Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

In the course of writing out the second post in the ’actual costs of publishing’ series realized something important. Since a lack of time limits me from working on it, will share it instead -

The Big Money is in upending the existing publishing model. New publishing is going to be so much of a change and there will be so many opportunities that even Amazon and Google will be hard pressed to control New Publishing or stop new start-ups.

The world of publishing is changing and there are a few key areas that absolutely anyone can come in and own. Writing software that helps the existing model and existing companies is all well and good. However, you’ll never be in control of your destiny.

Here are some of the big areas worth focusing on if you’re a developer -

Starting Points – Where customers start off trying to find content.

Every big site and every big retailer is adding to the discoverability problem. There are 4,400+ blogs in the Kindle Store and no easy way of finding a blog that’s right for you.

There are 275,000 books and the only way anyone has figured out to get any interest is to offer a book free or for $1.

There’s no way to highlight independent publishers or self-published authors. 

There’s no site that has a good, smart book search.

Most big players are so focused on ‘control’ and ‘competitive advantage’ they are doing nothing to make things easy for customers.Customer focus usually beats out monopoly focus.

Think Google when it first came in and instead of focusing on building portals and getting users to stay within their network forever they just built a search engine that worked.

Decision Points – Reviews, Ratings and Providing Customers Intelligence

One of Amazon’s biggest competitive advantage is the sheer number of user reviews. However, there are two vulnerabilities -

1. Changing what a review means. 
2. Hitting the longer tail.

An example of the first is that Amazon’s reviews provide reviews from every user’s perspective – However, not from a complete perspective, and not from the perspective of the person reading the reviews to make a decision.

An example of the second is upcoming and new products (such as most self-published books) where there aren’t enough reviews and data points to make a decision.

By its very nature of focusing on selling books and focusing on bestsellers, Amazon can never be a site completely focused on ’interestingness’.

Purchase Points – Start selling

Scribd is offering to sell books and take a 20% cut. They’re just a few years old, and they might have a lot of traffic – However, those users are trained to expect free.

Start an ebook selling site that doesn’t allow books less than $5 or higher than $9.99. Focus on people who don’t mind paying for quality content.

Tell every self published author that they have to link back to your site to get listed. Google might ban you – However, you’d have enough traffic from other sources.

Do a Tie-In so that every self published author is selling your site along with their book (not sure how exactly to pull this off – however, any url shortening service, squidoo, and wordpress.com are good examples).

Services to Writers

Every writer, that actually finishes a book,  is going to -

1. Spend some amount of money on Marketing.  
2. Print and buy their own books. 
3. Sell their books.  
4. Need an online presence.
5. Be susceptible to scammers and people who overcharge them. 
6. Spend on editing and formatting in some form.
7. Need a bookcover.
8. Need many more related services.

Focus on just one service or offer a bunch of services. However, millions of writers are going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps even billions, every year. As opposed to big corporations providing cookie cutter services at high prices, you can provide a tailored, viable value proposition. 

Publishing

This is the most challenging – However, it also has the most upside

1.  You’re now in a world where if you play your cards right you can take most of the profits from an ebook (tune out what publishers are claiming).
2.  The traditional model of publishing is dying yet publishers can’t just switch to a new model and cut 80% of their staff – they wouldn’t know how to function.
3. No matter how good of a job Amazon does they can’t focus 100% on finding authors and making them successful – you can.

There’s more to the Publishing opportunity – have to think about it.

Closing Thoughts

New publishing is going to be about getting things done for the customer.  A mistake a lot of people are making is getting caught up in either  -

1. Trying to control the market BEFORE providing value (not Amazon – they’re playing it very well). 
2. Or wasting time arguing about DRM and their own personal beliefs. No one cares. You can only help people who are willing to be helped – so stop trying to save the world.

We might not like to admit it – However, fundamentally, Customers don’t really care about anything other than getting good books, getting them easily, and getting them at good value for money.

Filed under: kindle, publishing Tagged: | future of publishing, kindle future