“2. There are six billion people in the world. Even if your market is hand-made spoke shaves for left-handed woodworkers, there are more people in your market than you can ever hope to track down.”

Ten years ago I co-wrote a book on kitchen design for a mid-size press (Taunton). They just released it as an ‘e-book’. Unfortunately they did not actually do an e-book, they created an enormous PDF file, belying their understanding, from a strategic POV, of what e-books mean. Then they used an ‘other rights’ clause in my pre-Internet contract to set royalties at a rate far below e-book standards. If the book wasn’t outdated I’d be more outraged- instead I can only shake my head at their stupidity and lack of vision. They have an incredible backlist that is perfectly suited to developing interactive books for tablet devices like iPad- home improvement and how-to books that are not outdated.

The point here is that I think that emerging new publishers have an amazing opportunity to out-distance the dinosaurs, if we stay out in front of the technology. Correct xhtml formatting, innovative direct to consumer marketing, flexible pricing, use of digital distribution systems that are highly trusted like Apple/Amazon/B&N, creative application of embedded links, media and interactivity- these things, when combined with vision give even a tiny start-up like ours enough lead time to establish a foothold.

While the dinosaurs fight for turf the tiny mammals take to the trees and start making spears.

I have a daily Google News search set up for eBooks and it is a chronicle of extremely rapid and historic change. Libraries around the world are starting to lend eBooks. The format wars continue with incremental differences designed to lock buyers into a relationship with B&N, Amazon and Apple- there are others but I think they will be marginalized by the big three. In any case it hardly matters when you can get compatible reader apps for virtually any device.

In other news Apple released a small upgrade to their iBooks reader that now supports video and audio embedding and zoom touch on photos within eBooks. As publishers we have pretty interesting ideas about ways to expand the capabilities of 24PageBook titles with these additions. Though the books may be brief, the tools and resources you can access via each title mean they are not shallow. I’ll be sharing more about the use of interactivity in our eBooks as we near our launch September launch date.

This would be built on a Google Spreadsheet so it would reside in the cloud along with pictures of the food, video content, etc. Meaning the 24PageCookbook has a bigger and more useful footprint than a typical fat paper cookbook.

I think the first title will be Pasta Italian Style (I’ll come up with a better title). A section on the basics, ten or so classic dishes and variations on each and you’ve covered 90% of the territory.

No offices.

No tangible product or inventory.

No infrastructure.

No payment system.

No overhead.

Infinitely scalable.

Highly profitable.

Sounds like a fantasy doesn’t it? Well, it is our fantasy. You’ll note that it doesn’t say No Work. There is work but it is work for the founders and it can be done anywhere. The goods are virtual but the money is real. All of the infrastructure is handled by others for a share of the revenue.

No investment (besides the work of the founders).

This kind of business was unimaginable only a few years ago. Now there are many small and growing businesses that do this. Like App developers. Writers. Game developers for mobile. Drop ship marketers. And publishers…

In the olden days of yore (pre 2007), a small publisher with an unexpected hit title had a problem: too many orders and not enough resources to fill them. This problem has disappeared with digital goods.

One more (almost) No:

No carbon footprint. The (almost) is the energy needed to build and operate the tools we use to create our business and our products. This is going down as technology develops. One more:

No dead trees.

Have a great Fourth!

I don’t think so. Once you hire someone to hold the reins and keep everyone on mission you have just turned your passion into a job. Why would any self-respecting entrepreneur want to do that?

I’ve been musing about this since I took my current job,musing about the differences between ‘real’ jobs and unconventional jobs like freelancing or consulting. I am fortunate to be a creative, that is I write and make things. There is almost no reason to treat creatives, salespeople or other self-directed employees like traditional workers, parking us in a cube and keeping us there for 40 hours a week. It is not the best way to utilize this kind of worker. Instead of hours worked the operative metric should be jobs done well. Companies like Best Buy, at its corporate headquarters, have started down this route with there being almost no required hours, policies, etc. You simply do your job well and keep others aware of what you’re doing while keeping up with what they are doing. This helps turn a conventional job into a ‘passion job’. Their experience has been that there was no loss in productivity even though many employees only come into the office for the occasional meeting. And meetings are far more efficient.

Obviously this doesn’t work for jobs that are tied to a location like retail workers, construction, etc.. But many of those jobs are entry level or skilled labor and working remotely will increasingly be a perk of moving up the ladder.

This is all driven by the ability to communicate with anyone from any place and the ability to access information from anywhere.

I think the move from jobs, to passion jobs to passions is a major spark for innovation. The smartest, most competent and creative people are the ones who thrive in an unstructured situation and those are the kind of people who turn ideas into passions. That’s a pretty good description of innovation.

The reasons it stood out include:

• I could see the entire structure in front of me, made clear by the changes in the eBook world, driven by Apple and Amazon, in particular their generous terms for indie publishers.
• It leverages my core faculty- the ability to explain things succinctly in a compelling way, in writing
• I could partner with someone I’ve done a lot of projects with whose skills are a great fit with mine, Mike Johnson.
• The company could be run from anywhere with no employees, no distribution or inventory and no need for any infrastructure
• It has the potential of being very profitable while remaining manageable
• The products I’m making add value to people’s lives

The last bullet goes to Chris’s point. Whether I’m helping people make new connections, learn business skills, understand emerging networks or use a charcoal grill like a master, in each case I’m adding value to their lives and I’m not requiring a lot of their valuable time to do it. Knowing this makes building the business a completely exciting non-job, which what any start-up should be.

This, understandably, set off a lightbulb moment. Bulk sales of eBooks could be pretty profitable even at low prices. Later that same day I was getting motivated by looking at the Dummies’ book site (I am fascinated by the success they’ve had selling 400 page books on practically anything whether the subject requires 400 pages or not- 200 million copies sold!) and noticed they prominently feature the fact they they sell white-labeled or privately branded versions of their books in bulk. Yikes! I’m all over that.

This whole thing has a lot of potential…

An entire service industry is sprouting up to do the formatting and distribution so you can publish to all the formats, however they want a piece of the pie, taking us back to the distribution middlemen issues that kept publishers in the red for years- too many hands taking little pieces until not much is left. Our business plan only works if we can keep a fairly big chunk of the revenues.

So we either have more labor associated with the publishing process at our end, pay a service bureau to do it for us or pick one distribution channel and get really good at it. With Apple supposedly selling 200,000 iPads per week and its far more sophisticated capabilities, there is a compelling choice. But Amazon/Kindle is also a huge source that everyone associates with book buying and they’re very cross-platform. B&N and Borders are less interesting.

So this is what we’re trying to think through as we get nearer to having 24PageBooks out there- and I can’t say I know what we’re going to do. The real glaring issue here is that the publishing industry needs a standard for formats and handling price competition (which would probably not be legal). I’m not waiting around for the big companies to figure that out. They can barely tie their own shoes.

I’ve been working on a 24PageBook called Learn To Market, Fast. It’s my distillation of what I’ve learned about marketing in the past three years or so. My grandiose vision is that you throw out everything you think you know about marketing and focus on two things: your reputation and reaching out to people who are publicly seeking a solution for a problem that you can fix. Your reputation gets you in the door and your response to their problem gets you the business. Simplistic? Yes, when compared to the arcane brand strategy mumbo-jumbo marketing and ad agencies are pitching. They offer secret sauce in a world where nothing is secret.

The best thing about this 24PageBooks project is the discovery that subjects like this, which have had millions of words written about them over the years, can be distilled down to a brief format without really losing much, if anything. My approach is to show a business owner exactly how to do marketing in a socially connected world, regardless of the size or kind of business they have. And I’ve discovered a measurement for the success of that marketing, a very concise measurement based on some serious research by a guy named Frederick Reichheld. More about that shortly. The book should be out in a few weeks if I can pull my business partner Mike out of the sea of work he is swimming in.