Growing a Book
I've been mucking around with hubpages. It's in the same category as squidoo, designed to publish single topics in a big ecosystem of topics. A nice approach for people who don't want to maintain dedicated web sites, or want to supplement that activity, with pocket money coming in from pay per click ad revenue and other options.
But there is another application for these systems, I'll call it "The Incremental Book."
The more successful publishers at these sites usually have several islands of interest. A particular topic or category that they explore with a number of independent articles (lens, hubs, pages,etc ) that all referencing each other in a mesh of links. This is good marketing. Google likes pages that have links pointing to them and this "backlinking" is a strategy for pushing a page up in the search results of google, assuming you've picked good keywords/phrases and your article is organized well around that single focus. Kind of like writing a paragraph around a topic sentence.
This also lends itself to a new and fun way to write a book.
You start with a topic you'd like to write a book about. No commitment at this point, just an idea. You start writing little sections of the book, one interesting piece at a time and publishing them individually on squidoo or hubpages. By publishing them there, you also get feedback, comments, etc (you'll need to actively participate in the forums on these sites around the topic area, offering advice, asking questions, which in turn drives people interested in that category to investigate your writing and provide you feedback.)
While you're growing your book this way, you also start making money from the traffic and ads for its partial content. Especially as the number of articles related to your topic grows. Then, instead of a line with a hook in the water, you have a net, where someone that hits one of the pages in the general area will likely be interested in the other related topics you have conveniently linked to in your mesh.
Once you have fleshed everything out, you can pull all the content together into an ebook and then let affiliates sell it for you through something like paydot.com
Here's a description of the process that goes into more detail.
Now this definitely goes against the grain of conventional thought for writing a book, which is generally to protect every scrap of an idea diligently and send the finished manuscript to a big publisher and wait for the royalty checks to roll-in. But the times are changing faster than our mental maps. This new model takes advantage of:
But there is another application for these systems, I'll call it "The Incremental Book."
The more successful publishers at these sites usually have several islands of interest. A particular topic or category that they explore with a number of independent articles (lens, hubs, pages,etc ) that all referencing each other in a mesh of links. This is good marketing. Google likes pages that have links pointing to them and this "backlinking" is a strategy for pushing a page up in the search results of google, assuming you've picked good keywords/phrases and your article is organized well around that single focus. Kind of like writing a paragraph around a topic sentence.
This also lends itself to a new and fun way to write a book.
You start with a topic you'd like to write a book about. No commitment at this point, just an idea. You start writing little sections of the book, one interesting piece at a time and publishing them individually on squidoo or hubpages. By publishing them there, you also get feedback, comments, etc (you'll need to actively participate in the forums on these sites around the topic area, offering advice, asking questions, which in turn drives people interested in that category to investigate your writing and provide you feedback.)
While you're growing your book this way, you also start making money from the traffic and ads for its partial content. Especially as the number of articles related to your topic grows. Then, instead of a line with a hook in the water, you have a net, where someone that hits one of the pages in the general area will likely be interested in the other related topics you have conveniently linked to in your mesh.
Once you have fleshed everything out, you can pull all the content together into an ebook and then let affiliates sell it for you through something like paydot.com
Here's a description of the process that goes into more detail.
Now this definitely goes against the grain of conventional thought for writing a book, which is generally to protect every scrap of an idea diligently and send the finished manuscript to a big publisher and wait for the royalty checks to roll-in. But the times are changing faster than our mental maps. This new model takes advantage of:
- The opportunity to make money off of little pieces of a bigger project before it's complete
- Using a group of people interested in the topic to help refine it and make it better
- The counter-intuitive trend of people buying ebooks which package something together, even if they could assemble the same thing from material spread out on the web; the tendency of people to buy printed books, even if a free ebook with the same content is available
- Different vectors of information. People looking for information through web sources and people looking for information packaged, look in different ways and in different places
- Leveraging interests of people who would rather sell stuff than make it. Using affiliates means you can outsource your marketing to people who enjoy it and are good at
- Once the mesh of articles is out there and the ebook is done, it requires very little effort to maintain as a stream of income, unlike a physical product you have to stock or a service you have to perform
Comments
Post a Comment