The Kindle experiment

I still seem to be mentally stuck on the book thing! I had a good conversation with the book publishing mentor type person, but I'm still not sure what I get for my £1500 expenditure. I'm not even sure if I get a book for that!

So I had a nice think in the sunny climes of a First Great Western train today on the way up to London, and decided at the end of it - and what can only be described as the second best cup of coffee I have ever had on a train, and that ain't a high hurdle to leap - that I would try an experiment.

The world is changing so quickly, and yet we don't realise how quickly. A few thoughts:

90% of singles are sold as download, yet only 10% of albums are sold the same way

In 2000, 90% of job applications involved paper, either post or fax. Now 90% are done electronically

So after a thought from a few people, I thought that I would try an experiment. Amazon Kindle is a whole system in itself, but also has access to the two most powerful online sales system so far ever invented: Amazon.com and iTunes! So as long as you have some form of eReader on your device - anything from an intelligent phone through a Mac to a PC - you can read books placed on Amazon Kindle.

So I have decided to take just one of our eBooks from our existing process, and experiment with it. Inline with what a friend suggested to me - I don't have mentors or coaches, I have friends with expensive tastes in food and wine - I have also decided to outsource it. This little experiment could have two distinct advantages:

I action something on the book issue, and close that out mentally

I try a new way of selling eBooks that I so far haven't tried, and decide if we can sell a "lite" version of the course via Kindle

What ever the result, go bad or indifferent, its running ahead of and hence piloting the main project

I like this experiment, it achieves a few extra things and won't take a lot of effort to complete.

The rest of the week is now devoted to website design, spec completion, and - if they remember to call me on Friday - a conversation with the SEO person. Next weeks goal is to get the blog up and running.

Surely, publishing a book can't be THAT difficult?

Monday was a failure. I had an appointment booked with a book publishing advisor at11:00, and didn't hear from her. Tried calling, got vMail = DAM!

So today, between doing interviews in the day job, I rang her again. I had read her website before the call, and wondered if there was a one-route solution? That was horribly confirmed in the following 30min phone call: "The answer is write a proposal to a publisher, so that will be £1500 please." She had a dodgy phone, which on hearing the price dropped out!

I am thinking that I am getting the order incorrect here on business launch. Even if I self published at a cost of around £3,000, it would still be six months+ - so September - before the book reached the shelves of Waterstone's and the High Street book retailers. I think you can do Amazon Kindle for less than $100 in a month.

Lets go back to basics here: you don't have to get it right, you just have to get it going. So I think we will get the website and course going first, and then think about changing the draft eBook into something physical.

Book publishing task complete, by dismissing it!

Day1: and we are already off plan...

Objective: source blog

I will write a bit more about this in some later posts, as at present I don't want to reveal the product name, but the first thing you need to do when launching a product that will mainly sell through the internet is to find a hungry market.

Actually, that's what you want in any ideal business, but on the internet you have to get high Google rankings, and that a scientific process of:
- Look at Googles tools to find out what is being searched for
- Look at the magazine racks/Clickbank products to see what is being talked about/sold with regards those areas
- Assess the competition
- Choose a product and URL combination, and then just go for it

We are in Go For It mode, and for various reasons we'll come back to the science bit later: it will be come clear when I reveal the chose URL and product name.

So accepting we are at that stage, what's next? Well the books written, but I am sure needs more work. But as Litman would say, its good enough for launch!

The next thing that needs doing is the website, which we'll achieve in two stages:
1. Launch the blog, and get Google rankings started. It should take about 30days to get onto page1
2. Have a the proper website designed in background during this period, ready for a day30+ launch

I once got quoted £2000 for the design of a fairly simple new website once. I ask the designer what they did for £2000, and much as though their portfolio was great, the main answer was to pay them half of that sum as a deposit! Needless to say that I didn't take them up on their option, but went and sourced a cheaper option that took 3months to index in Google.

So today's task was to source a blog platform. Now I know there are cheap and simple ways to do this on free platforms - I'm writing this blog on such a platform - but I want to outsource. So I made contact (eventually...) with the provider of such Wordpress based blog platforms, and she (eventually...) came back to me to confirm that yes, I could not only have one eMail address, I could have as many as I wanted!

Go result for the day, but should have taken less time

Costs so far: £6.95
Time: 63hrs

So why outsource?

So why outsourcing? We here so much about outsourcing to far off exotic lands in the UK media, that surely outsourcing is easy?

As an engineer its easy to jump in and DIY: but that's wholly unproductive. You see, what you learn in business is that something you are great at, something's you are good at, and something's you are adequate at - and the rest is just ego! When someone else can do it quicker/faster/cheaper/better, then - why DIY?

So this project is about outsourcing, and doing what I have found I do best: finding markets, conceptualising the product/service, and then launching. Once its in day-to-day business mode, frankly: I lose my mojo! I am then better to develop or move on, than I am to do the 9-5.

So I am outsourcing for three core reasons:
*Do what I do best/others do best
*Get there quicker/cheaper
*Change and improve my business

Business is NOT rocket science...

This is the diary of a simple UK business person, who is trying something new: outsourcing the launch of his new business.

It will on launch involve a website and a book, and possibly later a workshop or training event. But let's start with a website and a book, and then see where we go.

And that's lesson1, a concept I learnt from a mad New Yorker called Mike Litman: You don't have to get it right, you just HAVE to get it going! As an MBA trained engineer, I thought everything had to be planned to the Nth degree, where as actually - you don't, you just have to find a market and listen to it.