The Author-izer

Archive for the ‘Publishing’ Category

If you ever listened to the WBJB Radio series of podcasts conducted by Ron Pramschufer, founder of SelfPublishing.com, you know how he feels about Print on Demand. If you haven’t heard his interviews with representatives from Xlibris, iUniverse, AuthorHouse et al., I’ll sum it up for you: he thinks most POD houses are little more than vanity presses out to beggar unsuspecting authors, and even at best the POD printing process produces an inferior product.

So you can imagine my surprise—and that, I suspect, of most other readers of the Publishing Basics newsletter—when I got an e-mail message from Ron with the subject header “New!!! Direct to POD from SelfPublishing.com.”

What accounts for this change of heart?

To quote Ron,

I’m a bit of a hard headed German so I have resisted altering my approach to self-publishing because I know it works. But I’m finally starting to realize that “me” knowing it works, and “you” going to a pay-to-be-published publisher defeats the whole purpose.

(Anyone who can give me a semantically valid reason for putting “me” and “you” in quotation marks in that sentence gets extra pedant points.)

Ron goes on to describe the Direct to POD program this way:

Direct to POD is a program developed by SelfPublishing.com for individual authors who prefer to choose a guided Publishing “Package” to the traditional a-la-carte method of SelfPublishing.com. Unlike the “Pay-to-be-Published” publishers, like Author House and iUniverse, we do not have inflated a-la-carte prices just so we can make it look like we’re giving you a big discount if you buy one of our packages. If you don’t mind the extra work, our a-la-carte self-guided services will always be the most economical way to self-publish your book. Whether you chose the guided or self-directed approach, YOU will:

• Always be the publisher
• Always own the ISBN to your title
• Always own your printing files after your initial printing
• Always earn ALL the publisher profit

The Direct to POD approach concentrates on helping the author get to the point that printed copies can be ordered. The old saying printers use: “The first book costs a lot but they get pretty cheap after that.” The packages offered are all based on the cost of the first book. Once the author/publisher has received that first copy, they will be free to order 100, 1000 or 1,000,000. Remember…as with all SelfPublishing.com programs… you’re the boss.

The $995 package includes:

• Dedicated book coach to see you through the process
• ISBN
• Layout of text and cover (5X8 or 6X9 fiction)
• 1 Paperback copy
• EBook EPub and Mobi Kindle file
• Inclusion in the Thor POD distribution program
• 5% discount on first primary print run as well as any additional upgrades or services.

The $1495 package includes

• Dedicated book coach to see you through the process
• ISBN
• Layout of text and cover for paperback and hardcover book
• 1 Paperback copy
• 1 Hardcover copy
• EBook EPub and Mobi Kindle file
• Inclusion in Thor POD distribution program
• 5% discount on first primary print run as well as any additional upgrades or services.

By “book coach” I presume he means “publishing coach,” someone familiar with the various steps involved in publishing a book, rather than a writing coach.

But the thing is, if Selfpublishing.com is providing all these services, where exactly is the motivation—for them—in tying it to POD? Because they could just as easily create a similar package for offset printing, with a primary print run of as few as 100 copies for one-color books and 25 copies of full-color books. (And, uh, isn’t “first primary print run” redundant?) With the lower per-book price of offset, the customer would get a comparable deal, even if storage and fulfillment services might add a bit to the package cost.

After all, if the main reason people are paying for POD services (some of which are a rip-off) is because they’re easier than managing the different aspects of publishing oneself, then making offset book printing easy would seem to be the obvious counter tactic. If you can provide an attractive package, you should be able to compete with the AuthorHouses of the world.

Yet, despite the still-visible differences between digital and offset printing (a narrowing gap, less perceptible in text than in, say, business cards), it wasn’t the technology of Print on Demand that really had Pramschufer up in arms. It was the predatory pricing practices of certain companies that used that technology and produce poor-quality, unsalable books for unjustifiable sums of money. Those are certainly practices worth condemning.

The Direct to POD program seems like decent value, but I’m not sure it’s unique  enough to distinguish itself from its increasingly numerous competitors. Since the days of that podcast series, we’ve seen the advent of Lulu.com, Amazon’s CreateSpace, and, in the e-book space, SmashWords, Scrib’d, and Amazon’s Digital Text Platform. And even though I believe (knowing what the cost of a book designer is, and of an ISBN, and so forth) that there are no outrageous markups in these packages, the creation of Direct to POD still looks more like a belated attempt to cash in on a trend than an attempt to protect authors from vanity presses in disguise.

Len Edgerly interviewed Seth Godin on February 24th for The Reading Edge podcast. (It took me forever to get that pun, for some reason). Though Godin was there ostensibly to talk about his latest book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? (Amazon affiliate link), the podcast bills itself as “Conversations about the eBook Revolution,” and this proved to be one, taking place as it did right after the great Macmillan-Amazon pricing dispute. (In case you missed that, Macmillan wanted to sell its new Kindle books for $14.99 instead of $9.99. Amazon took all the “buy” buttons off Macmillan’s books in the Kindle store, but then caved in, largely because of Apple’s intention to sell books in its iBook store for the iPad at $14.99.)

Starting about 7 minutes into the episode, Godin explains that instead of creating books for their readers, publishers have gone looking for readers for their books. Publishers are obsessed with moving paper (with what David Mathison called “packaging” in his talk at the 2010 BAIPA conference) around rather than getting attention. What they need is a platform that lets them know who is reading what. When it comes to e-books, they’ve ceded carriage to Amazon, and now to Apple. And because the iBook app doesn’t come pre-installed on the iPad,

That means that carriage is going to be an issue from the first day, because before you can even read a book on the iPad, you’re going to have to go download an app for it. Which is opening a huge door for any publisher with guts, who could, if I were doing it, join up with five other publishers and jointly issue your own app. Because if you issue your own app, then you don’t have to cut Apple in, the way you do in the current system, but most important, the data, the privilege, the ability to find out who needs what and how to get it to them, belongs to the publishers, not to the middleman.

My immediate thought was that it would never happen. Not because the Big Six would never cooperate in such a venture (though they might not). Not even because traditional publishers believe they’re in the business of producing and distributing physical objects rather than words, as Godin claims in the interview.

No, because Apple wouldn’t permit the competition. Back when the iPod Touch and the iPhone first came out, the mobile version of iTunes installed on them didn’t support podcasts. But when someone created a podcatching application, Apple wouldn’t allow it in the App Store because it competed with iTunes. Or would compete with iTunes, once iTunes supported podcasting on the iPhone and iPod touch.

And this was for something that didn’t actually make Apple any money.

So it’s pretty hard for me to believe that they’d allow serious competition for their iBook store.

For a moment, looking at the iPad app store, I thought I might be wrong. After all, there’s not only a Kindle app (the better to keep people from buying a competitor’s device) but a few other e-book applications, at least one of those focuses on free public-domain books. And let’s not forget the comic books and magazines. There are plenty of individual books (and Vooks) for sale as apps, but we had those already on the iPhone, and Apple gets its cut of each of those.

If you have contrary information and can refute me, please do, but I can’t imagine that Apple is letting Amazon sell books through its Kindle app, or Marvel Comics through it’s iPad app, without taking a cut. (It would certainly account for per issue prices that have Marvel’s reviewers complaining). The percentage they take of individual book apps is fair enough, at least by comparison with what an author can expect to get in royalties from a traditional publishing deal, but if anyone else is going to make money off an iPad app, Apple will, too. It beggars belief that they would do it any other way.

Because you can’t get an app into  the App Store without Apple’s permission (and, rumor has it, without designing the thing on Apple-approved tools), there’s no way book publishers could create a platform for recommending, selling, and reading books without cutting Apple in on the profits. Hence Apple would inevitably have a say in the pricing of any Mystery Novel or Science Fiction bookstore app that the publishers got together to produce, and it’s pretty unlikely that they’d stand for anything that seriously undercut the prices in their own iBook store. And that could act as quite a deterrent, not just to the big publishers, who might not be flexible enough to try such a thing anyway, but to smaller publishers, who might.

It could still be worth it for publishers to create their own system, for the sake of that data about who’s reading what. Amazon’s recommendation engine, its ability to say “People who bought this also bought that” is a great tool. So are its reviews, even if not all of them are genuine. There might be something extra that a publisher-created e-book app could offer to readers, and to the publishers, that would make it a worthwhile investment. But it’s not going to be freedom from Apple’s influence, not on Apple’s device.

Apple is the ultimate closed system. If you want to play with their toys, you play by their rules. If book publishers really want an e-book distribution system that they control, they’re going to have to produce their own e-book reader, and it’s going to have to provide a better experience than the Kindle and the iPad put together.

I’m not holding my breath.

George Morrisey, a management consultant, professional speaker, and the author or co-author of 19 books, posted the following tips to the October 2nd edition of SpeakerNet News. I have re-printed them here with his permission.

My books have been far and away my most important marketing tool over my 38 years in the speaking business. However, the role of books in the marketplace today is radically different from when I started. With that in mind, let me offer some tips for you to consider as you approach the place of books in your speaking career.

• Unless you write a best-selling sex book, the likelihood of your being able to generate significant revenue from books is very low. My best year of royalties was about $35,000.
• Your main reason for having a published book is to position yourself as an expert in your field.
• However, what is different today is that a book can become a foundation for a spin-off of 15–20 other products/services that can produce significant revenue. These include such things as consulting, facilitation, workbooks, assessment instruments, webcasts, recorded presentations that can be downloaded, subscriptions to a variety of ongoing services, ebooks, and online training, just to mention a few. You are limited only by your own imagination.
• Lengthy books of several hundred pages are history. Most best-selling business books today are under 100 pages in length that include lots of pictorial and graphic illustrations.
• Content is still vitally important but it does not need to be beaten to death. Whether we like it or not, there are very few books today that are read cover to cover.
• Remember, however, that YOU get better as you grow in your speaking profession but the books and other publications you have already published do NOT get better. Whatever you publish needs to be something you will still be proud of 10 years later.
• Determine if you want to self-publish or work with a commercial publisher. My preference is to go with a commercial publisher for the primary book unless you are willing and able to invest a lot of time, energy and money in promoting it. Self-published books will rarely, if ever, be found in bookstores. Spin-off products are perfect for self-publication and should be looked on as items that can be easily updated or created anew and brought to market quickly.
• For commercial publishing, my preference is going with a medium-size publisher rather than with one of the giants. Medium-size publishers are likely to provide more personalized treatment and key decision makers are more accessible. You will probably get little or no advance from them but a greater willingness to establish a specific promotional budget. With large publishers, your book is one of several hundred to several thousand titles they will offer in a year. Unless you are a celebrity or a REAL best-selling author, they are likely to offer it to the market and, if it doesn’t take off in the first few weeks, they will catalog it and forget it. Less than half of all commercially-published books recover their initial costs, much less make a profit for the publisher.
• Regardless of what the publisher may suggest, every clause in their “standard” contract is negotiable. A few things to keep in mind:
  1. You should reserve the right to publication, without the publisher’s permission, in any media that they do not provide.
  2. Insist on being a part of the final decision regarding title, cover, and jacket copy.
  3. Be certain you have the right to purchase the books at bulk prices and that you may sell the books yourself.
• Set a goal for yourself for when you will schedule time for writing, and stick to it.

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Mitch Joel is a social media rock star who runs an extremely successful digital marketing business in Beautiful Montreal. I’ve been listening to his Six Pixels of Separation podcast since he started it. Since he’s just come out with a book by the same name, everyone is interviewing him about his social media insights.

I, on the other hand, wanted to talk to Mitch about publishing. He’s said too many interesting things on Media Hacks recently. (Two of the other contributors to Media Hacks, Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, have just published a best-selling book together, and another one, Hugh McGuire, runs a book start-up.)

In this interview, Mitch talks about:

• His previous experience with the publishing industry
• The importance of having a platform
• The difference between writing a book and writing a collection of blog posts
• The powerful mystique that publishing a book retains even (or especially) in the age of social media
• The value of a good editor
• Why his publisher made his book more blog-like
• Distribution and business models in publishing
• What makes a book a book

Mitch is an incredibly articulate one-take podcaster. I’m not. I’ve edited this interview slightly for fluency. In particular, I’ve rearranged the beginning, because Mitch and I started our conversation before his introduction.

A big thanks to Mitch for such a fabulous interview.

Since they can’t keep Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone in the stores, I’d recommend you all buy it on Amazon (and give me a few cents in commission while you’re at it).

Sometimes.

As I discovered when working with Eve Abbott on How to Do Space Age Work with a Stone Age Brain™, the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office) includes books in the class of “paper goods.” Whether or not that classification represents an accurate definition of a book in the 21st century, it’s one of the hardest to qualify for. The applicant has to be using the “mark”—that is, the book title—for at least three different products in that class. They could be a series of books, or a book, a workbook, and a supplement to the book, or a series of books, but there’s not really a way to protect the title of a single book, either through trademark or through copyright.

The same is true for films. It can be confusing at times, if more than one book or film (or CD, for that matter) of the same name becomes famous. Still, the pool of possible titles would be extremely limited if everyone had to search the trademark database before coming up with a book title, especially since many books with the same title are in completely different genres and wouldn’t directly compete with one another, no matter what the USPTO might think.

Still, if you can come up with a unique title for your book, it’s an advantage. It doesn’t hurt to check Amazon.com or Books in Print to see whether anyone has published a book with your number one choice of title in the past 10 years.

It’s also good to remember that your publisher may change your book’s title, so there’s no point filing for a trademark until after you have a contract.

Post adapted from the answer to a LinkedIn question on March 23, 2008.

Thinking Like Your Editor:
How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction—and Get It Published
Susan Rabiner & Alfred Fortunato
W. W. Norton & Company, 2002
Paperback, 288 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-0393324617
List Price: US $15.95

I’ve read many (very good) books about how to write a non-fiction book proposal. While Thinking Like Your Editor includes a substantial section on your “submission package” and concludes with a sample of a successful proposal, the best parts of this book are the subjects not covered in similar books.

Of course, the authors should know all about the importance of including something in your book that your competitors don’t have: they’re literary agents. Before she was an agent, Susan Rabiner was an editor, first with a university press, then with HarperCollins. She provides a lot of inside info not just on how editors interact with authors, but on how they deal with booksellers. (Getting a new book onto a prominent display of new titles requires the payment of “co-op money.”)

There are too many important points made in this book to list here, but one that I can’t remember seeing put into so many words is “Every work of serious nonfiction (Rabiner and I disagree on the need for a hyphen in that word) begins with a question the author has about the topic and ends with an answer the author wants to provide.”

This is something I need to ask my clients, many of whom have a topic but aren’t yet sure which book on that topic they’re going to write: “What is the question driving your book?” The answer to that question could result in several different books on the same topic—books that might compete with one another, but which might all find publishers, nevertheless.

In fact, I might even start asking that question of my blog and podcast clients. It has that “If it was a snake, it woulda bit me” sense of obvious rightness to it.

In addition to such tips as how to leave a good voice mail message for an agent, the book addresses the specific issues of writing serious non-fiction, methodically laying out many things that lurk in the realm of intuition for those who have read widely in this genre. There are lots of good tips for recovering academics, things I had to learn by doing when I made the transition from jargon-laden academic writing to punchier, to-the-point business writing and copywriting.

The one problem I have with this book is that it doesn’t define “serious non-fiction.” For instance, given that Wiley, the largest publisher of business books, isn’t listed among the trade publishers of serious non-fiction on page 130, you might think this category of book doesn’t include business books, yet there are business books chosen as examples elsewhere.

I would recommend that if you’re in doubt as to whether publishers (who themselves seem to have a different definition from this book’s authors) would consider your book “serious non-fiction,” you should read the book anyway. You can check it out of the library, as I did when Hilary Powers recommended it on the Editors Guild list, or you can buy yourself a copy to keep around as a reference, which I expect to do soon. But make a point of reading it, either way.

On Wednesday, December 3, 2008, I gave a presentation about self-publishing and POD to Clive Matson’s “Getting Published” writers’ group. I’ve reproduced my handout here. Click the “play” button below for the recording. If you pay close attention, you can hear me make a mortifying grammar gaffe: I said “have chose” instead of “have chosen.”

The recorder shut down before we had finished the discussion, which went on for quite some time, but after we had moved from the topic of POD to other aspects of marketing a book.

The example of POD success leading to a contract with a major publisher is Terry Fallis’ book The Best-Laid Plans.

The Handout

Traditional Self-Publishing

• Higher up-front costs, but lower per-book cost (offset printing)
• You’ 

  Download

  [podcast]http://authorizer.fileslinger.com/audio/Matson-12-03-2008.mp3[/podcast]re responsible for storage and distribution (shipment)

Print on Demand

• Lower up front costs, but higher per-book cost (digital printing)
• POD company prints and ships books as needed

Costs Author Pays Either Way

• Copyediting
• Book design and typesetting
• Cover design
• Proofreading
• ISBN/Bar code

Podcasting Your Book

• Inexpensive, but time-consuming
• Builds audience/platform (might lead to publishing contract)
• Best for fiction, poetry

Some POD Companies

• Booksurge/Amazon (www.booksurge.com)
• iUniverse (www.iuniverse.com)
• Lightning Source/Ingram (www.lightningsource.com)
• Lulu (www.lulu.com)
• MagCloud POD magazines (www.magcloud.com)

Read

• The Self-Publishing Manual, by Dan Poynter
• The Fine Print of Self-Publishing, by Mark Levine

Listen

• The Writing Show (www.writingshow.com)
• Publishing Basics Radio (www.wbjbradio.com)
• The Publishing Insiders (www.blogtalkradio.com/ThePublishingInsiders)

Visit

• http://delicious.com/authorizer/
  (tags: bookmarketing, writing, ghostwriting, publishing, POD)
• http://www.selfpublishing.com/
• http://www.podiobooks.com/
• http://misssnark.blogspot.com/

On October 12, 2008, Paula B from The Writing Show published an episode about Print-on-Demand Technologies hosted by Ricardo from Amigo Audio (known to me from his insightful contributions to the For Immediate Release podcast). Ricardo talked about buying your own printing press in order to start a bookstore that could provide thousands of titles without needing acres of shelf space.

The printing press, in this case, would be one of two devices, either of them smaller than the HP Indigo printers used by many POD houses and the new MagCloud services. The first is Instabook Maker, which when assembled is 7 feet long, 3 feet high, and 2.5 feet deep.

The second is the Espresso Book Machine from On Demand Books. The new 2.0 version is 3.8 feet wide, 2.7 feet deep, and 4.5 feet high.

Either of these could fit in a good-sized office or a modest-sized storefront. (Ricardo even talks about the possibility of installing such a press in a van and creating a new, improved bookmobile.)

When listening to Ricardo’s recording, I had a hard time imagining myself, or most of the authors I work with, wanting to start a bookstore. Devices like this do have the potential to give independent bookstores—a dying breed—an edge they haven’t had before and an opportunity to make a wider range of books available to their customers, including titles that have now gone out of print. But most non-fiction authors don’t aspire to running a bookstore or even a printing press. Come to that, I don’t know any novelists or poets who do, either. In fact, most independent publishers have someone else do their printing.

Then there’s the caveat that even if the quality of the paper, printing, and binding do in fact stack up to those of commercially published books, producing a professional-looking book requires good design and good editing in addition to the correct technology.

And if you want to be able to reprint books from other authors and publishers, there has to be some kind of arrangement about rights and royalties, which could get complicated.

But then I got my October Michigan Today, and what should be in it but an article about an Espresso Book Machine recently installed in the Ugli? (Excuse me, the Shapiro Undergraduate Library. But when I was in gradual school at U-M in the early 1990s, we all thought “Ugli” was only too appropriate.) U-M was one of the first libraries to get involved in digitizing books as part of the controversial Google Book Search project, so it’s not surprising they should be quick to adopt other new technologies.

The Espresso Book Machine makes perfect sense as an investment for a research library. Academic books tend to have small print runs and to go out of print quickly, but those out-of-print books remain important for scholars. U-M is a research university famed for its library collections. They even have a papyrology collection; I worked there one summer. (Yeah, I know, you thought U-M was all about football. I was in Ann Arbor for 5 years and never went to a single game.) And libraries only need a few copies of any given title, but they need to restock them due to wear and tear.

So when I read the article and watched the video, I thought “Now that is really cool.”

Do I want to open a bookstore? No. And I don’t think either Instabook or Espresso is likely to be a good investment for anyone who wants to print large runs of single books. Nor is owning such a device enough to make you a publisher (assuming you can afford one, and the prices are such that you’d better be independently wealthy, a large enterprise, or have VC backing). But the potential really is tremendous, if the intellectual property issues can be worked out.

I’ve been subscribed to Penny Sansevieri’s “Book Marketing Expert” e-zine for some time now, but for some reason I only recently discovered her new “Publishing Insiders” show on BlogTalkRadio. It’s well worth listening to if you’re at all interested in the world of publishing.

A note about the BlogTalkRadio website: when you go to the show’s web page, the latest episode starts playing automatically. I personally find this more than slightly irritating, but if you grab the feed for your podcatcher, you don’t actually have to visit the website again.

Whether you want to know about Booklocker’s suit against Amazon or how to get your book reviewed, you can find out by listening to this show, which also introduces you to some lesser-known publishers who want to hear from first-time authors.

A couple of months ago I wrote about storing your data “in the cloud.” Now Hewlett-Packard wants publishers to store magazines in the cloud and make them available on demand. These days, a “publisher” is anyone who posts content online, so that means you.

Thanks to colleagues in the Northern California chapter of the National Speakers Association (NSANC), I had the opportunity to attend a presentation on MagCloud at HP Labs today. NSA member Ian Griffin used MagCloud to create the first issue of “Professionally Speaking” and send it to NSANC members.

MagCloud prints on heavy 80-lb matte stock rather than the flimsy paper used by most magazine publishers. I compared “Professionally Speaking” with the assorted business magazines piled up on my desk and with the Better Social Media Communication Results newsletter my colleague Lee Hopkins published on an offset press. The MagCloud product compared favorably to both, particularly for printing photos.

The text didn’t seem as crisp or black as that in the BetterComms newsletter, but that may be a function of the resolution of the PDF file uploaded to create “Professionally Speaking,” or perhaps the font color or style, because the body text in HP’s own MagCloud Publisher Guide is as clear and sharp a black as anyone could wish for. (You can download a free PDF version of that to help you set up your own MagCloud publication.)

Technology

Many POD book publishers use the same HP Indigo printers that produce MagCloud’s magazines. We looked at an Indigo 3000 in the Color Lab, but that’s already been superseded by newer, faster models that push the break-even point versus offset printing to 5,000 copies. (That means that unless you’re printing 5,000 or more copies, HP Indigo technology, and by extension MagCloud, is more cost-effective than offset printing.) Even the older model is impressive—more than seven feet tall, yet amazingly compact and tidy for industrial production. Ordinary inkjets, laser printers, and even offset presses use 4-color printing: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black (abbreviated “K” for reasons I can’t remember). The Indigos use six colors, either the standard CCMMYK of photo printers like my Epson Stylus Photo 1280, or Pantone spot colors. They’ll print on practically anything, including plastic cards, and the samples we saw were beautiful. I don’t think I will add one to my “covet” list, though: the PG&E bill would go through the roof, and the fan noise would keep me up at night.

Serial Typography

Until now, the burgeoning print-on-demand industry has focused on publishing books. Magazines are actually better candidates for POD, which allows for timely production and reduces wastage. (Some 50% of magazines sent to newsstands are never sold and get pulped.)

The defining characteristic of magazines is recurrence. When you sign up as a MagCloud publisher, you’re asked to enter a title and subtitle for your magazine, and then create your first issue. During the private beta, you’ll need an invitation in order to get a publisher account, and they’ve already had more than a thousand requests, so you may have to wait a while before you can try it out.

Many other print publications also lend themselves to this multiple-issue format: newsletters, annual reports, membership directories, course materials, and the like. So do e-zines and blogs. You might not really want to start distributing your e-zine in print format to all your subscribers, but having a print version to hand around at networking meetings could be useful, and it’s possible that a few of your readers will actually want to order one.

If all you want is a short run of a short-format document, however, you may want to consider another POD service, because right now MagCloud offers you one trim size, one binding, and one text stock. (Cover and text stock are the same.) Other features, like templates to allow non-designers to lay out their own magazines, are still in an extremely rudimentary phase. And MagCloud is not (yet?) in the business of selling ISSNs. (That’s like an ISBN, but for magazines; I remember getting one for my electronic journal in 1994, and if you ever want your magazine sold in stores, you’ll need one.)

If they can find a way to import RSS feeds easily MagCloud will attract bloggers in droves. Right now Blurb’s “blog slurping” function only works with hosted blogs, which is no use to those of us who publish our blogs from our own servers. If Windows Live Writer can access and import from all my blogs, I don’t know why BookSmart can’t.

Pricing Structure

MagCloud’s own business model is to charge US$0.20 per full-color page. That’s one side of an 8.5 x 11 sheet, the same as one page in a word-processing program or one page as a copy shop would charge you. This represents a comfortable but not extravagant markup over HP’s costs. It’s less than you’d pay for color photocopies and probably less than it would cost you in ink to print the magazine yourself on an inkjet printer (assuming you have a duplex printer that handles tabloid format sheets, which most people don’t). Publishers add their own markup on top of this base price.

Magazine length is based on a unit of 4 pages, up to a total of 60 pages. (This is short by comparison with most commercial magazines, but much longer than most corporate newsletters.) A 60-page magazine would have a minimum cover price of US$12 plus shipping—steep compared with what you find on the newsstands. And that’s assuming the publisher doesn’t want to make any money on it.

There is no set-up fee for publishing a magazine if your PDF is ready to go.

Magazines 2.0

Because of the Indigo technology’s advantage in short-run printing, the MagCloud team is focusing its efforts on niche publishers like NSA or the Palo Alto flying club. One person at today’s presentation described MagCloud as “iTunes for magazines.” MagCloud has a lot in common with blogging, podcasting, and niche networks created with Ning. While print magazines already exist to serve a phenomenal variety of specific interests, those magazines also cease publication with alarming frequency as subscriber numbers and advertising revenue drop off and distribution costs increase.

A New Model for Print Advertising

Print advertising is the oldest form (apart from yelling at passers-by in the open market, anyway), and it has long-established conventions that simply aren’t appropriate for MagCloud’s niche publications, any more than they suit most podcasts or blogs. Advertisers buy print and broadcast ads based on something called CPM, which means “cost per thousand.” So for every thousand readers you have, you get X amount.

Naturally, if you only have 500 subscribers—or 50—CPM is a rotten model. Traditionally-published magazines give away free subscriptions to “industry professionals” (meaning anyone who signs up): it helps them keep their circulations numbers high. If you’ve ever had one of these free subscriptions and tried to cancel it, you know how difficult it is to stop magazine publishers from sending endless issues of dubious relevance.

MagCloud publishers who want to subsidize their printing costs with advertising (an established revenue model and one not yet much used in book publishing) can learn important lessons from online content creators. Highly targeted audiences are more valuable than sheer numbers. If the advertiser’s product matches the interests of a magazine’s readership closely enough, sales are guaranteed. For some groups (like the wine geeks who listen to Grape Radio), the revenue per order may be quite high and the return on investment in a niche publication very enticing.

This won’t work for all niches, and finding an advertiser to match the interest of your readership might be a challenge. But MagCloud has some ideas about that, too.

Community Vision

Many POD houses make more money by selling design and editing services than by printing and distributing books. Rather than selling design services directly and overtaxing its creative department, HP Labs wants MagCloud to become a community marketplace where content creators can hook up with (and rate) designers, and publishers seeking content can find writers to produce it. In this vision, subscribers could create their own magazines from individual articles in other MagCloud publications. An advertiser could post “I’m trying to reach Baby Boomers in the financial industry” and publishers could respond with their reader demographics and psychographics.

So far the crowdsourcing and social networking aspects of MagCloud are only at the “vision” stage, however. Users of the MagCloud site have two options: to sign up as subscribers, and to sign up as publishers. Eventually, one presumes, it will be possible to sign up as a designer, a content creator, or an advertiser.

Even in its pre-release state, MagCloud offers fascinating possibilities. Like all great ideas, magazine publishing on demand prompts the question “Why hasn’t someone done this before?”