Travelblather

I don’t usually do PR things. But I was offered the chance to talk to Pete Ward the CEO of WAYN (Where Are You Now?) a few weeks back. I vaguely remembered this backpacker social network site from way back – long before Facebook. And, it’s still going strong with some 21 million users. Regular readers will know I am no fan of Facebook. So, how was a social media business like WAYN surviving? I was curious to find out – particularly because they were on the verge of relaunching with a completely new user experience. I found Pete engaging, thoughtful and interesting. Here’s what we talked about:

What’s WAYN’s mission? Has it changed?
Imagine you can see where your mates are on a map. That was how it started. Mainly as a result of my own backpacking experiences. Nowadays it has evolved - to help people make the most out of life. Our vision is to help people discover where to go, what do to and who to meet.

Who are your customers?
It’s a global audience of people who love to travel. But not as big a backpacker market concentration as you’d think. Our biggest demographic is 25 to 35. But our most active demographic is over 50. I think that participating in it made older people feel a bit younger – and even allowed them to be a bit voyeuristic.

What does the new site do compared to the old site?
This has been the biggest shift we’ve ever made. We are only 10% of the way. Even at 10% we’re very excited. Not just the travel website scene but the web more generally has seen the ‘Pinterestisation’ of media, the way we engage with content on line is evolving - fast. Previously we had a quite magazinesque site -  a nice shop front but not much else. But social sites like Facebook reinvented this – things like the newsfeed, the wall for accessing info and ideas are quite different… adding content from people like you – personalization and relevance and timeliness is changing the way we consume and create content. Filtering is a big thing and it's still not done very well.

Why have you made these changes?
I don’t think anyone has cracked social travel including ourselves. Trip Advisor are doing it quite well, Gogobot has nice design features but doesn’t have the scale. We’re been around a while and have an ever growing community. What has been the core ingredient? We are social in our DNA. People come to the site to connect and socialise – that is the glue for our community and that’s what makes it a sticky site.

Our realisation was that if we are going to truly become the leading travel social platform we need to rebuild from the bottom up- but we mustn’t lose the social engagement. So we took the social engagement stuff and fused it with a recommendation engine for where to go and what to do. We recognise that our users will provide some of that info, but there are other things like check ins from other social sites, content like recommendations from Time Out and expert reviews that complement the decision-making process so the wall is a great way to integrate all  those elements and then to personalise it so that it’s really relevant.

What’s your view on making people share more to access more of your services? The premium services look exactly like Badoo - a dating site – is WAYN about dating or about travelling?
Is the impulse the same? Yes from a purely social context. There’s the same human needs that drive engagement – influence – everyone wants to be seen to be influential in something… the more friends you have the better.

People are that shallow…?
[Laughs] Well, they are interested in popularity – it makes them feel good. Everyone. Even the over 50s. Think about the celebrity factor. Much as you’d like to treat these people like anyone else, you can’t help being a bit keen to be their friend. We look up to people who are better than us and want to be like them – it’s in our DNA.

That’s one side of sociability – but there’s a more generous thing. If you can encourage people to share advice and recommendations that makes them feel good about themselves.

Social in the context of travel isn’t ‘I want to meet them because they are fit’ it’s ‘I want to connect with them because I know they are influential on Paris’. So we want to algorithmically bring people who are authorities/experts to the fore – so people can endorse people they see as experts.

Could these experts be professionals rather than members? For example a brand’s social media manager?
Yes. We could say the social media manager for Visit London could be one of these experts. A tourist board can sponsor a page directly. We did a recent promotion where the Air New Zealand marketing manager was promoted as a genuine user and he used it to add content about his travels round the world and we promoted it more. It was hugely successful. Our members really engaged with it.

Do many people use the premium services?
Those who pay are 10 times more active. Less than one percent are subscribers at  the moment. But they represent nearly 10 percent of our traffic.

What’s the core revenue driver? Subscribers or advertising?
The real value is, we think, in monetisation with brands – that is the scalable opportunity. Once you have an active audience, that’s your opportunity - as long as you engage with them in a way that is relevant.

Do you agree that the moment a free service starts to focus more on monetization, the user experience deteriorates?
We’ve come full circle – you used to have to buy premium membership to interact. Then we went free and ad funded and now we are freemium. Money v traffic is the trade-off. We reckoned there is a way to get the best of both. Restrict the things that don’t stifle interaction but that are still regarded as valuable by users.

For example?
Sending messages – now you can send as many as you want. But if you receive a message you have to pay to see it. Another way to offset that is – if you don’t want to pay - do something that we value as a business... do something else to help us and we will give you access. So share WAYN with a bunch more of your friends for example - that gives us new customers.

Do you see a role for professionally written content on WAYN?
I do funnily enough – beforehand it was no. Now we are seeing the value in creating an aspirational platform which inspires people to discover new places and partnering with tourist boards has shown us that. Mostly it’s Tourist Boards that are the people who have the best content on their destination. By doing innovative social engagement campaigns with them we have found that users respond really well. So whether it will be commissioning directly from writers or more likely working with third parties like Tourist Boards I think it’s useful. There’s a place for pro-content on a social platform but it needs to be served up in a really smart way. Like say an awesome photo to get people to engage with something quick and short and then maybe dive deeper.

How is WAYN different to Trip Advisor?
We have a strong advantage over Trip Advisor. You know the 1 to 99% rule? Most people don’t add reviews only a minority do. People go to Trip Advisor much closer to the end of the booking process. What you don’t do is hang out there… it’s not like that. People’s WAYN profiles are much more rich… what people like, where they want to go, what they’d love to do… we have huge numbers of data points about people and social signal data too. You can follow a brand on WAYN as well… just like Facebook. We can break down the 350k friends of South Africa and look at the data and see… what are they looking for? We know for South Africa it’s adventure sports, then wine tasting. We got 160,000 respondents to a survey we did with South Africa. Doing more surveys with consumer brands is something we see as really interesting for our future business – everyone has an opinion and we can aggregate them really fast.

Do you see privacy as a growing issue
I’d say it’s a ‘perceived risk’ with privacy. Despite the naysayers – those same people are adding more content on themselves. Ultimately people don’t feel as protective – they accept it’s part of the process. You have to do it  to make the most of the service. The winning businesses will respect privacy and not abuse that trust. The negative impact is 10-fold… 28-fold. We aggregate data – which allows us to present more tailored offers to you. We’re going to serve you ads anyway – so might as well show you ads that. You might be interested in.

Any questions you think I should have asked and didn't?

I'm delighted to welcome Nellie Huang and her husband Alberto to Travelblather. I've wanted to get the inside story on their Wild Junket Magazine project for months. From a standing start they have already hit the 100,000 user mark which is a tremendous achievement. So... how have they done it? I asked a few questions.

How did Wild Junket Magazine start?
It started as a way to provide more value to our readers than the usual blog post or eBook. We wanted to combine our (Nellie and Alberto) skills to create a unique product that would fill a gap in the market. With Nellie's experience in travel writing and my proficiency in photography and design, it felt like the perfect option. It was also an excellent time to launch the digital magazine as there were less than ten digital travel magazines in the market then. We also did some research and found out that more than 50% of magazine readers in the US now access content through digital sources.

What are its USPs? What makes it different?
We are a new-age magazine designed for modern, social travelers who are looking for more than just quality content. With links embedded and videos soon to be included, we provide a full multimedia experience rather than just old-school magazine content. What makes us stand out from the other digital magazines is that we marry long form travel narratives with an interactive design and format.

You're personally pretty strongly associated with the Wild Junket brand (indeed some might say you ARE Wild Junket) - do you think having a real person at the centre of the project helps people connect with it more?
I (Nellie) have spent years building the WildJunket brand, and I think that with a real person behind the brand, readers feel that there's a more personal connection. They know who we are, what we stand for, and are able to relate with us and interact with us on a deeper level. Even though we are delivering a professional product here, we don't want to lose the familiarity that our readers have with us.

What's your thinking about charging people to read your content?
We believe that payment is proportional to quality of content. That is why we pay our contributors to have the best possible content for our magazine and therefore readers in turn pay for the quality content we offer. We think this is something our readers understand and appreciate. Although this system does work, we want even more people to enjoy our work, so we plan to make our magazine free and widely available for new website subscribers. The new website which is dedicated to just the magazine, will be launched at the end of the year and all newsletter subscribers will have free access to the magazine.

So does that mean you are abandoning the subscriber model?
No. Our readers generally fall into two groups: those that found our magazine through Zinio or Magzter, and those who are loyal readers of our website. Our goal is to increase our numbers for both groups of readers. We'll keep the subscription model, but our aim for 2013 is to increase advertising revenue, so we want to focus more on building our readership rather than making money from subscriptions. So, to convert even more of our website readers to magazine readers, we’ll give them free access to the magazine if they subscribe to our newsletter. This way we’ll really build up our mailing list and increase subscriber numbers. Of course we run the risk of Zinio/Magzter subscribers heading over to the website for a free subscription - but that just means we gain another website reader - which is a good thing!

You offer the magazine on multiple platforms - why?
We don't want to limit readers to just one platform. Each person enjoys content in a different way and from different sources. There are still a few platforms we would like to get on, so we are working hard to meet the goal. As a matter of fact, we didn't intend to release print versions of our issues but we decided to offer it on the print-on-demand site, Magcloud, due to a few readers' requests. It's all about what our readers want.

What have been your biggest learnings about publishing on multiple platforms?
Each platform has its own set of rules and functionality and it can be difficult to comply with everything. But once we found a common area to work from and organized ourselves properly, it was not very different from publishing on just one platform.

Which platform has been most successful for you?
Zinio has proven to be the most successful to date, allowing us to reach readers outside of our initial fan base. They are the biggest online magazine store and also the most professional, in terms of production process and organization. This is why we have made them our default subscription platform.

How do you adapt the content to work across different platforms - is it just technical or do you edit it and write it in different ways too?
It is mostly technical. We try to be as consistent as possible so that a person reading our print issue will receive the same content from his/her iPad. And since most platforms are PDF based, the technical changes are usually easy to perform.

How do you choose what kinds of features to publish each issue?
We plan our editorial calendar months in advance and we tend to plan each issue's content around a certain theme. For example, our winter issue has a focus on winter activities featuring destinations like Iceland and Finland, but we also make sure to include other non-related destinations like Cambodia and Palestine to give it variety. Starting from our Winter 2012/2013 issue, we will be publishing on a quarterly rather than bimonthly basis, which helps us to plan things better. In general, we tend to publish articles on less conventional destinations and unusual experiences: such as a yurt stay in Mongolia or learning to build an igloo in Austria.

What's in it for advertisers? Give us your best sales pitch!
By partnering up with us, advertisers can get access to over 115,000 unique readers. Each issue receives over 1,65 million unique views over a shelf life of 3 months. These readers are mainly based in the US, UK and Canada, aged 25 to 44 years old, who book all their trips online and travel at least three times a year. Our readers love adventure and special interest journeys such as wildlife safaris, mountain treks and expedition cruises.

We have worked with several global companies such as G Adventures, Viator Tours, Lattitude, and Visit Finland. They have all found advertising on our magazine an effective way of reaching their targeted clientele.

We're also proud to share that WildJunket Magazine is a finalist in the Digital Magazine Awards 2012, for both Best Travel Magazine of the Year and Magazine Launch of the Year! We are very excited and we're confident this means that our magazine is looking at a bright future.

How can people subscribe or find out more?
There are many ways to subscribe to WildJunket Magazine: directly from our iOS Newsstand app, or via Zinio and Magzter that are available for both computer and mobile devices. You can also get print copies of our issues delivered straight to your doorstep on Magcloud.

Are you interested in writers pitching ideas at you and do you pay?
We are more than happy to receive new pitches although we have already planned the editorial calendar for the next year. We pay for contributions. Anyone interested can check our guidelines here: http://www.wildjunket.com/magazine/editorial-guidelines

'Big data’ is a phrase that’s getting a lot of airplay at the moment. The basic premise is that nowadays we have the computing power at our fingertips to be able to crunch massive quantities of disparate information and use it to unearth previously unappreciated things - about people.

The US election came down ultimately to just few counties in a few swing states according to various media reports. And that’s because both parties had huge databases of information that they had gathered about voters that allowed them to predict very accurately how states and even counties would vote long before polling day. This allowed them to micromanage the campaign. Spending their resources only on the people that ‘mattered’.

On the one hand this seems really smart. It’s a bit of a holy grail for marketers this kind of stuff. To roll out the oft quoted phrase attributed to John Wanamaker. "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” Increasingly with the web and big data to help them, marketers DO know which half is wasted. (Or they think they do.)

Take this thinking to its conclusion and you can see that in politics this approach could be massively undemocratic. People who live in states which are bound to vote a particular way regardless (according to the data wonks) aren’t worth talking to at all. Leave them alone – don’t even bother to tell them anything much at all. Conversely, imagine if you just happen to live in one of the key swing state counties that the data wonks have worked out really matter – your vote is suddenly worth exponentially more than the votes of millions of people elsewhere. It would be worth moving to one of these counties just to have that kind of influence.

I’ve recently read The Filter Bubble: What The Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser and it’s just brilliant. Its basic premise is quite similar. As algorithms get better and better at knowing what you want (or what they think you want), they’ll just keep dishing that up and you’ll never see anything else. So, click on the same friend a few more times on Facebook and their updates get pushed up in your newsfeed – do that enough and it’s possible that you’ll increasingly see only the updates of same few friends that Facebook thinks ‘really’ matter to you at the expense of all the others. Likewise for Google. Keep searching for say information that suggests you have a bias towards voting Republican (stuff that’s pro gun ownership maybe?) and slowly the search engine will start serving up more of the same and you’ll see less and less stuff that’s more Democrat leaning (stuff that’s pro gay marriage for example). You’ll begin to be locked inside a bubble of stuff that is highly 'relevant' to you to the extent that it will shut out all conflicting points of view.

Both of these concepts are fundamentally about the ability of technology to know us better than we know ourselves or to be better at deducing subtle connections than we can ever hope to be. And maybe (maybe) it is. But is that a good thing?

You know all that stuff you stick on your Facebook page? It’s not just Facebook using it. It gets sold on to huge third party companies that use it to model and predict behaviour. They are getting better and better at it. Soon they will know that because you like Homeland you are more likely to buy one brand of soft drink over another or one car over another. Did you know that when you read a book on Kindle, Amazon is watching what you read? So you spent the afternoon reading a book of fiction which has a chapter in it featuring a car chase where the hero drives a BMW? It won’t be long before the ad you get served up next time you hit Amazon will be for… a BMW.

So… you might have guessed that I’m not a huge fan of big data. I believe the Net should be about helping us make more interesting and unexpected connections – about serendipity and about humanity ahead of technology and profit.

What has all this got to do with content then? This week a company called Percolate raised 9 million USD in series A funding. Percolate has developed a platform to help brands use social media more effectively. It uses an algorithm to suggest content ideas for social media community managers (ie the people that run a brand’s Facebook page or blog etc). This means they can spend their time producing more content that’s ‘appropriate’ more quickly.

To quote some of the stuff on their website: Percolate’s goal is to make content creation easy by prompting community managers with ideas and inspiration…  Percolate is constantly scanning for interesting areas for the brand to explore for stock content, whether that’s a long-form blog post, an infographic or a video.

Who needs research and consideration to write content? Just get an algorithm to come up with the ideas for you. But how would you feel if you were reading stuff created off the back of prompts from a piece of technology rather than by a real person?

I can't remember how I came across Iain and Claire's travel blog Old World Wandering – but I was immediately impressed by the quality of the writing and the look and feel of the design. I love the fact that they are writing in-depth, thoughtful pieces of prose.

As I browsed around the site I spotted that they are trying to fund their next travel writing expedition – a trip from Shanghai to Cape Town - using Kickstarter. Basically they need a bunch of people to commit money to the venture. I have to admit I thought this was a brave thing to do – and like their blog, different. A constant theme on this blog is the challenge to make travel writing pay in this new world of the web – and here is an interesting new model. Which I have seen some people succeed with recently too.

So I asked if they’d like to talk some more about the project and the funding model. Here’s a really interesting guest post written by Iain.

"With only 10 days left to go, my Kickstarter project is still almost $30,000 away from its target. If I don’t raise the whole amount, I get nothing, and statistically my chances of success are slim. I’ll keep trying anyway, and I’ll also use Kickstarter again – if differently – because I believe it’s one part of a model that will eventually support writing of quality published online.

I've watched successful travel bloggers follow two paths: either they write to a narrow set of keywords and sell advertising or they build an audience around their personality, which leads to speaking engagements and endorsements. There is obviously overlap between the two, and there may be success stories I don't know about, but I believe that there is also a third business model slowly taking shape that will support long-form travel writing published independently.

I describe Old World Wandering, the travelogue I write with my partner, Claire, as an experiment. It began simply enough, in 2006, with updates for family and friends, but slowly – like a petulant child – our little travelogue has grown large and promising enough to take over our lives. That may sound familiar, and far from experimental, but 18 months ago, when we published Claire’s 3,500-word dispatch from Attukal Pongala, the largest gathering of women in the world, we started an experiment that has yet to produce a stable result. Claire’s article was picked up by The Browser, which curates “writing worth reading.” The traffic from that encouraged us to write even longer articles, like my three-part, 10,574-word epic about an Indian village cursed by tourism, and we were soon being featured by other curators of lengthy prose, like Longform and Longreads, which by collating links are also assembling a passionate community.

Claire and I write as well as we can, in as much detail as we can, but despite a measure of critical success and a growing list of subscribers, we're still a long way from making Old World Wandering financially sustainable. A 10,000-word article about a relatively abstract subject is going to see a lot less search-engine traffic than twenty highly specific 500-word articles, for a start. In-depth writing also takes time – 71 hours of carefully clocked work, in the case of the Chinese of Vientiane – and the growing long-form community is partly a response to established newspapers and magazines cutting their budgets for in-depth features, which tell stories that twenty 500-word articles just can’t.

In an interview, Graham Boynton – who was an editor at Conde Nast Traveler and travel editor of the Telegraph Group – described the problem succinctly:

I have no doubt that travel websites, blogs, and tweets are rapidly replacing conventional print travel journalism, but the problem is there is not enough money in it for the journalists to earn a decent living. If writers who want to specialise in travel lose the financial incentive to do so, then the gene pool of travel literature will be diminished. That, to my mind, is the greatest crisis facing travel writing – the dumbing down of the genre.

I think Kickstarter is a part of the solution to this crisis because it allows a relatively small group of passionate people to make something happen. Extremely successful campaigns often have surprisingly few backers: Matter – a journalism project we looked at closely – raised $140,202 from just 2,566 backers. It did that by emphasising a big issue – the low quality of science and technology reporting both on and offline – instead of speaking in too much detail about what Matter might actually do. We’ve tried to approach our campaign in the same way, by highlighting the importance of travel writing that connects past with present and community with place, instead of packaging destinations for visitors to consume, but we’ve also made too many mistakes. We haven’t spent enough time engaging with other travel writers, for instance. We worried that they might take our campaign as criticism of their own experiments, but what has actually happened is that other travel writers – who know how tricky all of this is – appreciate what we’re trying to achieve, and have given us genuine, unselfish support.

Our biggest mistake by far was underestimating how many people would see our campaign. We’ve worked hard at promoting it using social media, but no larger site has picked it up yet, and only 700 or so people have watched our video. Twenty two percent of them get through all four minutes, and almost exactly half of those people have backed us. If we can keep that ratio up, we only need to get 5,000 people to watch our video, and that helps me to believe that there is still enough time to save my Kickstarter project, and my travel writing experiment, with your support."

You can find out more and join up to back the project here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oldworldwandering/old-world-wandering

In my last post I speculated about the future of Frommer’s printed travel guides now that Google has bought them. It got me thinking about ebooks and self publishing. I already author an iPhone app to Seville and I retain the rights to that content across other media. So nothing to stop me publishing it as an ebook. David Whitley recently published Hardly Paradise: Anti-Postcards From A Grumpy Traveller a stack of his travel features as an ebook. It looks like it wasn’t a particularly complex task. And, get this. At the moment the writer gets 70% of the sale price (Amazon retains 30%). That’s a pretty good deal. So I took myself off to a seminar about ebooks hosted by Women in Journalism (yes, blokes are allowed to go along) - called How to write a best seller - how e-books have changed the rules.

The session was chaired by Alexandra Campbell, author and novelist (as Nina Bell) and panellists were Catherine Ryan Howard, author of Self-Printed: The Sane Person's Guide to Self-Publishing'); Philip Jones, editor of the Bookseller, agent Antony Topping of Greene & Heaton agency, Caroline Hogg, commissioning editor at Avon (HarperCollins publishing), who specialises in commercial fiction. So – a good panel and a good chairperson too. Here are a few key takeaways for me.

Ebooks will revolutionise the marketplace
Philip Jones: “Publishers haven’t really woken up to the impact ebooks will have”. Booksellers however have. Big time. Antony Topping pointed out that whilst high street book retailers used to take a title on and order a good number of copies, they now order tiny numbers and won’t commit to more until they are sure it sells. This makes life difficult for publishers – what kind of print run, how big a risk? Certain kinds of literary fiction and  non-fiction are much harder to get off the ground now too. The future could see whole genres moving online only and the high street being the place you buy just the big photogenic coffee table books, complicated textbooks and really big selling works of fiction. Who knows? There’s innovation happening. Amazon has recently introduced a new category of ebook called Amazon Singles. Longer features which are typically much shorter than a novel, but more than a magazine article. Singles are priced $1 to $5. Typical word count is 5000 to 30,000 words. I think this idea is REALLY interesting. In the past, there was no way to easily sell work of this length. Magazines aren’t big enough, and publishers don’t want to commit to such low page counts. Ebooks have no such limitations. The format seems ideal for tablets and smartphones. You can imagine grabbing a sandwich at lunchtime and turning to your iPad to spend an hour reading about a $150 million bank heist. Lifted, by Wired and New Yorker writer Evan Ratliff is just 34 pages long. (NB I paraphrased these last few sentences from this piece in Wired.)

Certain types of eBook sell better than others
The winners at the moment are sci-fi, women’s fiction, crime and erotica – serial fiction is selling particularly well. If you have an idea for a book – better have the sequel and #3 and #4 ready to go soon after. Antony Topping: “Because journalists (like you people here in the room) are used to churning out the copy fast this could be an opportunity for you – if you can turn your hand to fiction successfully.” (I wonder if the other category that sells well is ‘How to write ebooks and make money’?)
Philip had a counter point which I agree with: “It takes time to create a great book – this new model doesn’t allow for that. To rush something out to the market can be a big mistake.” Antony agreed – he said that for him as an agent if someone comes to him with a manuscript that has already been self-published as an ebook it has been ‘tarnished’ and he’s less likely to consider it unless it has sold really well. (Then of course it’s a different ball game.)

Amazon owns e-publishing
There are other options – you can publish ebooks on the Nook (the Barnes and Noble platform and reader due in the UK soonish); Kobo (the reader is on sale in WHSmith in the UK) and Apple’s iBooks author - but Amazon is the one that shifts the product and that’s down to the Kindle. Antony suggested Amazon could start giving away Kindles for free soon. What interested me was the way the panellists spoke in hushed tones about Amazon. Amazon keeps its data about how many copies of ebooks are selling to itself. Only Amazon really knows what is selling. There are best seller lists – but the implication was that that algorithm is more complex than pure sales numbers. Could Amazon start to favour self-published ebooks where they take 30% of the sale and control the author relationship completely at the expense of ebooks from traditional publishers? What impact do reviews have on rankings? As Catherine Ryan Howard put it “Amazon pays my wages… they could change the rules tomorrow. It feels a bit like they are reeling us all in before whipping the carpet from under our feet”.
What’s to stop Amazon deciding to only pay 50% royalties rather than the current 70%? Not a lot.

Publishing an ebook on Amazon is easy
You go to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing page, sign up (which takes about half an hour) and upload your book and cover pic. Job done. According to Catherine there’s no real quality control. She quoted an example (which has since been removed) of someone uploading a book called ’50 Shades of Grey’ which featured 50 pages each with a different hue of grey on it. For a while it was a best seller. People used to price stuff on there at 99c – but nowadays there is some kind of price/quality equation in play in her opinion. People steer clear of the 99c price bracket because it denotes dross. The sweet spot for pricing is USD2.99 she thinks. Right now images just don’t really work – it’s just words. And that for me is a big disappointment. Travel books need images in my opinion. It looks like it will be a while before this happens. Maybe apps remain the better product for an online travel guide? (Actually – there’s no maybe, I think they do.)

Small could well be beautiful
Ebooks don’t have geographical boundaries the way traditional publishers and printed books do. Once you publish online anyone who speaks the same language can buy your book. This means that smaller more niche topics that wouldn’t sell enough copies in one market to be viable could well work when exposed to the worldwide market on line. So, write a really good book about say food for toddlers with milk allergies and you could be selling copies to people in Canada, Australia, the US etc etc. I can see a whole new discipline not dissimilar to SEO of people analysing the Amazon product list for ‘content gaps’ that would be profitable and then finding writers to fill them.

Presence and profile online are essential
Catherine the self-publisher talked about self-publishing being about entrepreneurship (above and beyond writing skills) and Caroline the publisher agreed. Even for a more traditional publisher authors have to be socially connected online – doing the twitter, blogging and Facebook stuff is considered pretty essential for new authors regardless of whether they’re self publishing an ebook or working with a publisher. A word that kept coming up was discoverability. To be successful an ebook has to pop up in search results – both in the Kindle store and elsewhere online too. That could be about choosing a really tightly defined niche and writing about that. It’s also definitely about thinking laterally when you upload your ebook about what tags to give it - one great example from Caroline was using the tag ‘Downton Abbey’ for a work of romantic fiction that happens to be set in the 1920s. People often want to find a book a bit like something else that interests them.

A final word from Catherine – who had some really smart stuff to day – “Self publishing probably won’t make you a fortune – it’s something to consider more as a sideline.”