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.

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!

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.

As I think this through I realize that with my first title, Facebook For Your Small (or not so small) Business, I actually did write a kind of software manual for setting up Business Pages on Facebook. The fact that it looks at the business model for using Facebook makes it somewhat different than a straightforward manual. That’s because I wrote the book for people who have no time or inclination to become Facebook experts though they understand the need to get involved with it as a business promotion tool. They just need to know enough to delegate the task in most cases.

It comes down to the value of one’s time. If I am restaurant manager my time is best managing the restaurant, not digging around trying to learn about Facebook. If we can save that person a few hours we’ve done our job. If our information helps them meet interesting people, reach out to customers or teach their employees to sell (all forthcoming subjects), the value is much higher. That’s the goal.

The important piece of that value proposition is the value of your time, as a reader and manager. Ten bucks is not a lot to acquire immediately useful knowledge. In fact, one executive who I discussed this with responded like this:

“If you can get it down to ten pages I’d pay $20!”

He gets it.

The other driver of this idea (and the business is really a very simple extension of a simple idea about the value of time) was our (my business partner Mike Johnson and I) work with small business owners. Without exception they simply don’t have the time to spend learning complex things that are peripheral to their business. They may understand that something like Facebook, and social media in general, are things they need to know about but they simply don’t have the bandwidth to read a Dummies book or search through Facebook’s various (and excellent) tutorials. With the 24PageBooks approach those links are found in the context of when you need them. If I’m writing about Groups, there are links right there to Facebook’s Groups help pages. Instant indeed.

Having written five titles in the last two months I think I have my proof of concept- most subjects can be covered in reasonable depth within the constraints of 24 pages. As a former writer, in the 90s, of how-to business guides, I know that publishers dictate the length of the books based on trade paperback shelving requirements- not the need for depth. As a result, many of these books are filler and repetition. Distillation is the metaphor. We’re removing excess water and concentrating the essence, the same way distilled spirits were invented to avoid transporting large quantities of wine. Distill it down, then add the water back in when you want a drink. Only people discovered they liked the distilled product as is…

I have to ask myself who has the time or interest to buy and read a 408 page book on GPS. And who has the time or interest to write one (it’s my understanding that the Dummies series pays a flat fee without royalties to their writers)? I know I don’t.

However, there may be an audience for a brief, concise book on the subject that gets you up to speed quickly without too much commitment of time and money. And I know that price would not be a factor in my decision to choose the short, concise book over the gargantuan tome. My time is the real cost here. That’s a considerable factor in the planning of my new venture.