Resource vs Store

Why Free Information Pays Dividends

The most aggressive salesman in the world can't sell refrigerators to Eskimos if he can't find any Eskimos. The Internet is littered with websites that are nothing more than advertisements pitching some product or service. When an author puts up a website that consists of nothing but teasers, or "long copy" as it's called in the advertising industry, it's going to fail. While the sell-through, the success rate of closing a sale to visitors, may be relatively high, the number of visitors from the search engines will be abysmally low. It doesn't matter how much you tweak your sales copy, how slick your storefront looks, whether or not you take all major and minor credit cards. You can't sell books to people if they aren't visiting your website, and nobody is going to send their friends to visit your advertisement. Most importantly of all, an advertisement is never going to serve as a platform.

Libraries are perhaps the best resource humanity has invented to date. Libraries don't charge you to read books on the shelf, unless you bring them back late or lose them. Libraries also tend to have much better reference collections than bookstores, which charge the retail price to if you want to leave with a book. Bookstores also focus entirely on the titles they believe will give them the best sales return for their shelf space, while even modern libraries have some leeway for collection building. University libraries and the main public library branch in large cities have the best collections for research and reference, and in some cases serving as the primary customer base for academic titles.

Libraries suffer from some major limitations as information resources, or even as a source for pleasure reading. With the exception of the odd college student who hides out in the stacks to sleep at night rather than renting an apartment, all of us have to commute to get to a library. Most libraries are closed for a block of hours every day, with some public libraries spending more time closed than open. Libraries have limited shelf space, limited stack space, and a limited number of copies of any given title. If you want to read recently published bestseller, you may be in for a long wait. Even the best research libraries have a problem with books being stolen, or lost for years through being shelved in the wrong place, and these books may never be replaced. Some of these problems may become distant memories as programs like Google Books scan the entire collections of libraries, making at least some part of the content available around the clock if you're willing to read off a computer screen or print it. But libraries fall far short of websites as an information resource in one key way. Libraries can't shelve books that haven't been published yet.

Unless you're that college student hiding out in the stacks, the first stop you make when searching for information about anything is probably the Internet, and probably Google. Google has become the equivalent of a library catalog for the Internet, a 21st century catalog that runs your query passed every web page in the index and presents you with a ranked listing of results. The information on your website is not inspected for completeness, accuracy or even obsolescence. Google counts on the incoming links to your site to determine the trustworthiness of your information, there aren't human beings working for search engines who's job it is to look at web pages and determine what's true and what isn't. Google counts on the community of Internet publishers to ensure that the cream floats to the top, and while it's far from a bullet proof plan, it's the best anybody has come up with so far. If you build a website that is viewed by visitors as a genuine resource, it will gain links and trustworthiness over time, and you'll be on your way to establishing a platform.

So the way to publishing nirvana is through self-abegnation and charitable works online. Is that what I'm saying? Only in the same sense that being a good person and helping your neighbors can bring you respect in your community. Respect is just as important in the online world as it is on Main Street, even more to authors who don't have any business downtown. The respect and links of your peers is critical to establish your website in a good neighborhood and bring you organic search visitors, but what happens when they show up at your resource. What's in it for you?

My publishing website averages around 5,000 visitors a day steered my way by search engines, year-in, year-out. Given the number of subjects I've written about over the years, it's not unlike having a small town newspaper, but one that I don't have to publish every day. With the exception of blogging, I'll go months at a time without updating a single page on my website, yet I can demonstrate the sort of traffic that brings tears to an acquisitions editor's eyes. So maybe you're thinking, I'm selling 500 books a day and raking it in. You'd be high by two orders of magnitude, I get a documented book sale to less than one in a thousand visitors, and I'm proud of the fact. My website is not some giant book advertisement, in fact, I haven't published a book on anything related to most of the topics I write about. And that's why I get the number of visitors I do, and that's why any new subject I write about gets off to a running start for search engine visitors. My publishing website is a resource, not a book advertisement.

But I do sell over a thousand books a year as a documented result people finding my website through search engines. The thousand books only includes books that I sell directly to individuals by mail order and Amazon sales to customers who go directly from my website to Amazon by clicking the link I provide and purchase the book. If I hadn't intentionally cut back on direct sales by raising my prices a couple years ago, that number might be over two thousand, but order fulfillment and customer service was proving to be a headache. Without the walk-in traffic generated by my website, Barnes&Noble would never have started stocking one of my titles, as I've never approached them to do so, generated a book catalog, or jumped through any of the hoops that publishers associate with bookstore stocking. Likewise, the half-dozen or a dozen colleges using one of my titles as a course text would never have started if the instructors hadn't come across my online content and requested review copies.

The balance between the free resource and commercial aspects of your website may be difficult to strike, but it's not some delicate negotiation that will result in ruin and loss of all your hard work should you push a little too hard on one side of the see-saw. But the philosophy that's worked best with every website launch I'm aware of, including some of the big billion dollar IPOs, is "get the traffic first, monetize second." This turns out to be a great formula for authors who don't know much about the Internet because it maintains the focus on the important part, getting the visitors. There's no penalty for not maximizing the income potential of your website, and it can actually help you win visitors if your site tends more to the hobby/enthusiast side than to the profit motive.

You can buy visitors with advertising, but the profit margins in books rarely justify the expense, even if you're a self publisher. You may also find yourself in the position of the refrigerator salesman who makes that mythical sale in the frozen tundra, but is left with a hollow feeling when the euphoria fades. If you spend time researching Internet business opportunities, you're going to find that most of them are based on trying to out-clever the next black hat guy in the short term, in a world full of clever guys. It has nothing to do with building a platform as an author, unless you're hoping to write a book with a title like, "Waiting for the FBI to knock on my door."

I've made small purchases of Internet search advertising in the past through Google and Yahoo! primarily for the sake of doing market research on search terms. If you're willing to pay more than other bidders for a search term, and your advertisement gets little or no actions, it's a pretty good bet that nobody is searching on that term. This is very useful information for a author with limited time trying to build a platform and planning on putting all the eggs in one basket. You don't want to go with a basket that people would just kick out of the way if they saw it lying in the street. But I've also known authors who have spent thousands of dollars trying to raise the sales of published books with search advertising and have failed to sell a handful of books. Paying for people to come to your website is a completely different business model than getting them for free, and it's one you have to approach a few dollars at a time, measuring the results. Deciding that your're willing to spend $X dollars promoting a book and setting up a campaign with that budget is a guaranteed way to throw your money away. If it was that easy to sell books, everybody would be a successful author.

Although I almost hate to mention it, there's another compelling reason for authors to practically write their books online, with draft chapters or rough research notes. Like most authors working on most books, the work might stretch into years, and you may never even finish. But during that time, the website can start working for you, raising your profile and through feedback, helping you write a better book. The book you may have given up on from the fear that nobody would ever read it, could turn into the first book you finish thanks to Internet fans cheering you on. And when a publisher decides they need to publish books to have a presence in a new market segment, and they don't have any authors in the stable raring to go, you better believe the Internet is one of the places a savvy editor will look to check for candidates. An unfinished book on your hard drive isn't worth the electrons that recorded it. An unfinished book on the Internet can be a vital piece of a platform, if not the whole thing.