“Recently, my friend Dmitry Shapiro asked: “Why are so many great developers spending their time trying to create products specifically designed to addict and help us waste our time?” Along the same lines, I wonder whether members of the technology community have lost the ambition to build lasting companies that contribute to productivity instead of another “flavor of the month” social media application.”

and

“Even a cursory glance at most conference lineups reveals a host of speakers whose actual accomplishments are flimsy at best and whose primary skill seems to be self-promotion. (Should a first-time entrepreneur really be dispensing “knowledge?”)”

This start-up stuff is hard, especially if this is not the game you’re able to play…

Hi!

We’re co-founders of 24PageBooks, a start-up conceived in 2010 and launched in early 2011. Though we are not a “technology” company, our business model is enabled by technology including the widespread acceptance of  eBook formats and access to distribution via cloud-based services like Amazon, Apple iBooks and Nook from Barnes and Noble. And our backgrounds are in technology start-ups and growth companies. So we like to feel we’re more a part of that eco-system than the traditional publishing spectrum (though the two are merging at the speed of light!).

As start-up entrepreneurs we’ve been both informed and motivated by bloggers and authors like Brad Feld, Seth Godin,  Fred Wilson, Guy Kawasaki, Gary Vaynerchuk, the 37 Signals guys, Mark Suster, Tim Ferriss, and many others. They have collectively, and without overt attempts to do so, created a social community, both online and in-person, of start-up founders, investors and supporters-and helped create a fertile environment for innovation. Their example has been incredibly helpful as we’ve gone through the process of starting a business, raising a seed round and bringing products to market.

In our case, those products are eBooks designed to help entrepreneurs quickly learn essential day-to-day skills like selling, reputation (social) marketing, networking, negotiating leases, event planning and dealing with lifestyle issues like personal change, relationships and more. All of the issues we’re covering in our first series of eBooks are related to day-to-day skills for managing your new business and managing the often hectic entrepreneurial lifestyle. We cover ‘skills’ and ‘lifestyle’ because we’ve learned that creating a balance between the two is essential to succeeding and enjoying the crazy ride that is growing a business.

As part of our initial marketing efforts, we’re defining our first releases as the ‘Start-up Skills and Lifestyle Series’ and will be distributing copies for input from our friends and mentors in the start-up world. What’s unique about the 24PageBooks approach is that we know how limited our readers’ time is. We’ve taken complex subjects and boiled them down into their essential components. Our titles are 6000-7000 words long or about 24 pages in a conventional print format (there is no pagination in eBook formats). They can be read in less than an hour. We imagine them being a perfect dose of information during a plane flight, for instance.

To close, we’re very excited about our new company. We believe that for any product to succeed today it must have offer excellent value while respecting the consumer’s time. Imagine picking up a 24PageBook on commercial real estate leasing and learning something that can save you thousands of dollars and hours of grief: That’s the kind of value we’re driving for. We hope you’ll check our eBooks out and tell us what you think. Our books are available on Amazon and coming soon to iBooks and B&N Nook stores.

We’re on Facebook at Facebook.com/24pagebooks, Twitter @24pagebooks and the web at http://www.24pagebooks.com.

We’re looking forward to hearing from you,

Martin Edic
24PageBooks Inc.
martin@24PageBooks.com

As both a writer and a publisher I can tell you that self-publishing is almost never a good idea with a few rare exceptions. Those million-selling author stories are about established authors with big readership followings and the budget to do it right. For an unknown writer, going the self-pub route usually turns out to be a lot harder than you think, especially if you are trying to publish a professional grade book (if you aren’t then you are essentially a spammer as far as I’m concerned). Let’s look at a few reasons why:

• Editing. This is probably the biggest issue with 95% of self-published books. You simply cannot edit your own writing. I’ve tried and I’ve been writing professionally for over 20 years. A good editor will make you a better writer and will help your book attract more readers. A great editor is like having a great co-writer with extensive experience beyond your own. And, because most new writers are in love with every word they write, having an objective person with a red pen in hand is critical.
• Copy editing. Copy editing is editing for grammatical, spelling, usage and tense errors among others. You really can’t do this with your own work- seriously, it is a “can’t see the forest for the trees” issue. There’s nothing worse than buying a self-published book and finding it full of misspellings, itsy’s (its vs. it’s), run-on sentences, etc.
• Copyright, ISBN, front and back matter, etc. To look professional you need to do all the things that help the system catalog your work. ISBN numbers, for example, are required by most distributors and with ebooks, different versions (epub vs. .mobi for example) may require different ISBNs. You buy these and they can add up. Publishers buy them in bulk.
• Cover design. You’re going to pay or it or you’re going to get crap. Remember these have to look good as tiny thumbnail images on e-commerce sites and on a reader and in B&W and color.
• Formatting. There are two ways to format ebooks, the right way and all the rest of the awful ways people are doing it. Epub (do you know what that is? You’re going to need to know a lot about this standard format) requires some knowledge of HTML code and getting the book to look professional and readable is not easy. And each distributor has different requirements for your file set-up. Typesetting? Fonts? Setting up files so they export with standards and metatags intact? This is not a simple thing to get right. You’re probably going to be paying someone to do this.
• Marketing. The mere act of publishing (all the things I’ve covered till this point) does nothing to help your book sell. Are you a marketing, social media and sales whiz? How are those public speaking skills? Know anything about pay per click advertising? How about PR? None of it is a walk in the park.

On the positive side, if you are a working writer with resources and experience you can find freelance editors and designers and go it on your own. But that’s a big if for most new writers…

As we add projects to our list and writers come forward with subjects we’d never have considered but that make perfect sense, we’re still finding no problem with covering a topic in 6000 words. Like most start-ups we’re finding our focus changing in very interesting ways, especially as we have really not sold a ton of ebooks. That’s ok because we haven’t really been marketing yet.

At the time of this post we have five titles available and we believe we are on track to adding one every ten days or so. This should speed up as our systems improve and we find a small group of quality writers.

One of the interesting things we’re watching (and there are many) is the explosion in technology-enabled publishing with new platforms, HTML5, apps and devices for consumption. With these changes the concept of a ‘book’ is changing and in some cases there is almost no resemblance to a print book- take a look at Al Gore’s Our Choice which is delivered as an iOS app. If you haven’t seen it, watch the video that link takes you to. It is a major change in the way we package and deliver complex information.

That being said, 6000 words might be a half hour’s worth of conversation. If you’re talking to the right person a half hour of talking and story telling can convey a lot of information.

Our job is to curate that conversation for the highest value content and edit that content so it is easily and clearly understood. That’s our focus at this point in time.

For Immediate Release

Actualitte‘

http://www.actualitte.com/actualite/25875-24-pages-books-editeur-numerique.htm

Upstate New York Start-up News

http://unystartups.com/2011/04/25/24pagebooks-closes-seed-round-from-french-investor-kima-ventures/

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http://www.facebook.com/pages/24PageBookscom

Twitter:

@24pagebooks