protection this time around. After discussing it with my lawyer, I went with a "click" agreement on the order page that states:

Your paid download of this ebook from Foner Books grants you a non-transferable license to retain an electronic copy of the PDF file for reading and to print one copy for personal use in your home or business. You may not create copies of this ebook or excerpts therof, whether electronic or printed on paper, for sale or distribution.

The order process is pretty balky, I'm using PayPal for the payment processor and E-Junkie for the download service. I looked at a couple other download services, but their legal agreements struck me as bizarre, like insisting they could do anything they wanted with your ebook content for the sake of promoting their own business. If somebody gives me a lead for a better method that I end up using, I'll offer a free Foner Books T-shirt as a bounty:-)

In the first 20 days, I sold 30 copies, with exactly half of them being purchased by US residents. The majority of the non-US sales were to UK and Australia, but included single sales to Austria, The Netherlands and Ireland. I was slightly surprised by the 50/50 split, because a strong majority of my web traffic is from the US. It's possible that the weak US dollar made the $13.95 ebook look very inexpensive overseas, but I suspect it has more to do with higher ebook acceptance outside the US.

The 30 ebook sales have already resulted in two claims being filed with PayPal, though it's impossible for me to know whether they were actually fraudulent usage of accounts or buyer's remorse. In one case, the ebook was never downloaded, so I refunded that one immediately, in the other case, the ebook was downloaded from E-Junkie twice, so I'm going through the dispute resolution process to see what happens.

In three more cases, the customers went for days without downloading the ebook, so I wrote them directly to ask if there was a problem. One e-mail bounced, so I just issued a refund. One downloaded the e-book right after I wrote (I pointed out that the buyers should check their bulk or spam folder to make sure the download link wasn't trashed) and the other wrote back to admit confusion with the whole process. I resent him the E-junkie link to download the ebook, and he succeeded.

My goal when I started out was to sell one copy a day, so I'm happy enough on that account, but I wonder if the balky ordering process is costing me sales. I've fooled around each week with a different sales pitch and progression to the order page, but I haven't seen that make any difference in the sales tempo. I think it goes back to the concept that there are buyers and browsers, and the people who want to buy the ebook will jump through a couple hoops to get there.