This article was published in The Computer Paper, a Canada Computer Paper publication.Authors share secrets of online successBy Dave Chappelle posted on 5/14/2001 2:00:56 PMThis is a great book--the best, most comprehensive "how-to" book I've read in quite some time. HowToPublish How to Publish and Promote Online While online publishing is a new medium, these authors have been involved it since the beginning. They really know about targeting a market, which types of publications sell best, and why. M.J. Rose learned after she had trouble finding a publisher for a genre-crossing novel she had penned. She decided to sell her book as an e-novel. By formatting it into an easily downloaded form, she could sell it to readers directly for a price that was less than that of a printed book. She also avoided printing costs. She marketed it so effectively that her book was picked up by a major publisher and a book club, and eventually sold in other countries. Rose now has four books out, and writes a weekly column for wired.com. She also writes for Content Spotlight, a newsletter from the publishers of Contentious, which is where I first encountered her work. Co-author Angela Adair-Hoy fell into the world of online publishing because of a desire to stay at home with her daughter. She now owns two successful Web sites (http://www.writersweekly.com and http://www.booklocker.com) and earns US$5,000 per month from sales of her e-books alone. This book offers readers all kinds of useful new information about electronic formatting, publishing, and promotion. However, no one can claim to know everything about a subject, especially one as new as online promotion, so the chapters by Rose and Adair-Hoy are supplemented by sections from other authors with experience in specific areas of online promotion. The book also extols how positive ideas emerge from brainstorming. Chapter 30 contains transcripts of actual online chatroom brainstorming sessions in which the reader becomes privy to the generation and discussion of ideas for marketing different books. Some of the participants are first-time authors attempting to market their own works. I can't say enough good about this book. You'll save time and expense by promoting your site using their techniques. They've already done it for themselves and demonstrated numerous other examples in the book. After all the Internet and stock market doom and gloom we've seen and heard the last year, it's refreshing to read about people who have worked hard to achieve Internet success.
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