So now you can self-publish a book with them and they’ll help broker ad deals, kinda like you would for placing ads on your blog, I think. I guess book publishers got tired of seeing all the rich folks sitting over at the magazine publisher’s table and decided to hop on the train.
There’s a new site in town, Worthy of Publishing. It sort of mashes the Threadless and MySpace democratic business models, to unpublished authors.
Basically, you sign-up and submit a synopsis, samples, etc. of your book. Then other people in the community go around reading and voting. The idea is that the cream will rise to the top and get the most votes/attention. Once that attention has hit a ‘critical mass’, publishers will step up sign the author and publish the book, banking on that ‘critical mass’ as an indicator of potential sales and interest in the title.
I’ve yet to find a self-published book that I enjoyed. I tend to have to lean on the profesional book folks to weed out the weaker stuff. Which I’m always greatful for them doing.
But this model intrigues me and I’m anxious to see if the “wisdom of crowds” theory applies here. I could see it happening…
I’ve always wondered if it’s two different customer sets. Paperbacks have always been easier for me to read, so I always go for those (the lower price point helps too). But the hardbacks look sooooo much better on the shelf and 9 out of 10 times are designed better.
From my desk here I can see six titles that I bought in paperback and liked it so much that I bought it in hardback too. Is that weird? I haven’t reread any of them, but it just seems more appropriate to have these books as hardbacks sitting on my shelf.
Now here’s a new service/product that could really do wonders for small publishers and anyone with print content. According to Publisher’s Weekly, Adobe has teamed up with Yahoo to provide a service that allows you to place ads in your pdf documents.
So, if you post a 10 page pdf document to your site, and are running this new service, Adobe/Yahoo will give you code to place on random pages that they’ll serve ads to, whenever it’s opened/downloaded.
WOWIO (which lets you download whole books for free) has been immensely successful at doing this and advertisers love them for it.
This could be really cool for folks sitting on tons of content with no way to pay for distribution. Ahhhh, the power of the internet!
