[Worldwalker]

The big question with any endeavor like this is one of the ones I ask my website clients: Why would someone want to use this?

That's the first thing you have to figure out: what is there that you have that Vince Flanders calls "heroin content" -- something so important to me, or any other random user, that we'll take time away from the million and nine other things we need to do today to go do your thing. You have to figure out if you indeed have that content -- which can be hard because you're so close to it -- and if so, exactly what it is, how to present it so that the people who want it can make use of it, and how to let those people know that it's there for their use. Getting them to pay you for it, I should mention, adds another hurdle.

However, since discovering MobileRead, I am overwhelmed by the variety of formats available.

As Queentess said, if you have your ebooks available as .epub (Sony, nook, Kobo, miscellaneous devices) and .mobi (Kindle) you'll cover the majority of dedicated ebook readers and a lot of the alternate devices, including computers.

But, I suspect that having a book available across the entire spectrum of services and formats is the best way to maximize opportunity.

Please go tell the Kindle-only people this. They don't seem to get that, and they should.

I've learned I can even turn a series of blog posts into a book (FastPencil). There are syndication opportunities. There are numerous plug-ins, widgets and applications for re-packaging content and distributing across a multitude of delivery channels.

But this is all in theory. I need to know--step by step--what to do and how to do it.

Step 1: See above. See the part about "heroin content" and about what not just you but your prospective users would want to make an effort for.

Step 2: See Step 1.

I can't emphasize this enough, because I've seen so many people try and fail: You need to have a reason for people to do what you want them to do -- in this case, paying you for your stuff. Every potential user asks the exact same question: What's in it for me? You want their money and their time. You're competing with the whole rest of the world, a fair percentage of which also wants their money or their time or both. You need a reason for people to read one of your blog posts rather than a post on MobileRead, or anywhere else. They're already doing something else; you need to give them one damn good reason to stop doing something else, even before you can start getting them to do what you want.

What is in it for me? What can you give me that I can't get somewhere else? Why are you so special?

If you can't give me a really impressive answer to that, and can't provide me with a compelling reason to override my basic inertia and time-starvation and go to your website, read your blog, and buy your books, etc., instead of going to MobileRead, reading Lum's blog, and buying Tim Myers' books, you've lost me before you started. Now multiple me by your entire target market.

They are in MSWord format.

A word processor's proprietary format is not a document interchange format. First mistake right there. So for starters, you should look at what formats you want to support (see above). The one your word processor uses (which is not the same as the one my word processor uses, for example) is not one of those.

How do I convert to all the different formats? Will Smashwords, Kindle and other services do this for me? Do all these different formats exist because of the variety of eReaders available?

Frankly, I don't think you're ready for this.

I'm not trying to be insulting here, just telling the truth: the kind of project you're trying to do requires a fairly comprehensive set of skills for the things you need to get done. They're skills that you, or someone on your team, has to have. You can't try to find them after the fact; you need them to get started. You're trying to do very advanced things, but asking MobileRead very basic questions. You're not at the point yet where you could even understand the advanced questions or their answers, and you needed to be at that point before you started.

You still have a problem with the basics. Your lead article, for instance, has a major typographic error in its title and headline. I'm not even going to start on your website; if you want to pay me to do that (it's what I do) PM me and we'll talk. You need a professional, though, whoever it might be. I looked at a couple of stories and found errors, obvious errors, that Should Not Be. If you're asking people to give you money, you need to look professional -- if anything, even more professional than the big names. Right now, you look like a guy who knows how to use WordPress. There are lots of them out there, and not many people paying them for content. Before you can do anything else, you need to elevate yourself above them.

What kind of system or application(s) do I need to install on my own site to sell ebooks direct-to-consumer? Can I use all the available services AND sell from my site at the same time?

This is why I'm saying you're putting the cart before the horse. Knowing how ecommerce works, and how to go about using it, is a prerequisite for setting up an ecommerce site. Trying to do otherwise is like saying you want to be a hotshot Formula 1 driver, and you'll worry about the "learning to drive" part later on.

I realize that 1000s of dollars would get me a design firm that could coordinate all these endeavors.

That money will get you more than their software and their keyboards: that money will get you their knowledge. It's knowledge you need, and you have to either have it yourself, have employees/partners who have it, or hire it in from a consultant (a design firm, in this case). You need that knowledge one way or another, and asking questions on MobileRead will not get you the kind of comprehensive answers you need.

I am also aware that there is a free application for virtually every digital task, from graphics manipulation to content delivery to business applications to web design.

Applications are easy. Knowing what to do with them is hard.

I own a pocket camcorder (one of the early Flips, to be precise). Would you consider me qualified to produce a Super Bowl commercial for you?

Why not? The people who make those multi-million-dollar spots have cameras, I have a camera, what's the difference?

Obviously there's a difference, and obviously that difference is why they spend millions on their scriptwriters, their actors, their photographers, their locations, their CGI artists, and all the rest, for a 30-second commercial, instead of a random MobileRead poster and a pocket camera. You could give me one of the fancy video cameras, or a whole set of them and a crew to boot, and I'm still not going to produce anything better than what you see on local TV for Joe's Used Cars, because my expertise is in other areas. The best camera in the world couldn't do the job for me; I have to know exactly what I want to do, and why, and how to do it with that camera.

While you're not making a Super Bowl commercial (yet), you are trying to present a professional image. Unless you know in detail the capabilities of the programs you're using, and have a realistic idea of your own capabilities, and stay within both of those, it's not going to work. Tools are amplifiers, and programs are tools. Amplified crap is still crap. So it's not the programs that you have to worry about, it's the people using them.

An expert has spent years learning not just how to use their tools, but when and why to use their tools. Going back to my commercial example, with a smart enough camera and ten minutes to read the manual, I could shoot video of exactly what I wanted, and with suitable computer power, edit it up to look exactly the way I want. Trust me, you still don't want to put that on at halftime, even for your local high school team. I don't know how to get viewers to respond to such an ad, not in the way that the people who do it for a living do. It probably wouldn't even get any business for Joe. The best tools in the world would still just amplify crap.

You need to either have, hire, or rent expertise. There is no way around it.

Perhaps the biggest plan I have, which may very well incorporate all my ventures, is the creation and conversion of a portal into a "virtual world."

How will it be better than Second Life?

These means using the most sophisticated design elements available online.

Why?

In fact, I don't believe it is inconceivable to turn a book into a movie (I don't mean traditionally as in book to screenplay adaptation). I mean using online presentation applications and sophisticated graphics (3D, Flash, Java, etc.) to present an eBook (a Flip book is one example).

There's a program for that. It's called PowerPoint.

Bad PowerPoint presentations are the plague of our time, too, but that's another rant entirely. Again, there are questions to ask yourself. One of these is "why isn't everyone doing it?" While it's possible that you're the first person to think of such a groundbreaking idea (note: you're not) it's also possible that other people have tried it and failed. Again, it's possible that those people failed because they didn't know how to implement it, but it's also possible (and IMO, far more likely) that they failed because there was no market.

For this idea to be anything more than a PowerPoint presentation -- in other words, anything more than an illustrated book -- the graphics aspect is going to have to be on a par with a modern movie. Consider a cut scene from a AAA video game. Consider the team of artists and animators who create it. Consider the server farm that renders it. Now consider that you need one of those for every page of your book. In a world with Age of Conan, people are not going to pay you for Wolfenstein 3D. And even Wolfie took a team.

Baby, I need all the help I can get.

Step 1: You need a team of people dedicated to this project who have the expertise that you lack. Nobody is an expert in everything, and your project is dependent on several kinds of expertise that you don't have. You need it. You are not going to succeed without it.

Actually, I think my plans could prove to be a great opportunity for web designers to experiment, especially those who wanted to dabble in virtual worlds.

I have an extremely low budget. However, I am more than willing to share profits and income revenue streams.

I'm reminded of the days when I was writing and selling software, and people would come up to me at conventions and say "I have this great idea! How about I tell you the idea, and you write the program, and we split the money?" (this happens a lot to fiction writers, too) They were always disappointed by my reply: "How about you keep the idea, and you write the program, and you keep all the money?"

Getting ideas is never the hard part. Time to implement the ideas, and making the ideas pay, those are the hard parts. I never had a shortage of ideas for software; I have no shortage of ideas for writing now. Ideas weren't the problem. Time to implement those ideas, a market for that implementation, and a way to monetize it, that has always been the problem. And, frankly, unless you can find someone who's independently wealthy and wants to sign on with you for a lark, you're unlikely to get the people with the kind of expertise that you need for the kind of budget you have.

I will recommend a few useful books to you. If you haven't read these, you need to read them now.

The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman.
Don't Make Me Think!, by Steve Krug.
Web Pages That Suck and Son of Web Pages That Suck, by Vincent Flanders.
Homepage Usability, by Jakob Nielsen & Marie Tahir.

They are neither large nor optional.