Building on my last Strictly Business blog post, I’ll elaborate a bit about the different layers that make up my independent publishing stack. You can think of these as the building blocks that we use to create our new media publishing company. There are a lot of different tools and services you can wire up to make your publishing business.
First, let’s outline the goal of the venture. Our objective is to actually make money by selling published content. And in our case, the company is publishing material about workflow, organization and photo management (at least for now). We publish electronic books that are available on paper (when appropriate), delivered on DVD, and as electronic downloads.
The most important components of the software/service stack are the shopping cart service, the publish format, the central website, social media promotion, the mail list, the customer database and the authoring software.
For a shopping cart, we use Shopify. It’s a flexible service that’s easy to set up (at least the basic set-up is easy). Shopify can smoothly handle transactions in most of the world, providing seamless download, as well as integration with mail services. It has a large set of API extensions to suit custom needs.
We also use Amazon as a retail channel, but we are not using it as the primary store. This is because we get a better split with Shopify, and because we want to own the customer relationship. We’re also distributing our books through traditional retailers like B&H.
We are currently publishing primarily to PDF. The chief reason for this is control over the layout of the finished product and the broad compatibility. If the look of the finished product is important, PDF is a great choice. There’s one important drawback – while you can view PDF on iPad, it does not currently support embedded videos on iPad or Android, so our multimedia eBooks are not fully iPad compatible.
Our central website is authored WordPress. It’s a flexible and easily customized platform for web development. There are many thousands of designers and developers with WordPress experience, so you are not locked in to the services of any individual web designer.
Our mailing list is powered by ConstantContact, which allows us to do mass mailings. It keeps track of Do Not Mail preferences, and provides us with open rates as well as centralized bounce rates.
We use Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Linkedin as the primary social media promotion tools.
Our customer database is currently hosted in Filemaker Pro. The database is the heart of our publishing venture, since it’s used to track our most valuable asset – our customers. This was the most expensive customization of the group, and the one I was most unfamiliar with. Fortunately my wife has a strong background in database marketing, so she designed the functionality, hired the consultant, and handles the import and export of customer data.
We are authoring our books in a combination of Apple Pages, Adobe Indesign and Adobe Acrobat. We were able to use InDesign to reformat our most recent book, Organizing Your Photos with Lightroom 5, from electronic to print in a matter of a few days once we decided to make printed copies.
Of course, this simple list skips a lot of details in how all these services are configured, and there are plenty of details to master. But, by putting these tools together into a seamless production line, we have been able to create a company that would have been impossible for us to build, even a few short years ago.