Things That Matter Most

Things That Matter Most

Strategically Building Content

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One of my early forays into the WordPress world wasn’t as a developer, it was as a marketing and brand strategy coach.

I rented out meeting rooms and presentation venues, and invited professionals from around the area to attend seminars and workshops about content creation. Shorter sessions were just 2-3 hours and you usually left with a few bullet points about your brand’s character, tone, and at least 2 article ideas.

Longer sessions were all day, included lunch, and had you walking away with no less than 3, fully-fleshed-out articles.

All of my sessions included homework: the 30-days-of-blogging challenge.

The Challenge

Unlike my current aims of blogging every day, this challenge was not about publishing content on a consistent schedule. It was about producing content.

Every day 1 you would sit down and write something. It could be a 100-word memo about a product, a 400-word summary of a sales meeting, a 1600-word description of your core business model, anything.

Then, the next day, you’d write something else.

None of this needed to be shared on your corporate site or published under your own name. Actually, I often helped students set up new accounts on Blogger or WordPress.com under pseudonyms so they could write anonymously. The aim wasn’t to take anything to market, it was to produce content and have your peers review it.

Our sessions consisted of explaining in detail your business, core competencies, and overall marketing strategy to a group of strangers. Then you pieced together the persona you wanted your brand to embody and the tone with which your writing would convey that persona.

Doing this as a group exercise, and allowing the same group to follow your work, established a certain level of accountability. It also gave you instant access to a group of people who could give you feedback about how genuine your brand felt through your writing.

Usually, after the 30 days were complete, you’d have maybe 3 articles that could be further refined and then published publicly to help establish your brand’s voice. After that, the trick was to keep writing regularly – even if not publishing – so you could maintain that voice.

If you’re strategically building content, a large part of your strategy must be consistency. Not consistency in your publishing schedule, but in your means of communication.

Notes:

  1. I usually selected 31-day months so my students could each take a “day off” during the challenge if they felt burnt out. ↩

Copyright, DRM, and Diminishing Returns

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Let’s consider for a moment that you’re in product development and trying to target a release price for your new widget. It cost you $100,000 to develop the widget (fixed project costs), $10,000 per batch to product the widget (fixed production costs), and $1.50 per widget to distribute and sell.

Assuming you have a total predicted market size of 1,000,000 units, and can product widgets in batches of 100,000, this means you spend:

  • $0.10 per widget on development
  • $0.10 per widget on production
  • $1.50 per widget on distribution and sales

So each widget costs you $1.70 in total. If you’re selling them for $9.99 a piece, you’re pulling in $8.29 in sheer profit with every sale. This is a pretty healthy margin, but it could be better.

Instead of producing physical widgets, you determine a way to create virtual ones. Your total development costs stays the same – $100,000. Production costs drop to effectively 0, though, as you can produce literally millions of copies for just the cost of computing power. Distribution and sales also drops to just transaction fees – $0.25 per sale.

In all, your total cost per widget has dropped to $0.35. If prices stick at $9.99, then your profit has grown to $9.54 for every sale.

If you’re still selling 1,000,000 units in each paradigm, this means your shift to virtual goods has brought in a net of $1.25 million in additional profit.

Unfortunately, you’ve also lowered the barrier to knock-offs and pirates …

The Publishing Industry

The above is a bit of a convoluted example, but it essentially mirrors what’s happened to the publishing industry over the past few years. Originally, printing books was prohibitively expensive unless you did so in massive quantities. Publishers would print several thousand copies at a time to get the cost per book down to a manageable amount.

If you tried to replicate a book (i.e. copy it and sell a knockoff) it often cost more to print at the same quality than the book was selling for initially. Books had their own built-in barriers to privacy, so copyright disputes were relegated more to plagiarism than wholesale reproduction of goods.

Over time, though, the industry changed. The advent of print-on-demand publishing meant vanity publishers could produce batches of as few as 1 book for a fraction of what it would have cost to set of a 1-book offset printing run. 1 Print-on-demand isn’t nearly as cost-effective as offset printing (you might pay $3 to manufacture each copy rather than $0.15), but if you’re keeping your quantities low it’s a cheaper alternative.

Later, even print-on-demand found trouble as electronic publishing began to take over. Now, the effective cost of producing a second – or thousandth – copy of a book is nil. Keeping books priced at almost $10 per copy means publishing houses with large sales volumes are making nearly cover price on each sale in profit. 2

Lowering the Barrier

Fortunately for publishers, digital goods are easy and cheap to reproduce in both large and small volumes. Creating a batch of millions of copies costs no more than creating a one-off copy for a dissatisfied customer.

Unfortunately, it’s also easier for pirates and thieves to make copies of digital goods, too.

In the early days, reproducing a printed book at similar quality to a publisher required both a copy machine and a lot of skill. Bindings were tricky, covers were tricky. Creating a forgery of a professionally-printed book wasn’t cheap or easy, so very few took the time to do it.

With print-on-demand, total profits began to rise for publishers, but so did the number of knock-offs available in the market.

With digital publishing, margins initially became astronomical. So did the numbers of illicitly-reproduced digital copies.

It’s hard to compete with free, so publishers’ prices have been forced downwards. Gone are the days of $24.95 pre-sales; when new books come out, I often sign up for advanced electronic copies on Amazon.com – sometimes for as low as $0.99.

By driving down the cost of doing business, the publishing industry has inadvertently driven down the barrier to competition as well. Thieves readily steal, reproduce, and subvert the sales of quality works by big names. Novices can jump in and sell their unedited, sometimes grossly unpolished manuscripts on the exact same markets that carry classics like Joyce and Hemingway and modern greats like King and McCarthy.

Optimizing further has produced diminishing returns for publishers, and they’re now just beginning to catch up with a market that ran away with the ideas they were working to iterate upon. Institutions of digital rights management (DRM) intended to protect author and publisher copyrights have all but failed to keep up with the rapid pace of digital development.

Ironically, I was asked recently by a friend to help publish their book. They didn’t want to spend a lot on production, and wanted to target electronic publishing so they could keep costs down while cheaply reproducing as many copies as they could sell. At the same time, they emphasized their need to protect copyright and “make it as hard for someone else to steal the book and make copies as possible.”

In this new world of electronic reproduction and distribution, this request might be impossible to fulfill. A billion-dollar industry has been trying to figure it out for years.

Maybe there just isn’t a way to do it.

Notes:

  1. Offset printing usually requires a massive setup fee to print the manuscript. Ordering in large batch sizes helps distribute this thousands-of-dollars cost across thousands of books, dropping its impacts to pennies per copy. Print-on-demand shops don’t require such a setup fee, allowing you to print a single copy for a few dollars. ↩
  2. When you’re talking about thousands of copies and a new writer with a low fee, publishers are only losing a few cents on each sale in fixed costs. The rest goes to cover the overhead related to acting as an agent and marketing the product – real costs for sure, but beyond the scope of what I’m trying to discuss. ↩

Indie Publishing

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The birth of blogging was heralded as the death of traditional publishing. Now anyone could be a writer, and anyone could see their words distributed to any audience anywhere.

It also meant that anyone could be a writer. The editorial barriers to entry were gone, and content of all types and qualities began to make their way online. 1

The birth of vanity publishing was heralded with similar praise and prediction. Websites like Lulu.com meant anyone could become a published author overnight. No more long processes of sending manuscripts into obscurity and just hoping that an editor somewhere would pick you up and publish.

It also meant (again) that anyone could publish anything.

The First Hundred

When I first began blogging in 2007, my goal was to build a body of content worthy of traditional publishing. I worked diligently to regularly write feature-length articles and set what, at the time, felt like an insanely ambitious three-day-per-week publication schedule.

I wasn’t picked up by any professional shops. I didn’t even receive stellar traffic on the site. 2 Instead, I took a half day away from freelancing and writing to build my own manuscript and published Mindshare Marketing: The First Hundred on Lulu.com,

I think, to date, I’ve had a total of 2 sales of that book. Only one of them was me, so I’d consider it a success. But I won’t be pushing for Amazon or Barnes & Noble to carry this title any time soon because, honestly, it’s not that good.

Jumping Duck

I started Jumping Duck Media around the same time as this first publication. Since its founding, I’ve professionally edited and published four separate titles under the imprint. 3

It’s been a great experience, and I look forward to continuing to publish titles under this imprint. It’s taught be a lot about the editorial process, marketing the printed word, and working with powerful wholesalers. 4

Indie Publishing

I love to read, and I take the opportunity to pick up new material every chance I get. Sometimes it’s spectacular. Other times it’s junk that reads as if no one bothers to proofread or offer editorial advice. More often than not, I find out that books in this second category were either published through services like Lulu or Amazon CreateSpace, of the imprint publishing the book is a vanity shop owned by the author.

The ability to publish one’s work independently has definitely challenged traditional publishers, but it’s also dragged the quality of published work down considerably. Anyone with an idea can now be a published author, and that’s not necessarily a good thing.

As the median quality of novels goes down, so does the price sellers ask from their customers. Just as we’ve watched software applications drop to and below the $0.99 price point, 5 we’ve watched the price of books drop for $29.99 for a new edition to $9.99/month for unlimited titles via Kindle Unlimited.

Gone are the days when avid readers lined up at midnight for a new book release.

The tale of indie publishing isn’t all doom and gloom, though. The fact that new authors can now find their way to bookshelves and readers’ homes where stuffy publishing policies would have otherwise blocked them is inspiring. The trick is twofold: to help these new authors find quality editorial resources to review/edit/polish their work before release and to help readers wade through the mountains of muck to find the gems out there waiting to be read.

Sites like Geeky Library aim to do that, placing the burden of editorial review on a team of individuals and making recommendations to would-be readers based on their own experience. No one-off reviews like Amazon. No somewhat-anonymous reviews like mainstream news media.

Indie publishing has been both a boon and a bane to the world of publishing, simultaneously increasing access for new writers and muddying the waters for readers looking for new books. Seeing how things continue to develop in the next month/year/decade will be very telling for the future of the written word.

Notes:

  1. Just think about the number of parody or intentionally misleading fake news sites propagated online. ↩
  2. The first time I had more than 10 unique visitors in a week I thought it was a mistake by Google Analytics. ↩
  3. One was a very limited print run of an outdoors botany guide. You can only purchase copies of the book while on-site at the region it covers. ↩
  4. In the publishing world, you’re essentially required to avail your titles to large booksellers at a 50% discount. You’re also required to allow returns from these booksellers, at their full payment price, in perpetuity if they decide their inventory is not maintainable. For a small publishing shop, knowing that the 10 copies you sell today might be returned for a full refund 3 years from now is incredibly stressful. ↩
  5. A price point wholly unsustainable for all but the most successful (or lucky) development shops. ↩

Why Comments Matter

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Recently on Twitter, I got in an argument with a couple of well-established anti-comment types. Their argument was that comments on blog posts and the like didn’t matter – they support disabling/disallowing comments on an individual site or article.

My argument is that comments are just as valuable as the original article, post, thought, rant that inspired them. Comments matter immensely, and there are several reasons why.

Conversation

Publishing an article in a newspaper or on a blog is the start of a conversation between many individuals. I post my thoughts, you post your reaction to those thoughts, someone else reacts to your statement further, and so on.

It’s a multi-party dialog that, without a commenting system in place, boils down to an individual stating their opinion and refusing to accept feedback or input.

Imagine a conversation taking place outside a website. I walk into a room and make a statement. It could be controversial, it might not be. Then, without having time for any feedback from the audience to whom I’ve made the statement, I walk abruptly out of the room and ignore anything anyone else has said.

Would you consider me inspirational or arrogant?

Publishing a blog is much like making a statement in a public square. Sure, I own the blog, but the fact that my statements are published for all the world to see make it a public arena. Rather than standing in the square and shouting, it would be like me inviting a bunch of friends (and friends’ friends) to my home, then making statements in my living room.

Yes, I own the space, but I’m still communicating with others in a semi-open-to-the-public venue. If I say something inflammatory or otherwise controversial, everyone listening has the right to complain, protest, or otherwise argue with me. My refusal to allow anyone to do so within my home is my right, but subjecting them to my opinions without any recourse to respond makes me a dick.

Subjecting readers to your published work without any recourse to respond makes you one, too.

Context

One argument is that commenting is still allowed even on closed sites, but through avenues like Twitter. I do value the conversations that occur on Twitter, but they lack sufficient context to continue into the future.

When you publish an article, your (likely) goal is that the article will be around and relevant for a very long time. Twitter, and other social media for that matter, is very time-sensitive. Comments made on your article 10 minutes after its publications are essentially lost to the aether a few hours later. Readers coming to your article tomorrow, next week, next month, next year … they will have no sense of the ongoing conversation surrounding your content.

Likewise, forcing any feedback about your statements to others’ blogs or media sites fragments the conversation and removes necessary context. Yes, anyone is free to make comments about your opinions on their own site, but then readers of their site will only see that opinion and have to look elsewhere for the content that originally inspired it.

In a community that seeks to optimize user experience, how is this helpful?

Comments

I am among the first to admit that the current state of commenting on the web is broken. Comments in WordPress, my publishing platform of choice, absolutely suck. Hosted replacements like Livefyre and Disqus aren’t much better.

Rather than close comments on posts, though, I’ll live with the current landscape, blog about how it can be improved, and continue to do what I can to help progress the web itself. It won’t change overnight, but it’s a start.

I have never closed comments on my site. Even when I disagree with what you have to say, I invite you to say it regardless so we can have an open, honest, contextual conversation about the ideas I’ve proposed.

You’re welcome to disagree with me, in the comments section below this post.

What Comes Next?

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The history of publishing has been an interesting one, and something I’ve been keen to follow for years.

When I was younger, published authors were a rare breed. They had to be creative enough to pull together a coherent manuscript and savvy enough to sell said manuscript to a publisher.

I wrote short stories as a kid and dreamed of one day publishing my fiction. I remember long days at the bookstore pouring through Writer’s Market in the hope of finding a company to make my dream a reality.

I attended author talks looking for inspiration, and was often surprised with how difficult it seemed to actually publish a book. The difficulty involved with actually publishing was astounding, and made the entire process feel very daunting.

The Digital Era

After I gave up on publishing a book, I tried to digitally publish some of my work instead. My first blog was a self-hosted HTML site built using MS FrontPage and updated manually by hacking the code and uploading it to the server over FTP.

Remember, this was in the early days of digital publishing.

Since then, we’ve seen a surge in the number of online content management systems that allow anyone to publish just about anything online. Technical skills are no longer required, so the long queue of writers waiting for publishers to select their works have turned to either online or self-publishing.

Newspapers have begun consolidating as media consumption moves to online. Traditional bookstores have begun shuttering as readers turn to digital publications rather than weighty printed tomes.

It’s been an interesting industry shift to watch. It’s been even more interesting – as a technologist and writer to be involved.

It’s Not Over

The shift in both publication and consumption media is far from over, though.

Traditional publishers are just starting to catch up with the digital trends, making things like vanity publishing (once a hipster mainstay) more acceptable and mainstream. Companies like Amazon are making it easier for digital goods to make it to market, and writers focusing on high-volume ebook generation are just as (in some cases more) successful as the old-school, advance-seeking pulp writers.

I look daily at the dichotomy between “traditional print media” its the now-mainstream digital equivalent. I ask myself every day what the media of the future could look like and if publishing 10 years from now will be as different from publishing today as today’s form is from the last decade’s.

What do you think is coming next?

What Constitutes a Publisher?

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A colleague recently pointed me to an interesting article about content publishing and web intents.  The article led to some interesting discussions.

Productization

The biggest issue we discussed, which was also something with which I disagreed, was the idea that publishers’ product could be something other than content.

And let’s not forget that publishers like Medium and Circa are technology companies first, publishers second, because they approach content as a product first and foremost.

I come from a world steeped in publishing – where the focus is first and foremost on the stories you’re telling through content. The product you’re producing is the content itself, and you work with talent (writers, both copy-focused and otherwise) to produce a product worth marketing.

A technology company, on the other hand, would focus more on the platform than the stories being told upon it.  Medium is a technology company – their product is the publishing platform writers use to publish their content.  The actual publisher in this case is also the writer – Medium is not the publisher.

That Medium and similar platforms are called publishers frustrates the conversation a bit.  Take one of Medium’s competitors for example – WordPress.  If anyone were to argue that WordPress itself was a publisher, rather than a tool to empower publishers, I’d call them insane.

Publisher Identification

The second point of discussion was who exactly qualified as a publisher.  While content curation often qualifies as publishing, the idea that websites like BuzzFeed qualify as publishers when they specialize almost exclusively in curation triggered a bit of debate.

When you look at publishing, you have to consider for whom the value is being created.  In the case of sites like Medium, value is being created for writers who achieve exposure and for readers who can participate in the conversation.

What value is produced from watching two puppies meet a cat or taking a quiz to learn what childhood book you’re the most like?

When you look at the real content strategy of curation sites, you can easily see they’re aiming to create viral content that a) pulls in traffic and b) entertains those visitors enough that they in turn share the content with their own personal networks.  It’s an ad strategy, pure and simple.

If you’re in business to sell ads, your product is visitor eyeballs – not the content those eyes are consuming.  I would argue this does not make you a publishers.

Native Advertising

I loathe advertising that breaks the layout or readability of a site.  In-line block ads that force text wrapping frustrate me to no end.

A newer trend in native advertising, though, addressed ad-haters like me while still bringing in ad revenue for a site.

Many publishers have pinned their hopes on “native advertising” to be their savior to combat the decline in effectiveness of banner advertisements, by creating new ad units and flexible content that will perform better because they are more in line with a user’s experience with the site.

If you have to advertise, I’d rather you did so with sponsored content that otherwise fits within the context and flow of your existing content. 1 I don’t necessarily agree with the assertion that native ads are less effective than regular banner ads, but I do agree that content editors/curators need to recognize there’s little difference between an ad call in a banner and one in a block of prose.

Streams of Content

The final point we’ve discussed is on the evolution of web publishing from creating static pages to building dynamic streams of content.  The article quotes another fantastic piece by Anil Dash:

Users have decided they want streams, but most media companies are insisting on publishing more and more pages. And the systems which publish the web are designed to keep making pages, not to make customized streams.

I’ve seen this developing trend in web design, and I really like it.  The idea of streams is fraught with exciting new challenges – how do you embed “evergreen” content in a dynamic, temporal stream? – and wonderful new ideas in the landscape of the web.  I’ve had a content strategy around this idea for quite a while, 2 and I’m looking forward to seeing how others leverage the changing trends as well.

My prediction: this trend will drastically impact the fabric of the Internet and digital publishing within the next 5 years.  We’ll stop seeing static websites (or even quasi-dynamic blogs) and see a massive shift to much more dynamic, customizable, app-like content platforms.

How do you see publishing?  How do you qualify publishers already in the market?  What do you think the future holds for us?

Notes:

  1. I will not sell even “native” advertising on this site since I’m aiming for an ad-free revenue model. But that’s my strategy and won’t be a fit for all. ↩
  2. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink … ↩