[kennyc]

The New Business Model of Book Publishing
Posted: 04/16/2012 11:21 am by Jim Kukral

I've written previously about how Amazon's Kindle and their KDP Select program is bringing new writers to the book publishing world, bypassing traditional publishers. But sometimes, established writers are finding a new voice there too.

Randy Cassingham is one of the first online publishers: his This is True column went online in 1994. It's his full-time gig: over the years, it has brought him several million dollars in income, and he lives on 45 acres in western Colorado, where he looks at gorgeous snow-covered mountains from his home office.

"TRUE" (as Cassingham calls it) is biting social commentary, using weird news as its vehicle. It's funny and has a loyal following: thousands pay $24/year to get the full column by e-mail each week. Tens of thousands get a free sampler. It might be the first example of an online "fremium" business model. In the early years, he turned down two unsolicited syndication deals to bring the column to newspapers -- turning them down because he didn't want to give up control of his work, he says.

Good move: now he's compiling his archives into Kindle books, where he can get a 70% royalty on sales, rather than the 12.5% that Dutton (part of the Penguin Group) pays him when it turned another of his websites into a book.

And it's working: Cassingham told me that in the first two weeks of Kindle book sales, the five volumes he has posted so far earned more than $1,400 in royalties from Amazon. "I'm boggled," he told me by e-mail. "Imagine if I actually concentrated on this income pillar. Or had more than five books available. Or I sent one or more titles out for review somewhere, or advertised, or did ANY kind of promotion to anyone other than my existing readers!"

Imagine indeed!

Then he realized that a throw-away human interest feature he includes in This is True, the "Honorary Unsubscribe" of someone who died in the previous week, could also be good book material.

"These are the people you wish you had known," he says. "Take the inventors I've featured. Did you know the same guy invented both the computer hard drive and the video cassette? What a fascinating guy!" He has also featured the inventors of the contact lens, the hovercraft, the Hawaiian shirt, even the guy who thought of putting a peanut inside an M&M. Then, he says, getting excited as he looks through his archive, "there are the medical researchers, responsible for saving thousands, even millions of lives, spectacular entertainers that died virtually forgotten, and..." Just as he says: the kind of people you wish you had known.

That book just came out on Amazon's Kindle this week, and it's the first of several in that series. Cassingham told me that "I'm glad I have a block of 100 ISBNs" -- International Standard Book Numbers, which are used to identify books for retailers, including Amazon -- "I'm going to need them."

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-ku...b_1428197.html