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Why do some web pages attract organic (naturally occurring) links while other pages get no attention at all?
Let’s start by dismissing web pages that are prima facie worthless and only deal with pages that have some inherent value. Broadly speaking, the inherent value of a web page is due to some combination of facts and opinion. Your visitors may differ over what they accept as fact and what they view as opinion, though it’s easier for most people to dismiss prose arguments than photographs, data tables and graphs. Every website that’s built to establish a writer as an authority should include some pages of original research or definitive reference material to create value for visitors who have no interest in your opinions.
Doing the research to create a resource page is often less work than analyzing the results, but writers who are used to cranking out blog posts based on reflections kindled by a different blog can be intimidated by the very idea of research. Let’s say you write on in the field of arts and crafts, it’s not important exactly what, and you want to start establishing yourself as an expert in the area. Since I don’t know anything about arts and crafts, I Googled “Arts and Crafts store” and the first three returns were: Michaels, ACMoorre, and Jo-Ann. Even though Michaels is no longer a publicly traded company, they still file reports with the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission), all of which are available online: http://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/companysearch.html
By skimming through the 10K annual statements of these companies, you can easily create a table showing how many stores they have open, total sales, profit margins, all the standard company information. Take that information and combine it on a single web page titled “The Arts And Crafts Market – Annual Sales Of Michaels, ACMoore and Jo-Ann Fabrics and Craft Stores” and you’ll have created a resource page for anybody interested in the arts and crafts market. You’ll also likely be the first person to do so publicly, because the only people who do this stuff for a living are financial analysts who don’t give their work away for free.
Once you establish a resource page based on SEC data, you can easily expand it through annual updates, which also opens up the opportunity to draw graphs of year-on-year changes, show percentage differences, comment on the predictions of the company executives. If you invest the time to skim through previous years of 10K filings, you can create historical data and graphs right out of the gate. You can also add something about the mom-and-pop operations, but coming up with data for mom-and-pop stores is much more difficult. The two main sources for data on small players (excluding membership organizations that restrict access to data) are the IRS and the BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics). Both publish large amounts of data based on the way sole proprietors categorize their businesses on Schedule C filings and how businesses respond to government surveys.
You don’t need to invest hundreds of hours or initiate your own telephone survey to come up with a resource page that people will quote from and link. All you need to do is pick a topic of limited scope that’s related to your field, like the top three players or employment trends in the industry, anything else that’s easily tracked through publicly available data. Unless there’s serious competition, you’ll soon be at the top of the search results for anybody seeking related information, and over the years, the page will draw a wider and wider audience from its increasing authority on the Internet. In the end, you’ll have created a platform linked into a high value neighborhood of contextually related web pages, which will help raise the overall profile of related work on your website.
So why is it important to create a resource or reference page with facts and figures rather than simply writing brilliant opinions about the subject?
While some people will steal anything that isn’t bolted down, most writers have an ingrained respect for facts and figures, especially when they are quoting them to prove their own point. If I say, “72% of organic linking is driven by resource pages” and I don’t present any proof, you’ll read it with a grain of salt. But if I say the same thing and link to an article on another website that includes graphs and tables, it makes my argument that much more powerful because it’s not just me saying it. Simply put, original research, artwork, and reference material draws high value links at a much higher rate than opinions and editorial comments.
I’ve posted a good number of resource pages over the years, and I’ve seen them generate large numbers of organic links and draw citations in dozens of academic papers. And I’ll tell anybody that the links aren’t driven by my sterling reputation for quality research and high standards or the name recognition of Foner Books. The vast majority of visitors to my website have never heard of my business or myself and won’t remember the names of either after departing. What drives all of the linking, the citations, the subsequent web traffic, is that NOBODY ELSE BOTHERED TO PUT THE DATA TOGETHER.
If you want to draw more web visitors but you really don’t want to do the work, you can probably find something on the web that’s at least similar in some way to the first idea you come up with for a resource page, and use that as an excuse not to do anything. But the truth is, you can always do it differently, and by coming at the information from a different direction with a different page title, you’ll attract your share of organic links and visitors. A good resource page on a subject in your area of expertise an interest may take anywhere from a day to a week to put together, but if you do it right, that one page will eventually draw more visitors than most writers whole websites.
Just remember, you need to build a platform in a field where you have the expertise to write something meaningful and eventually benefit through books sales or any of the ancillary business you can generate through your increased public profile. Don’t waste your time trying to create resource pages in areas that don’t interest you just because you want to see more visitors arriving at your website. You may get them, but it won’t help build your presence in the field you work in because the incoming links will be from the wrong neighborhood. It’s would be like putting a big sign out front of your house advertising daycare when you aren’t in the daycare business and hate kids.
BTW, Michaels had higher sales in 2009 than the Borders chain. Who knew?
Today Publisher’s Weekly announced they are going to “return to their roots” and accept books for review from all comers, even what they describe as “vanity fare.” The catch? A processing fee of $149 to be considered for review. George W. Slowik Jr., the president of Publishers Weekly, writes, “We briefly considered charging for reviews, but in the end preferred to maintain our right to review what we deemed worthy.”
What high ethics they claim! Apparently, they feel that charging for the opportunity to be reviewed is less of a scam than actually delivering a review for the price.
It’s funny, but I dropped my Publisher’s Weekly subscription over a decade ago because they rarely published anything worth reading about the publishing business. It was mainly reviews of books I’d never read and fluff pieces about publishing insiders.
I guess when George, who was the publisher of “Publishers Weekly” back in the early 90′s bought the magazine from Reed a few months ago, he wasn’t as crazy as I thought. There’s good money to be made dangling carrots in front of self published authors and whacking them with $149 sticks.
As Poets&Writers magazine states in their article about agents, “Legitimate literary agents do not charge writers for the opportunity to represent them. If an agent asks for a reading fee up front or a fee to edit your work, you should seek representation elsewhere.” I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Publishers Weekly has made similar statements in the past.
Is $149 a fair fee to consider a book for a review? No. It’s what corporate types call a “profit center.”
Is $149 a fair price for a dream? Perhaps, but Publisher’s Weekly should make it clear that they are selling dreams, not processing books for review.
I’ve got a fun challenge for them. Go ahead and review every book, just don’t publish the reviews for the “unworthy” books – send them to the authors. At least they’d get an outside critique for their $149. But wait. I suppose actually reading and reviewing a book would take an intern a few hours, and that would cut into the profit center.
I’m not a privacy nut by any stretch of the imagination, but I had to laugh at myself this week when a publisher asked me to look at a couple of titles on Amazon for technical reasons. One of the texts was related to sexually transmitted diseases, and my first reaction was, “Oh no. If I click on this, next time I got to Amazon they’re going to suggest I may be interested in “Home Syphilis Treatments” and “Living With The Clap.” And that’s just for looking. When you buy a book or an eBook online, there’s a permanent (or very long lived) audit trail of the purchase maintained by the retailer and payment processor. It’s only the pirates downloading stolen eBooks who maintain their privacy.
When you purchase a book online from Amazon, Barnes&Noble or Apple, they must keep a record of who you are and what you bought in order to deal with returns, refunds, disputes, taxes, etc. While these companies respect the laws on personal privacy, I don’t think any legal protection of privacy stands up against a court order. Besides, given the record of some major corporations and government agencies on protecting personal records from identity theft, it’s clear the legal protection and physical protection aren’t the same thing.
If the customer is always right, what prevents Amazon or other online eBook retailers from providing anonymous eBook purchasing for paranoid customers? I can think of a variety of steps they could take, like including a “private shopping” button for the site that turns off all tracking and allowing purchases to be made with anonymous currency. Gift certificates or any prepaid electronic currency would work as long as the chain of custody is broken after the anonymous currency is purchased. If a customer agrees to no refunds and the eBooks are sold without DRM, the system would work for a download to the current IP address of the buyer.
When Amazon delivers Kindle books over the 3G network, it’s akin to making a phone call, so they need to know the right address to send the eBook. For true private purchasing, Amazon would have to treat that information as temporary and not store it with a customer record. And Amazon explicitly preserves Kindle purchase records to protect the buyer from the loss or failure of the Kindle device. But if the buyer and seller agree that a transaction is anonymous and non-refundable, I don’t see why the retailer would need to preserve the personal information for audit purposes.
I took a look for existing anonymous currencies online, the leader seemed to be Bitcoin. However, there’s a headline on their website that reads “Warning*** Do not trust any transactions that happened after August 15th, 2010, 17:05 UTC ” so they might not be the top choice. How about Amazon and Apple getting together and minting anonymous A-bucks? They could both pretend the “A” stands for Anonymous when they’d both know that it really stands for their brand (and not the other).
As long as the equivalent dollar amounts of an anonymous currency are kept low and the utility is limited to a few online retailers, it shouldn’t be a worry for law enforcement agencies. Somehow, I don’t see the major international crime organizations laundering their billions through the purchase of eBooks and other penny-ante digital goods, especially when the same criminals are probably behind some of the piracy sites.
I also think it would be a good long-term move for Amazon, Apple, and other online retailers to work on business models that will allow them to do business with more privacy minded consumers. The Wall Street Journal ran a series of articles recently about the growth of personal tracking online, and no doubt some politician will eventually see it as an issue to run on and start passing laws to enhance online privacy for those who desire it. It’s always better for businesses to get out ahead of the curve rather than to wait for legislative solutions, which are often driven by public relations disasters.
I just published a new eBook on Kindle because I’m looking for feedback, I priced it at $0.99 for a week before raising it to $7.95. The title is now “Internet Book Marketing: An Author’s Guide To Building An Online Marketing Platform.” The original title was “Content SEO For Writers: Creating Websites That Work For Search Because They Work for People” but I changed it based on your feedback. You can buy it by clicking here. If you don’t own a Kindle, it’s a good excuse to download Amazon’s free reader for computers or smartphones:-)
There are a few things I’m particularly interested in getting feedback about, and one of them is the title. I’m basically using my own definition of search engine optimization here, which is laid out by the subtitle: “Creating Websites That Work For Search Because They Work for People.” As far as I’m concerned, that covers 95% of the SEO that matters for any legitimate writer. This has nothing to do with the SEO practiced by B2C (Business to Consumer) sites, which are primarily catalogs trying to appear higher in search rankings than other catalogs for particular consumer goods.
People who write for a living have a tremendous advantage over everybody else when it comes to building a website because text search is the primary navigation tool for the Internet. Authors who follow a sensible approach to creating a web platform are basically guaranteed to succeed, the question is how you measure success. If having a popular website in your genre is how you measure success, all it take to get there is time and effort. But if making a living is how you measure success, you have to make sure that you are writing about subjects that have enough earnings potential to pay your bills.
My own review of the book, if I posted one on Amazon, would be positive, with a major caveat. This book includes all the points that my fifteen years of publishing online have taught me are important to success. But with the exception of a section about the dangers of blogging for writers, it does not debunk SEO myths or talk about all the advice you should ignore. My teaching approach is to focus on the things writers need get the job done as opposed to running up word count with warnings, standard reference material and historical context. While the book contains points that are important for beginners and experts alike, it doesn’t attempt to fill in all the gaps.
Depending on the feedback and how the PDF version sells off my website, I may write an expanded version for print this winter that would include all of the basics of using Analytics and pages of HTML source code for building a simple but effective website. In editing down from the original material, I dropped large numbers of graphs and tables, knowing how poorly these elements work on Kindle, and stayed primarily with the issues I could address is text.
To put it as bluntly as possible, unless you are a writer or somebody who employs writers, this book is not for you. I’ve literally had web design discussions with people who have looked at my pages and said, “But that’s unfair. I can’t come up with content that good!” Well, that’s the whole point. Why should people tell their friends about your site and why should search engines send you visitors if you don’t have great content? Because you really want to sell some books and are willing to invest in web technology to do it?
Yet I keep hearing from authors and publishers who think that they can hire somebody to create a successful content based website for them. They can’t. It’s not about the technology, the aesthetics, the interactivity or the multimedia, it’s about the content. If you’re an author or a publisher, you have that content, and if people aren’t interested in reading a big chunk of it for free, that should tell you something about the potential market for it.
Order the Kindle version of Content SEO For Writers: Creating Websites That Work For Search Because They Work for People
When publicly owned Barnes&Noble purchased the privately owned Barnes&Noble college bookstore operation last year, I commented to a friend that it looked like Riggio was cashing out. My friend responded that it made no difference since Riggio was just moving money from one pocket to another, but the college bookstore operation was family owned, while the Riggio family own less than a third of the public company shares. Now the board of Barnes&Noble is considering all options to increase share value, including selling the company.
There’s a reason that Barnes&Noble and Borders have seen their stock prices plummet, and it’s called Amazon. I ran the following graph a few weeks ago when I posted my annual update of North American book sales for the year .
Barnes&Noble made a serious bid at the eBook reader business with their Nook, but it was fatally flawed from the inception, at least as far as the 700+ retail superstores were concerned. An eBook reader doesn’t tie readers to a bricks-and-mortar store, it frees them. If Barnes&Noble could reorganize around their website and eReaders, fire ten thousand plus employees and make all that real estate go away, it’s probable that their enterprise value would be higher. But it’s not easy to fire all those people and get rid of all that real estate, whether it’s financed or leased, without going through bankruptcy. And since bankruptcy is rarely in the interest of the stockholders, the board has their hands tied and can choose between running a failing model and selling the company to somebody who can make changes. They seem to be taking the latter path.
Back in late 2008 I joked that self published authors should get together and buy the Borders chain so they could all get their books stocked on the shelves. The market cap of Borders at the time was $65 million, today it’s $80 million, so whoever bought Borders in late ’08 made a pretty penny, but it was a crazy ride that saw the valuation drop near $25 million at one point. Barnes&Nobles market cap is around ten times that of Borders, it’s a much better managed company with a much more active website.
For those who see the BN.com website as the jewel of the Barnes&Noble operation, the funny thing is that they practically got it for free. I owned stock in BN.com when it was an independently traded company, with 80% of the shares split between by Barnes&Noble and Bertlesmann, and my memory is that the IPO paid for most of the development costs even after the parent company bought in the publicly traded shares and bought out Bertlesmann.
I suspect that the college bookstore operation that’s now part of Barnes&Noble will continue to generate revenue (hard to miss with $150 required texts) but they overpaid for it at this stage of the game. And eBooks are coming to get textbooks especially.
If there’s a moral to the failure of the superstore model, it’s the old story of not seeing a displacement technology coming. Those superstore chains were doing soooooooo good when the Internet was a mere nothing by comparison, and by the time they got their act together… well, the graph above is worth a thousand words.
Update: Barnes&Noble share price bounced over 20% on the news that they may go private. That moved the market cap from around $750 million to $900 million overnight. If the stock price had continued its decline another 20% instead, Riggio could have taken the company private himself with the money from selling it the college bookstore operation. The BN.com maneuver on a larger scale:-)
In the top right corner of this photograph I took of a dragonfly lawn ornament, you can see a dragonfly resting. Unlike the plastic imitation, the real dragonfly’s wings are too transparent to show up well. Does it make anybody else think of gaudy bestsellers and their assembly line marketing approach that drowns out the original voices in literature?
It also got me thinking about all of the imitation in the book industry, and how the recipes for business blockbusters seem to change so little over time. Every summer there are a dozen new management hits crowding the Wall Street Journal and New York Times nonfiction lists, and not a single one offers anything new, or even helpful. I’ve come to see these titles as a sort of business porn, something that lower and middle management types can get excited reading, like monkeys in a university experiment paying with bananas to look at a picture of a dominant male.
I don’t think that derivative “me-too” nonfiction is a good business for self publishers, even if you ignore the soul devouring aspects. For one thing, the toughest part of publishing for most authors is marketing, and while you can easily clone the book of some famous clown, you can’t clone his platform. People who become pundits based on truisms usually steal all of the oxygen for those talking points for years to come, so even if you write a better book, it’s unlikely you’ll find anybody to read it. So where do all the imitations come from? Other trade publishers who have existing relations with distributors, retailers and customers in that space.
Of course, imitation in the book industry is the rule, not the exception, which is why I encourage nonfiction self publishers to target niches that literally won’t support the economics of a large trade. A title for which the market is limited to a couple thousand copies a year won’t earn you a living, but it won’t encourage competition either. It’s the publishing industry equivalent of “small ball”, trying to score runs with singles, bunts and sacrifice flies, rather than swinging for the fences every time you come up to bat. Once you established the cash flow to pay your bills, you can try moving your publishing business in new directions.
Amazon just issued a press release with some astounding Kindle numbers that require careful reading. To select a few points:
- Kindle eBook sales for the first half of 2010 are triple sales for the first half of 2009
- Amazon’s share of the trade eBook market is increasing
- Five trade fiction authors, two of whom I’d never heard of and one in translation, have sold over 500,000 Kindle eBooks each
Those are the exciting numbers, though the one that will get the most press is Bezos’s comment that Kindle eBooks are now outselling hardcovers on Amazon by volume, with eBooks selling 80% more copies than hardcover books last month. The reason I don’t get too excited about this last factoid is that hardcovers sell at much higher dollar prices than most Kindle eBooks and June is hardly hardcover season, things may change during Fall going-back-to-school days.
Amazon still hasn’t released the number of Kindle readers in existence, that the sales rate popped for a few weeks after the price drop is no surprise. Backers of Indy Bookstores are fond of pointing to a 2009 survey in which the largest book buying demographic, 50 to 60 year old women, claim they would never buy an eReader. Sorry survey believers, I’m afraid they’re all wet on this one. For Amazon to be achieving the sales numbers they are claiming, plenty of middle-age women must be buying eBook readers, and I doubt they are squinting their way through fiction bestsellers on their iPhones and BlackBerries.
The key take-away from the latest Amazon numbers is something I’ve suspected for quite a while. Kindle eBooks and readers are primarily a displacement technology for fiction, the very industry which believed that fancy fonts and avante garde cover designs would protect their turf. It turns out that reading fiction on a Kindle is at least as effective as black and white was for movies before color came along. The key is in the suspension of disbelief, the ability to lose yourself in something that isn’t real. And that turns out to depend on the words or the story, not on the presentation technology.
One day Kindle and other eBook readers will be better, the ePaper will be whiter than white and the page flip time will be instantaneous. But the battle over the delivery system for fiction to heavy book buyers will likely be over before that happens, and it’s starting to look like the Kindles of the world will win. One of these days I’ll update my page on Kindle eBook sales based on the press release. A back of the napkin calculation suggests that Amazon is now delivering around 2 million Kindle eBooks per week, though the majority of those eBooks are probably out-of-copyright classics and trade freebies. But that number depends on how top-heavy the Kindle list is with bestsellers, compared with paper book sales.
I never saw the need to buy a Kindle because I live ten minutes walk from the largest college library in America and they have a particularly good collection of the 19th century literature I read. So I never got around to buying (or using) a Kindle until around 10 days ago when I was completely out of business related things to do. I wish I had bought one years ago.
The Kindle display, which you’ve all seen by now, is a dirty grey with mediocre contrast and it flashes black every time you turn the page. These are the only two negative things I can say about it and I got used to both of them within an hour or two.
The list of positives would go on for quite a while, so I’ll just highlight the things that surprised me. First, gmail access through their experimental web browser works decently, and is free across most of the developed world. Free. When looking at the cost of ownership for any eBook device, the free 3G network access offered by Amazon world-wide is a major trump card.
The text-to-speech voice synthesis is much better than I expected. I haven’t sat around listening to a whole book because I prefer to read, but I look forward to trying it next time I’m sick and can’t focus.
The built in dictionary is a treat. I’ve never been an English dictionary user. When I was a kid and would ask my mom what some word meant when I was reading, she would always say “Look it up in the dictionary” and I never would. So my vocabulary is built from context, and there are all sorts of words that fall into that sort-of realm where I know what they mean but not exactly. For example, I was reading “The Mayor Of Casterbridge” on my Kindle, and came across the word “guinea”, which I always thought was just another term for an English pound, or twenty shillings. I moved the cursor to the front of the word to invoke the dictionary and found that it now represents twenty one shillings (history too complicated to explain) and was commonly used as an auction currency, since it included a 5% commission compared to the pound. Good stuff.
Back when Kindle first appeared, I converted an edition of my POD Publishing book which sells a few copies a month, but I never went further with it because I didn’t like the way anything looked on Amazon’s preview tool and wasn’t crazy about the 35% publisher share either. Now that I find I’m happy reading on Kindle despite the aesthetic compromise, I’ll try publishing some more Kindle books. I’m planning to focus on that $2.99 to $9.99 range where Amazon will pay 70% commission, and may even try something with a collection of reworked blog posts.
The bottom line on Kindle is that at $189 with free 3G, it’s hard to go wrong. Besides, Amazon pays me more than that every month in Associates commissions:-)
Barnes & Noble finally reported their fiscal year last week, letting me complete my annual bookstore sales survey. I’ll start with a graph from that report which is worth a thousand words:
If I graphed the stocks of these booksellers, the trends would be similar but much more pronounced. Amazon continues to grow their share of media sales (Books, Music and Movies) in North America, while Borders continues its death spiral. The hold-up on the Barnes and Noble 10K filing this year was their integration of the college bookstore division, which was previously a privately owned company. For the graph above, I subtracted out the college bookstore sales, so the the historical component would remain relevant.
The current trends would put Amazon North America at over $6.6 Billion for 2010, more if their share of eBook sales holds up. The Barnes and Noble bookstore sales would continue their downtrend towards $4.0 Billion in 2010, and Borders would dip under $2.5 Billion. With a little bit of luck, Amazon’s North America media sales for 2010 could be more than the bricks and mortar stores of Borders and B&N combined!
The good news for Barnes and Noble is that BN.com had its best year of the decade, growing 24% in 2009. If the Nook catches on and BN.com can start selling a lot of eBooks, they’ll be able to show good growth. The caution is that BN.com sells eBooks through an agency model, and reports the total sale price, as opposed to their share of the transaction. Still, as they used to say during the cold war, better read than dead.
As for Borders, I’ve considered buying their stock (BGP) as a private equity takeover speculation, since it’s trading for a buck and change. But as with most stocks that have lost 95% of their value, it’s more likely we’ll be reading about them in Chapter 11.
I was a bit surprised that nobody took me to task when I mentioned the expense of customer service on my post about eBook profits last week. While I enjoy customer service for the main part, it’s always been an issue with direct sales, whether eBooks or mail order. Back when I was shipping books by the U.S. Post Office every day, I was always getting angry e-mails from customers on the West Coast who were sure I was ripping them off because their book shipped by Media Mail wasn’t there in two days. By creating an expectation of quick shipping from local warehouses, Amazon has poisoned the well for small mail-order publishers shipping from one side of the country to the other. Although my mail order operation was as much as 20% of sales a few years ago, I pushed it down under 1% today due to the customer service overhead. So eBooks are my main custumer support challenge these days.
The customer service for eBooks is much simpler for two reasons. First, in case of a botched download, there’s no incremental cost to issuing another PDF file to the buyer, other than a minute or two of my time. But I go the extra mile when required, like when a buyer in Puerto Rico didn’t download the eBooks he had purchased and didn’t receive the e-mails I sent him with new download links I had generated in eJunkie. I knew he was getting some of my e-mails through his Hotmail account, just not the ones in which I included a link, and it turns out that Hotmail is now throwing out e-mails it deems junk without putting them in a folder the user can easily access to check for mistakes. Typical Microsoft insanity. So using his name and address from the transaction receipt, I looked up his phone number in the online White Pages, and gave him a call. Once I reached him on the phone, it became clear that Hotmail wasn’t going to work, and he provided me a different e-mail address. I stayed on the phone until he downloaded the first file successfully.
The other thing that makes eBook customer service a pleasure compared to the mail order business is that I can issue preemptive refunds. If I see that a couple days go by without somebody downloading an eBook they paid for, and I can’t get a response through e-mail, I issue a refund and that’s the end of it. I’m not out a paper book or postage, and PayPal refunds the transaction fee. I got so trigger happy on preemptive refunds for a while that I would issue one on the slightest negative comment about an eBook. After a doing a couple of these, I got an angry e-mail from a guy stating that he did not want a refund, he was “Just sayin.” So I’ve backed off on preemptive refunding for content issues:-)
Thanks to the database search feature of the eJunkie delivery system, I’ve been able to resend eBooks to customers from last year and the year before, including one guy who lost his whole house in a fire. I don’t post anything on my site saying that there’s a lifetime guarantee, but as long as I’m here and it’s so easy to check whether the person really bought the eBook in the past, I’m happy to oblige. When I sold eBooks through Amazon from 2004 through 2006, I thought that Amazon was guaranteeing lifetime replacement support for the eBook customer, but either I was wrong or they they’ve done wrong. I haven’t heard from any of those customers in a year or two, but in the past when they reported a loss and showed proof of purchase, I would ship them a paper book at my expense.
Having been in and out of the mail order book sales business for the last fifteen years, you’d think I’d have heard it all by now, but that never seems to be the case. Just this week, I heard from a guy in Australia who bought the eBook version of my publishing book back in March, but apparently had trouble with the download. I didn’t know because the system showed multiple downloads had taken place (I allow several tries to in case of Internet problems, etc.) Now, three months later he’s e-mailing me to say he never got the eBook and would like to buy the hard copy. Rather than issuing a refund or sending instructions on the best way to buy the paperback in Australia, I wrote back to ask why he let three months go by without saying anything. Maybe I’ll learn something new.
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