The future eBook landscape remains out of focus. Despite the advent of the clunky Amazon Kindle, it's still difficult for most readers, even publishing experts to see where the business is going to shift. However, certain publishing industry experts are now calling for the brand name publishers to narrow down their list of printed books and instead invest more money in their marketing efforts. It's come down to this: with a little bit of money and a distribution chain, anyone can publish a book. However whether people will continue to focus on PDF format, on-demand print, other or all of the above is unclear.
At the same time, industry outsiders in PR and marketing are selling a variety of innovative services and methods employing traditional and nontraditional marketing. From my perspective, if you want to publish your own book, your money is best spend with someone whose expertise in marketing understands traditional and progressive means. The name of the game is creating "events" and "news" around your book and making the thing an irrefutable impulse buy. Anyone who tells you that one medium (internet blogs, video, tv, direct mail, live events) is better than another generally is wrong. Instead you need to analyze the content and the author you are selling and develop a strategy around him.
As for the format, it should follow the marketing plan. If this is a must-have diet book that will be marketed solely through the internet, then maybe a PDF style format is for you. By the way, check out Smashwords which allows the author to set his or her own price in a non-DRM Web 2.0 environment. If you are selling books at live events, consider what else you can wrap with the book and check out Book Surge. And, for those interested in partnering with a direct mail business book publisher, you should get to know Cornerstone Publishing out of Texas. These are three completely distinct examples of what I consider the future of publishing, and so choosing one or more of them needs to follow a well developed marketing plan.
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