Dave's Blog

On Twitter yesterday I was raving about a fantastic Economist slideshow that sets out a credible and satisfying vision for the future of publishing:

The slide show misses an important third mode of reading. For the Economist it makes sense to ignore it. Technical and "how to" publishers can't afford to. The three modes are:

1. Lean forward: rapid browsing, search, instant gratification.
2. Lean back: deep, reflective, minimum distraction.
3. NEW! Lean over: instructions that you refer to while you carry out the task.

My guess is that most Packt and other "how to" tech books are really lean over. Mainly people have them on their desk (or a PDF in a separate window) at the same time as they're doing the work. What's your experience?

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Paid Content documents Amazon Publishing's haphazard start. Sales have not been stellar, but 3 of the 5 best sellers were from Seth Godin's Domino Project:

After The Hangman’s Daughter, the most successful print titles I tracked were both from Seth Godin’s imprint, The Domino Project: Poke the Box, by Godin himself, which has sold 23,436 copies in print, according to BookScan, and Stephen Pressfield’s Do the Work (publication date: 4/2011), which sold 8,288 copies in print. Another Domino Project book, Anything You Want by Derek Sivers (6/2011) was Amazon’s fifth bestselling print title, with 5,702 copies sold. Sales of 5,000 to 10,000 copies is hardly spectacular in the traditional publishing world, but it’s not bad either.

Why The Domino Project Works…

Seth Godin is clearly doing well with Amazon Publishing—but he was also doing pretty well before he signed up with them. He operates his imprint “99.7 percent independently,” he told me. “Sometimes I ask [Amazon] for their insight, but then I make my own insights about what I want to do with the info I got.” For example, Amazon was able to tell Godin that people often bought his books in bulk, which gave him the idea of selling Domino Project titles in multi-packs.

I asked Godin if Amazon has helped him with the marketing of the Domino Project books. “Most of what people think of as marketing has been done by us, The Domino Project,” he said. “By far the biggest tool we’ve had in selling the books is our blog, which has 50,000 subscribers.” The Domino Project also sends copies of its books to word-of-mouth marketing company BzzAgent .

Godin's approach was to treat Amazon as a fulfillment platform, not a marketing channel. He marketed direct to customers, using Amazon's back end to handle all the fulfillment. The Domino Project's logo says it all:

Once his direct marketing had pushed books onto Amazon's best seller list, he also benefited from Amazon's huge existing user base. But the marketing ooomph came from Domino, not Amazon.

A lesson for publishers and self publishers: the big platforms (Amazon, Apple, Google) can make your life easier, but they don't do the hardest part of your job for you.

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anatomy of training video.pdf Download this file

This is my plan for how to structure a 3-5 minute "how to" training video. Each video will form part of a series of videos that makes up a course.

The structure ensures that:

1. The reader gets a clear idea of what they're going to achieve and why in the first 20 seconds.
2. The instructional steps are clustered into logical groups, to make the steps more meaningful and memorable. And you have no more than 20 seconds before the steps begin.
   
3. The video ends by reminding the viewer what they did and why it was worthwhile, and then encourages them to keep learning. Again this is just a 10-20 second wrap up.
   

I'm hoping this will make the videos more accessible and useful than a straight, unstructured "do this, then this" screencast. We'll see...

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