Here is Oprah, as if she didnt have enough customers, charging in to YouTube

Click here to view Oprah’s video!

A video well worth watching.

A narrow yet very broad niche!

Click here to watch this amazing couple’s niche!

Occasionally I drop in on TomPeters.com

He has an excellent blog and over the last 25 years has stayed true to his passion and message.

Here is an excellent video on two rapidly emerging and important markets.

A sign of the times.

Penguin dips it’s toe in the blogging pool.
Liked their description of what the blog will be about.

“an editor will post the latest news from the company:
new acquisitions, sneak previews from works
in progress of some of Penguin’s best-loved
authors, industry gossip and advice on
how to get published”.

Which will be invaluable for many.

Eoin Purcell, from a small publishing house has been
active in this soace for a while.

Wonder what Eoin has to say about this?

The Penguin Blog

Penguin Books launches the first blog from a mainstream publisher on Monday 31st July. Having led the way in bringing publishing into the digital age with its award-winning podcasts, Penguin’s blog will be a destination where an editor will post the latest news from the company: new acquisitions, sneak previews from works in progress of some of Penguin’s best-loved authors, industry gossip and advice on how to get published.

Cherie Burback gives the thumbs up to iUniverse and also has a good article on this area.

American Chronicle: Do-It-YourSelf Publishing

Slashdot | Get Played. Get Paid.

The new plan provides 80% of the revenues back to the creators.

The New York Observer’s MondoWeiss: How the Internet Is Replacing the Book

Self-publishing on the web, whether through blogs or by posting articles in web-journals, is rapidly eclipsing traditional academic venues in its ability to serve the public and popularize knowledge. For example, I have an impact on policy making in Washington and capitals across the globe through my blog, which has close to 2,000
readers a day. Many of my readers are from a blue-chip list of policy wonks who have email tags from the leading think tanks and government agencies. Moreover scores of journalists are reading my site every day. I speak to at least 10 journalists a week, who use me and my site for story ideas, background information, and contacts. I was quoted in over 1,000 articles last year while living in Damascus. If my relatively modest, country-specific site is having an impact, Juan Cole’s is many times larger. He was getting a quarter million readers a month at the height of the Iraq war. Web-publishing and blogging is reconnecting academics to main-stream intellectual discourse.

It’s always good to read press releases from publishers that are there to help new authors.
Well done Long Dash.

North Jersey Media Group providing local news, sports & classifieds for Northern New Jersey!

We’re a small publishing company that specializes in print-on-demand and supported self-publishing. We help authors publish their books — memoirs, novels, non-fiction, poetry, how-to, religious, any kind of books. Would-be authors bring us or send us their manuscripts, and we print and bind the books, trade paperbacks, on the spot. We like to think we’re less expensive, faster and more author-friendly than the big self-publishing companies. We use a machine called Instabook. It was invented by a man in Florida named Victor Celorio and includes both the printer and binder. All of the controls and mechanism are computer based.

I’ve often marvelled at the niche the Da Vinci Code is pitched at.
(and this post is worth gold to a budding author!)
(or exactly how we wrote our book)

Having read several books on the subject before the Da Vinci Code I was really interested.
The books I read were fairly heavy on the subjecyt and often the author was pushing a particulay band wagon.
- Jesus’s body is buried in France
- The bloodline still exists
- The cult Jesus belonged to
- What did the Catholic Church really know and what was covered uo.

Eoin Purcell’s blog post ….

Eoin Purcell’s Blog » Blog Archive » Its all about marketing

puts a lot of this in to a good context.

The niche that Dan Brown took was writing something that put many non-fiction books in to a context and language that many people could understand. Of course many serious scholars had covered this niche, and lots of non-fiction writers but there are millions of people that dont need all the cross references and lengthy support of circumstantial co-incedences.

The message is just as Eoin says …

“You can have a book that to the elite appears predictable
and clunky but raises the pulse of the majority of readers.”

“if you cannot create a reason for a book to be bought then
there will be no sales.”

Dan Brown put in to context for me a lot of the books I had read thqat now sit on my book shelf probably never to be read again because they are all a small part in the puzzle.

As a result of Dan Brown I also uncovered a niche ….
and published an eBook together with a scholar.

We set up a web page that people reached via a google advertisment like the following …

On this page we had a question like ….

What is the one major question you had after reading the DaVinci code?

People could enter their question and boy did they do that …

… thousands of them

Look at the stats …

The advertisment appeared on 1,684,102 pages.
People reached these pages after seqarching for things like “opus dei” “priory of sion” “mary magdalene” etc

Once they reached the pages our advertisment was on 33,644 of them CLICKED on our advertisment and went to the questionaire page.
… and hundreds of them asked questions.
Questions like ….

• What Is The Da Vinci Code?
• What Is The Holy Grail?
• Where Is The Holy Grail?
• What Is The Quest Of The Grail?
• What Is The Grail Code?
• What Are The Dead Sea Scrolls?
• What Are The Nag Hammadi Codices?
• How Many Gospels Were There?
• Does The Gospel Of Mary Magdalene Really Exist?
• Why Are There So Many Marys In The Bible?
• Who Was Mary, The Mother Of Jesus?
• Who Was The Real Mary Magdalene?
• What Is The Chalice Of Mary Magdalene?
• Were Jesus And Mary Magdalene Married?
• Where Is Mary Magdalene Buried?
• If Jesus Were Indeed Married To Mary Magdalene, Does His Bloodline Still Exist?
• Who Were The Merovingian Kings?
• Leonardo Da Vinci And The Last Supper
• Who Were The Knights Templar?
• Do The Legends About The Knights Templar Have Any Basis In Fact?
• What Was The Role Of The Freemasons?
• Does The Priory Of Sion Really Exist?
• What Is The Opus Dei?
• What Is A “Cilice”?
• What Is Hieros Gamos?
• What Is The Role Of The Rosslyn Chapel In The Grail Story?
• What Is The Fibonacci Series?
• Would You Say The Da Vinci Code Is Overtly Feminist?
• Did The Church Evolve From Pagan Religions?
• When Will The Church Admit The Truth?

So once we received these questions we wrote the book …

The DaVinci Answers “Facts Behind the Fiction”

So … following on from Eoin’s statement …
“if you cannot create a reason for a book to be bought then
there will be no sales.”

We had the questions people wanted answering and went out and wrote them.

That is how we wrote the book!

We sold thousands of books as a result.
This was long before the Da Vinci hysteria and the film.

If any budding authors want to receive the full blow by blow of how we got 1,683,102 adverts for our soon to be written book in front of people, extracted hundreds of questions and sold thousands of copies then leave a comment on this blog entry and I’ll get back to you.

This will work for any niche that people need questions answered.

All will be revealed!

What a paradigm shift!
We are all becoming authors.
With every blog post, with every photo stream, with podcasts.
“Many elements of society have come together at this time to make self publishing possible. Most people have home computers to write their books on, the industry has created high-speed digital printers and the Internet means all of these things can communicate”

Massive Book Publishing Growth Predicted