Yesterday Amazon announced that for every 100 hardcover books sold they sold 143 Kindle versions of the same titles. This is the tipping point for the publishing industry and they are not going to like it. Just as iPod/iTunes killed the CD business (and record stores), eBooks are the end of dead tree print books [...]

No employees.
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 [...]

Tim Ferriss of The Four Hour Work Week fame was an inspiration to Mike and I as we evolved the 24PageBooks concept. The driving motivation behind it is personal liberation in both a literal sense and a spiritual sense. This recent blog post, though a long read, is worth spending time with- things don’t liberate [...]

I just read a perceptive post on adding value with your products by Chris Dixon, an investor and entrepreneur. He rightly points out that start-ups should consider what value they’re adding to society with their products or services, value beyond the obvious usage value. I’ve been thinking a lot about this because I realized earlier [...]

As we get ready to move out of beta for 24PageBooks, we’re already having an epiphany regarding the potential of our brief eBooks on business and lifestyles issues. This came from an accidental exchange with a friend who owns a successful business. She shared some info I sent her with her CTO who, being a [...]

As we try to get our first half dozen titles out there it is increasingly apparent that the publishing business is a total mess. Apple, Amazon Kindle, B&N’s Nook and the many other readers out there all have differing requirements for formatting eBooks. Though many use the ePub ’standard’, it is an open standard so [...]

I am not a social media pundit. I am a person with a somewhat unusual track record of using social media to connect with business prospects, unusual in that there are actual sales associated with that activity. That experience, which continues as I work on marketing at Catertrax (my employer) and 24PageBooks (my publishing company), [...]

Having written a half dozen 24PageBooks in the past few months in preparation for our launch, I’ve come to realize that sometimes even 24 pages can be too many. Which then leads to the realization that almost all how-to, business and lifestyle titles are way too long. Our Writer’s Guidelines suggest that a writer proposing [...]

As we approach the publishing of our first 24PageBooks title, I’ve had feedback from many people regarding our pricing decisions ($9.99+any applicable taxes). Most have been positive once people think through the value proposition. The 24PageBooks concept is simple: Instant Expertise on a specific topic, usually in an hour or less. So that first title, [...]

I was in a library the other day and, while browsing through the new non-fiction titles I came across this astounding title: GPS For Dummies. This is a 408 page book about global positioning systems. It is not, apparently, a highly technical book for engineers- I doubt they would read a book with ‘Dummies’ in [...]