[jerryflattum]

Originally Posted by 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.

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.



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



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.



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.



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.



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.



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.



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.



How will it be better than Second Life?



Why?



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.



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.



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.

Worldwalker:

One thing I need to learn is how you people select a specific block of text to quote, rather than quoting the entire post. But, in your case, you provided so much info that I went ahead and included your entire post.

Your comments are sort of close to brilliant, but I won't say that because if I inflate your ego you might not help me, ha!

I've written a website development plan. Condensing that into a forum post entry is a challenge. Hell, I didn't even know if anyone would respond much less the kinds of responses I got so far. Someone suggested trying MobileRead and here I am.

I could rip my site apart far more than any criticism you offered, and I know you held back considerably. But in deference to myself, I did something very smart: I came to MobileRead and said, "Here's what I got, here's what I want to do, whadda ya think?" And lo and behold, it worked.

Do you not think I know what kind of team I need? There is a Business note in the documentation I keep on the development of my business and the website that lists the team I need to do what I need to do.

I received one estimate from Weymouth, and they glibly quoted me a price of 60K-100K. Given the quote had a 40K buffer, I knew they were being flippant.

Yes, this is very much a game of "do-it-yourself" now because there IS no budget to hire Steven Speilberg. I'm an "Indie" songwriter. Should I quit because I can't get signed to a major label?

I have a page on my site "Seeking Investor." I'm exploring RocketHub, IndieGogo, Kickstarter, FundingPost and every other way there is to find investors. Just last week I started writing a business plan.

I know fully well what I'm up against.

Now, back to you. I need someone like you, clearly. But I can't afford you! But, I was lucky enough to get some incredible advice from you by opening myself up in this forum.

I'm not the least bit concerned about competition. If I was, I'd never have written a song or an eBook and I'd just go crawl into a hole knowing how "big" the competition is. Competition is an obstacle and a challenge, not a reason to quit.

How to monetize what I'm doing: Isn't this the quest of nearly every blogger, website owner, writer, artist and marketer in cyberspace?

One thing is for sure, the Internet, in spite of its current development, is truly uncharted territory. What seems to be an insurmountable obstacle one day is answered by a plug-and-play application the next.

You compared the use of a digital camera to the equipment used in making a 30 sec Super Bowl commercial. I work in music and film. I know how much Titanic cost...and I'm not trying to make Titanic with a digital camera.

However, Justin Beiber--whether you like him or not--launched his mega-star career by uploading a cheezy home-made video on You Tube. It pissed a lot of people off.

Marketers and advertisers are learning that social media has it's own set of rules, and yes, you can become a millionaire selling pet rocks.

I'm not trying to get over. I wouldn't do what Justin Beiber did. However, I will upload a video shot on my Canon digital camera to the sites I mentioned that network artists and startups with investors. I'll probably upload it to my site. Do I know it wasn't produced by Dreamworks and directed by James Cameron?

6 months ago I didn't even know you could by a Wordpress theme. I installed it, set things up with Hostgator, hired a Wordpress expert, and after I could no longer afford his fees, started doing things myself.

Hack job? No shit. But, my site is experimental. Every little thing I try I learn from. I actually figured out how to embed Google Analytics code on my home page. I installed a bunch of other widgets and I have a slew of plugins lying dormant because I don't know how to configure them.

Now, suddenly, over night, MobileRead provides me with Calibre, Vook and Mobipocket.com. That's one hell of a start in asking the questions I asked about ebook conversion.

One of my blogs is called "Solutions Now." The tag line for the blog is "Every Conflict Has A Solution." As trite as that might sound in this context, that tag line is my guiding principle. Whatever mess my website is in...there's a solution.

No, I can't say I know exactly what I'm doing, because what I'm doing is very much an act of exploration and discovery. I'm in a lab. I'm experimenting. My colleagues will laugh at me. My wife will divorce me. But I keep looking through that microscope because I know the answer is there--I just have to find it.

Speaking of "scope", let me explain what the "Entertainment Cyberscope" is and what I mean by converting "portal" into "virtual world."

The Entertainment Cyberscope (EC) was born as an offshoot from a column I wrote for a well known songwriting website. Instead of writing an article, I decided to create a portal for all things entertainment.

After I stopped writing as a columnist, I decided to recreate the EC on my site and it's now taken on a life of its own.

I'm building it using Pages and sub-pages and man it doesn't get any clumsier than that. So, the first thing I realized was I needed a database solution.

I then realized that the portal could be much more than just a comprehensive info source. I became an affiliate of zZounds, one of the largest retailers for music equipment online. I swapped a few emails with them asking them about what kinds of solutions there might be in linking all the listings I have (and will have) in the EC with all the manufacturers they feature on their site.

I believe the EC has tremendous advertising/affiliate potential. Yes, I have to prove it...and I will.

Being a lover of movies and online graphics, after discovering "virtual worlds"--like 2nd Life--I realized there were opportunities now to do much more with the "portal" concept.

I discovered an article on the SAP Design Guild website, "Portal Design vs. Website Design." SAP, as I'm sure you know far more than me, offers design and business solutions for global conglomerates. Man, talk about being out of my league! One rep from SAP told me they deal only with companies capitalized in the multi-millions if not billions. A 2nd rep just recently asked me for a proposal.

A firm like SAP is not going to hop on my bandwagon without serious venture capital. Duh. But, what the process taught me was that there are solutions--and some of these solutions are available without spending millions.

How do I incorporate and integrate my own content--my songs, ebooks, blogs, etc.--with a venture like the Entertainment Cyberscope? Well, I start by asking the question, "How?"

Right now, I'm trying to decide if I should stay with one site or splinter off into multiple sites, in the quest for greater focus and clarity. Every blog, every ebook, and every other venture I've got going could easily have its own dedicated site.

But then, as you know, there are tons of amazing websites that manage to integrate seemingly disparate channels of content, without losing the overall focus, whatever that focus may be.

A database. A software. A web application. Somewhere in there lies the solutions.

Thank you so much from my heart and soul for the time and energy you've given me in this quest.

Once again, if I could, I would love to hire you because I have no doubt you could provide many of the solutions I'm seeking. Meanwhile...I'm on my own.

And I didn't even mention the implementation of a SEO/social media marketing strategy.

Jerry