David Hancock's space

Nichecraft is the name we use for the literary alchemy of spinning ideas into gold. Pick a niche in a subject that you will remain eager to write about and promote and make nichecraft the heart of your strategy for success.

Every book you can write can help sell every other book you write. Make synergy one of your objectives. The more books you write on the subject, the more copies they will all sell, along with the products and services based on them. Just as you can build a house brick by brick, nichecraft is the easiest, simplest, fastest way we know for you to build a career, book by book.

Nichecraft also makes it easier for you to focus your attention on authors, books, other media and speaking opportunities in the field you want to enter. You have to assess its long-term prospects and convince your networks and yourself that you will enjoy being part of it.

The idea of nichecraft is worth many times the price of this book. It’s as logical and powerful as it is simple, and it works as well for Jay Conrad Levinson, who laid the foundation for a virtually endless series of books that are needed by more people in more places in more kinds of businesses every day.

Our certainty that practicing nichecraft will make you a successful entrepreneurial author can’t guarantee that you will be able to sell your books or that they will sell well enough to warrant more books in the series. But the unpredictability of publishing is part of what makes the business exciting and keeps publishing people open to new authors and new ideas.

The biggest worry of the year for book publishers has been answered, as Borders appears to have been granted another 12 months to sort itself out. Leading shareholder and lender of last resort Pershing Square has extended their $42.5 million term loan to Borders until April 1, 2010.

But Pershing has once again won big concessions for that extension: The "put" option to buy the Paperchase chain (which Pershing never wanted to own in the first place) will expire, and the big grants of 14.7 million warrants will be reset from the previous price of $7 a share down to yesterday's stock price of just $0.65 per share.

CEO Ron Marshall, hand-picked by Pershing, says in the announcement, "The extension of the loan gives us some necessary breathing room, which is important in the current economic environment." Borders will announce fourth quarter earnings after the close of the market tomorrow.

One of the qualities common to successful nonfiction books is simplicity. They are based on simple ideas compellingly communicated by their titles, their covers and their marketing. So make your ideas clear, compelling and promotable, but keep them simple.

In their earnings conference call with investors, Barnes & Noble noted that "inventories declined $155 million or 11 percent compared to last year." They say they were able to "improve inventory turns to the highest levels in our history" and indicated "our in stock percentage of being in stock on key titles and back list did not suffer at all" as a result. Other supply chain improvements "resulted in reduced purchases from book wholesalers which of course carry lower markups." A good portion of the inventory reductions were in music, and the company indicated DVDs and music combined now comprise just about 8 percent of sales and is still falling.

CEO Steve Riggio addressed their digital initiatives without offering any actual information: "We also plan to return to the business of offering customers digital content inclusive of eBooks, newspapers and magazines.... We understand investors are anxious to hear more specifics about our plans in this arena and we do have a wide range of initiatives in development but due to the highly strategic nature of this fast evolving market, we will announce each of them as they launch.... I think our customers are very eager for us to enter the marketplace."

The company is solid financially, noting that they started the fiscal year with $325 million in cash. To clarify our earlier note about the company's expectation of opening just 15 new stores in the year ahead, 11 of those are relocations of existing (and 10 stores will be closed) so the net gain will provide almost no growth.

So I'd encourage everyone not to forget about your local bookstores and support them whenever possible. Make sure you are friends with the Community Relations Managers and do what you can to drive traffic back into the stores.

1. Create books, products and services that you can market with pride and passion.
2. Remember that you are in the service of your ideas, your books and your readers.
3. Establish an annual marketing budget that reflects your belief in the importance of marketing and enables you to carry out your promotion plan.
4. Devote the same time, energy and imagination to promoting your books every day that you devoted to writing them.
5. Foster and sustain warm, giving relationships with your networks.
6. Maintain the perspective of a one-person multimedia, multinational conglomerate when you make decisions about writing and promoting your books.
7. Be a lifelong learner in your field and in learning to market your business so you remain competitive.
8. Use state-of-the-art techniques and technology to serve your readers better.
9. Recommend competitors’ books if they will meet readers’ needs in ways that yours don’t.
10. Practice “co-opetition” by seeking ways to benefit from collaborating with your competitors.
    
    Of course, give more than your readers expect, which is why I’m going to do the same with 10 more…
11. Always over deliver with the content of your books, seminars, talks, etc.
12. Make your marketing efforts creative and consistent enough to position yourself as one of the top authors in your field.
13. Welcome change as an opportunity to find ideas and improve your business and your life.
14. Make selling your books to new readers the start of a lifelong relationship.
15. Encourage readers to contact you, and regard this as an opportunity to serve them, to help attract new readers through word of mouth and to publicize everything you can offer them.
16. Welcome the chance to say thank you and reward those who help you.
17. Let your decisions reflect harmonious short- and long-term personal and professional goals that make you eager to get up in the morning.
18. Ask the people involved with your books and your business to help you keep these commandments.
19. Strive to create harmony between what you think, say and do, without crossing the line between being righteous and self-righteous.
20. Understand that marketing begins once you’ve made the sale and that a mind numbing 68 percent of all business lost is due to apathy after the sale.

Apple previewed the many changes on the way in the next version of the operating system (version 3.0) for the iPhone and iPod Touch. (Apple says there are now about 30 million devices running this OS). Notably for publishers, Apple will now allow the sale of App Store content from within a paid app.

SVP of iPhone software Scott Forstall said at the preview, "We've been listening, and some developers say there are other business models they'd like to support, such as subscriptions. Like magazines who would like to have readers renew their subscriptions, or, for instance, an e-book provider, who would like to sell a generic e-book application. We are supporting all of those in iPhone 3.0. For example, when you buy a game, you can purchase 10 more levels right inside of the game. Or, if you are buying city guides, and you've already purchased Chicago, but next you'd like to buy San Francisco. The business arrangement is the same, with 70 percent of the revenue going to the developer and developers are paid monthly. This is for paid apps only, so when a consumer sees a free app, you won't ever be asked to buy something within the application."

Exactly what this means for the emerging ecosystem of ereaders and ebookstores focused on the iPhone OS is not yet clear. Certainly it opens up additional opportunities for those vendors already selling paid Apps--like the bestselling Classics compilation, the travel guides mentioned above, and vendors like ScrollMotion, which wraps content and a reader together into an app. And it provides potential business models and incentives for companies that control content to create paid apps which they can turn into continuous channels for selling content--think anything from story or book a week/month to a portal into a company's list or a genre or type of book.

Apple keeps their traditional thirty percent--good since it means there is no other retail/wholesale middleman involved, or potentially unsustainable if layered on top of another seller's model. (Also good for publishers if it helps move the discount for selling ebooks in general to 30 percent.) Potentially it leads to conquering the biggest problem so far in the growing ebook-for-iPhone market: a better, more seamless store/purchasing experience. And if it drives enough revenue for Apple, it could incentivize a breakout ebook App Store to improve the search/discover/buy process.

It offers no advantage to those who provide free reader apps--like eReader, Stanza, Kindle and Shortcovers--and then try to sell content for the apps separately (outside of Apple, and with no commission to the company). But it raises the possibility that Apple might try to block these apps in the future, or change the way they do business. It certainly signals that Apple wants their traditional piece of this growing bit of action.

I know we'll be following closely and participating.

Your creativity—your ability to use your imagination to create new ways to promote your books—will impress publishers because they show little creativity when they promote their books.

Large houses publish hundreds of books a year, so they can’t devote enough time or money to creating the most effective marketing campaigns for every book they publish. Even the big books that receive far more attention than the rest of the list are victims of the cookie-cutter syndrome. As each book winds its way through the publishing maze, it is granted the time and attention warranted by its importance to the list.

You and your publisher will have identical interests but not identical agendas. You both want to make money on your book, but your book will only be one of the hundreds of books a large house publishes. They have to pay attention to the whole list; you don’t.

If yours is one of the few big books on your publisher’s list, your book will be looked after as well as possible given your publisher’s time, money and creative limitations.

Authors, like their publishers, are prisoners of the system. The publication of any book is a complex enterprise that, at a large house, involves the fleeting attention of more than a hundred people as the book passes before them on the conveyor belt that connects writers at one end of the publishing process with readers at the other.

Publishers publish far too many books to do all of them justice even if they wanted to. The skill, creativity and commitment with which books are published vary enormously depending on how much love or money or both motivate the publishers and their overworked, underpaid staff. The result: cookie-cutter publishing.

Ultimately, no matter who or how you publish your books, the responsibility of moving them from the booksellers shelves to your fans hands, lie solely in your hands.

The long-term payoff: everything you do to promote your books also helps sell you, your future books and all of the products and services that you will have to offer.

One reason now is such a great time to be a writer is that you can use the books you love and the authors you admire as models for creating your books and your career.

You can bring your vision, passion and creativity to promotion, your unique ability to do the same things differently and better than they’ve been done before. One way to know you’re succeeding: other authors use your ideas.

Every book is four businesses:

1. 
an enterprise that creates a product or service 

2. a marketing business that sells what it produces
3. 
a service business that understands that service is whatever customers want it to be
4. 
a people business that makes the first three possible

The larger the business, the harder it is to establish and maintain personal relationships with customers, suppliers and employees. Although they may be poor in capital, entrepreneurial authors can be rich in human capital through their relationships with the people in their networks.

One advantage you have over traditional authors is that you can establish and maintain warm personal relationships, online and offline, with your readers and other allies in your assault on the citadel of fame and fortune. In the age of multinational conglomerates, consumers appreciate more than ever relationships with businesses that provide them with impeccable service and personal involvement.

According to Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, one of Amazon’s goals is to be the world’s most “customer-centric” company. They want to establish relationships with customers that are so satisfying customers won’t be tempted to start from scratch and build relationships with competitors. For an entrepreneurial author, being the world’s most reader-centric author is a worthy goal.

Although entrepreneurial authors are committed to the success of their businesses, they value people more than sales. They pursue their goals ethically and whenever possible, by providing more than what they promise.

The ereading (and eretailing) landscape continues to get more interesting as BN has bolstered their quiet development efforts in digital content by purchasing Fictionwise for $15.7 million in cash. As part of this morning's announcement the company acknowledges for the first time "the launch of an e-Bookstore later this year."

They say, "Barnes & Noble said it plans to use Fictionwise as part of its overall digital strategy, which includes the launch of an e-Bookstore later this year." Barnes & Noble indicates they will keep Fictionwise as a separate business unit and founders Steve and Scott Pendergrast will continue to operate the business. Early reactions with epublishing circles see it as giving further support to the ePub format and to the possibilities for DRM-free ebooks. Steve Pendergrast indicated to Tele-Read they "shopped the site around to a number of buyers with the understanding that the current philosophy toward e-books would survive--and that presumably means that you'll still be able to buy nonDRMed books from Fictionwise when publishers allow."

Since Fictionwise owns eReader and drives the store for Lexcycle's Stanza, it makes BN a big player on the mobile platform. And last month Fictionwise announced they would run the econtent store for Plastic Logic's form-advancing ereading device, so there's one natural device tie-in to build on.

In related stories, prior to the BN announcement Wired interviewed makers of iPhone reading apps in the wake of Amazon's launch of their Kindle app for iPhone. In the story, the makers of the Classics app--heavily promoted by Apple, containing about 20 classic books--say they have sold 160,000 downloads (for about $255,000 in revenue).

Michael Serbinis, who runs Shortcovers for Indigo, is sanguine: "If you've got Kindle and you've got some books on your account then you can read them on the iPhone, that's complimentary for what they've got but pretty limited for everybody else." Neelan Choksi at Lexcyle says "I kind of view it as a legitimization of reading on mobile devices which is nice, and that will help us," while admitting that "We still have to distinguish ourselves in the space."