 Great photo by Grok. We had a client who recently showed us a whole new program they were going to present to their clients and new prospects alike.
It was well thought-out. It was super detailed. It had lots of impressive features. It promised to deliver a ton of value and ROI. And it was terrifying. Who sees what—and when This may seem contradictory, if not counterintuitive. Here it is, we’d just lauded this new program which our client had created and unveiled to us. And then we undercut that review with the dreaded T-word. What gives? We can give you a little more detail now, and you’ll certainly say “Ohhhh…!” Our client—like many business owners—lives and breathes in spreadsheets. So that’s what they’d shared with us. Indeed, they screen-shared it with us. And this spreadsheet (was it Excel? was it Google? who cares?) was about 40 rows deep by about 25 columns across. All at once. Yep. Terrifying. The good news: We were the first, and only, ones to see it in this state. Our client was justifiably and understandably excited by the cool new program they’d worked so hard to develop. But boy was it ever un-exciting when presented as a swimming sea of spreadsheet cells. This is hardly a tragic story. And you likely can see exactly where it’s going, even if our client wasn’t able at the time. We patiently listened to the whole presentation, which took about a half hour. We took notes. And then we asked some pointed questions:
The idea was to turn down the spigot on this fire hose so it would better resemble a soda straw. The client—they’re very smart—immediately saw where we were going. Easier than you think Once our client realized that they needed to carve their presentation of this new program into bite-sized chunks, all that was left was the execution. And here we can describe a kind of MVP or minimum-viable-product version of that effort: Sure, the client could have gone on and created a snazzy new PowerPoint deck, with discrete slides for the different phases of this proposed program. But that would take time, effort, and resources—and at this point, the client really just wanted to test out this idea: socialize it with existing clients and see how receptive they’d be. So why even make a PowerPoint? The solution was even simpler: Tabs. Yep. That’s all they needed. If this program has five phases, then carve the spreadsheet into five clickable tabs. Simply screen-share a single tab when you present it. And if the conversation leads to a discussion of Phase Two, then click the Phase Two tab. Done. Steve Jobs famously said that simple is hard. But sometimes it’s hard to see what’s simple, and staring right at you. Do you really need to spend a fortune on a shiny new CRM (customer relationship management) platform when your Excel is still working fine? Of course not. Wait for the expense to be more than justified. Ditto for things like learning management systems or LMSs, or even slick PowerPoints as we’d described in this story. Have a marketing challenge that you suspect is simpler than it appears? Contact us and let us put a fresh set of eyes on it for you.
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 Great photo by Grok. Wait. What? SEO for YouTube? Is that even a thing?
Here at Copel Communications, we are not SEO gurus. But fortunately, some of our clients are. So we learn a lot. And when it’s prudent and discreet to do so, we’ll share some of the love. Hence this article. Short takeaway/spoiler: You can, and should, max out the SEO for your YouTube videos. In this article, we’ll discuss how. But first, the genesis of this story. As we’d noted above, this comes to us from an actual client assignment which, as we write this, is ongoing; they have tons of YouTube videos (most of which, incidentally, we also scripted). The challenge, as our client made clear, was to drive more search-query traffic to this huge repository of videos, spread across multiple playlists on our client’s YouTube channel. But how? There are two parts to this. Both are basic, yet nuanced. They are: 1. The actual title of the video. 2. The YouTube description of the video Let’s review each. 1. The title We’re talking B2B videos here. So you might have an existing video about a product or service that you offer to prospects. And what’s its title? Sure, it’s something like “Our Great Product.” You must understand that there’s the real world, and then there’s the SEO world. In the real world, populated solely by humans, “Our Great Product” is a perfectly good title. It tells people what the video is about. Simple. No clutter. Great. But in SEO World, it’s unfortunately insufficient. You want to “think backward” from what someone who would ultimately want that product or service would be searching on in, say, Google (or in AI; more on that in a minute). So if your Great Product solves Challenge X for, say, logistics executives, you might want to revise and expand the title accordingly: “Challenge-X-Solving Product for Logistics Executives Seeking Productivity Gains.” Not terribly exciting in the real world, but a step forward in SEO Land. But wait. That new title is pretty darned long. Aren’t there limits on this, imposed by, say, YouTube? There sure are. Titles max out at 100 characters, including spaces. The one we just noted above was only 66. So there’s room to play. Often, depending on the viewing device (desktop or laptop browser, tablet, or phone), that title will get truncated and lopped off with just an ellipsis (three dots or “. . .”) after the first few words. Meaning, the first few words are the most important. Because those are the ones that will stick. So factor that into your re-naming. Put the most important stuff first. It's not the real world. Sure, humans will read this stuff, too, but they’re only part of the audience. The rest is web crawlers, spiders, and all the algorithms that the search engines employ to serve up results which hopefully include your video. Now that you know about 1. The Title, let’s proceed to 2. The description Clearly, this is much longer than the title, but some of the same rules apply. Stuff will get cut off before you see the clickable “…more” to reveal the rest of the copy; a quick test on our desktop browser clipped it off at around 60 words. The max is 5,000 characters (not words), which can include links, text, and hashtags. That’s a lot of copy. It’s almost like a blog. About 1,000 words. Again, you want to fill this with info that your human searchers are searching for (what problems will the product or service showcased in your video solve?), as well as what the web crawlers want to find. For our recent project, these videos often offered solutions that helped with numerous arcane technology platforms, so we included bullet lists of those platforms in the description. The search engines like stuff like that. Know what they don’t like? Verbatim copy stolen from your website; they’ll ding you for that. So you want original copy. And you want it written by a human. All the search engines can spot AI-written copy from a mile away (as can we), and they’ll ding you for it. Which gets back to AI-based search vs. classic Google search. The landscape is still shaking out as we write this; even the term AEO (“ask engine optimization”) may not have legs. But what we’re seeing already is a refreshing overlap of what makes for good SEO content vs. AEO content. If you can nail the SEO side, the AEO side will likely catch up. Bottom line: Depending on the number of YouTube videos you already have posted, this could be a quick or long-term retrofitting assignment. And it should definitely shape your efforts for future videos; write the new titles and YouTube descriptions at the same time that you write the scripts. It will save you time and effort. Need help with any of this stuff? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.  The joy of de-selecting. Do not get us wrong. We are not luddites here at Copel Communications! We love shiny new tech.
We use AI a lot, too. So don’t think that this article—about yanking the plug on Apple Intelligence—is about some kind of irrational fear of technology. Nope. It’s far simpler than that. It’s about helping our clients to make money. Wait, what?? Apple Intelligence stands in the way of that? A solution in search of a problem The comedian John Mulaney once compared his aging body to the iPhone: each year it looks the same, but it just gets worse. LOL! We’ve been on Apple tech since the very first generation of Macs, so we have a well-entrenched more-love-than-hate relationship with the folks in Cupertino. But Apple Intelligence crossed a new threshold for us. Sure, you’ve seen all of the “ingenious” new features that Apple will foist on you, every single year, with every new OS update, whether it’s for your Mac, your iPhone, whatever. Each one purports to be the greatest thing ever—which is a tacit admission that the very thing it’s replacing, which had been identically hyped at its outset… wasn’t. Fine. It’s easy for us to throw stones, and we’re well aware of Theodore Roosevelt’s famous “Man in the arena” quote (the important part: “It’s not the critic who counts”). And besides, every time Apple rolls out a controversial feature, it typically back-pedals with a new slider whereby you can disable it. Liquid Glass, anyone? You certainly remember--remember? it’s still ongoing—all the hype around Apple’s version of AI. It was so special that it wasn’t just AI, i.e., artificial intelligence. Oh no. The “A” now stood for “Apple.” Apple Intelligence. Capitalized. It would solve everything in your life. Until it didn’t. The last straw As we’ve taken pains to make clear: We’re not afraid of technology. When Apple Intelligence rolled out, and even as it got updates and bug fixes, we stuck with it, waiting (and wondering) for it to help us in our daily lives. Until it tried to answer emails and text messages on our behalf. Woah. Stop the presses. It’s one thing to suggest some verbiage. It’s another to insert it into a reply by default, whereby our accidentally depressing the spacebar would constitute “Send.” A client asked us a question. We were about to give them a well-considered and nuanced answer, with a few factors to consider. And there’s Apple Intelligence, replying to our client with “Sounds great! I agree!” Fortunately, we caught this before any damage was done. Here at Copel Communications, clients pay us for our intelligence. The real kind. Not the over-hyped artificial kind. Hence the illustration for this article. We effectively rocketed our way to System Prefs to disable this hallucinogenic digital sidekick. Should you? Your choice. But now you know where we stand. And should you contact us, you also know that you’ll get a real reply, from a real sentient human.  Great photo by Grok. Question: As the year draws to a close, are you merely older… or wiser?
Not to flatter ourselves, but we think we can help with the latter. That’s because it’s time for our year-end round-up—an annual tradition here at Copel Communications —of our top posts for creatives like you. Catch the ones you’d missed. Or revisit those that helped. Enjoy!
Well, that’s all for this year. Have a suggestion for a post for next year? Contact us. We’d love to hear from you!  Great photo by Grok. Wait, it’s December already? We must have blinked.
Because it’s already time for the round-up of our top posts for consultants from 2025—an annual tradition here at Copel Communications. Here, then, is your chance to catch any articles you may have missed, or to brush up on others you may want to re-visit:
Phew! That should be enough reading and tips to tide you over for a little bit. But how about next year? Any topics you’d like us to address? Contact us and let us know!  Great photo by Grok. We love continuous process improvement here at Copel Communications!
In this article, cash in on all the tweaking and optimizing we’ve been doing, literally for years, with different clients of ours, to make things as efficient and repeatable as possible. Today, we’re going to talk about B2B “demo” videos. Does your company ever make these? We’re talking about those “watch this screen and see what happens” kinds of explainers which also, of course, sell. So it could be a product demo. A software demo. A service. A SaaS platform. A training session. There are tons of these. They are common. And chances are, if you need to make one of these, you probably need to make a ton of these. And this is where optimized efficiency—that “Big Mac-ifying” of the process—really comes into play. In this article, we’ll describe (in broad strokes, with the details purposely blurred) how we do this for a couple of clients of ours. Pay attention: We guarantee that there are elements of this process, perhaps many elements, that apply to your situation. And the more that apply, the more you can benefit. The challenge at hand As we’d stated above, we’re going to anonymize these specific client assignments. But you’ll get enough detail to follow the process, and recognize opportunities to improve your own workflows. In the first example, this client of ours will do a screen-sharing demo of the prototype of a use-case solution they create for their clients. And they do lots of these. The big opportunity here: If you could anonymize these brilliant solutions, and pare them down into, say, little two-minute stories, you’d have marketing gold. You could use them to quickly populate, say, a dedicated playlist on your YouTube channel. You could use that to show to prospective clients, who stand to be awed, once you hit the critical mass of sheer videos posted to that playlist. Not to mention your ability to feed the voracious appetite of the SEO algorithms and web crawlers of YouTube, Google, and so on. It’s one big virtuous snowball. Turning those client demos into marketing videos, incidentally, was not as obvious a choice as you might think. You’re starting with a lot of sensitive material. You need to see the bigger marketing picture, strategically… and be able to literally blur the lines of sensitive information, tactically, once it comes time to execute. So. This client does more than have one of their reps conduct (and record, via Zoom) the client demo of each new prototype. The prototype itself is based on a use-case that was presented/sold to their client beforehand, in order to get the green-light to make the prototype. Follow? Between the raw footage of the demo Zoom call and that original use-case PDF, we’d almost have everything we need to script the video. But not quite. So here, after lots of back-and-forth and tweaking with the client, the third of our three pieces of input evolved. In this case, it’s a super basic Excel sheet. In one column, it lists the timecode of the demo video; in the column beside that, there’s a quick description of what is happening on screen at that time. Example: “00:32 – 00:41 User logs into platform, using two-factor authentication with an emailed six-digit code.” Someone on the client side makes that little Excel, typically only about ten rows deep, for us. It takes them about 30 minutes. And that’s all we need! From there, knowing this client well, we can pen the video script using a basic three-act structure:
Even easier As you can clearly see, the big lift, for the client, in the scenario above, is to create that little Excel sheet for us. But more recently, we’ve started making videos, for a different client, with no Excel required. That’s because, for the cool things that this client is creating (we can’t share details, sorry), they already create three PDFs which are not only goldmines for us, but they’re also all we require to start scripting. The three PDFs, broadly speaking, are:
These PDFs are so detailed that we’ve been able to write video scripts from them, using their details as the visuals, with the simple addition of a basic voice-over. So there will be shots such as “Zoom in ultra-tight on the detailed box at the lower right of Page 3, and pan across the different functions listed in its flow chart.” In other words, no “lift” from the client at all! It reminds us of Craisins. Huh? You know Craisins. Those “dried cranberries” originally created by Ocean Spray. While making cranberry juice, they would throw out all of the skins of the actual cranberries used. Until someone got the great idea of drying the skins and adding sugar to them, and coming up with a clever portmanteau name like “Craisin,” which implies “cranberry + raisin.” (Read our article about portmanteau names and how you can profit from them.) Think about that: All those cranberry skins were not being used. Today, they’re a massive source of newfound revenue. Ditto for the three abovementioned PDFs. They were used to create a client deliverable, and then effectively shelved. Today, they’re the basis of a “found money” marketing effort. With very little effort! Need help “McDonald-izing” some of your existing deliverables and processes into efficient marketing gold? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help!  Great photo by Grok. If you’re an aspiring business book writer, this article is for you. And if you know someone who is, this article is for them. Share it with them.
Our topic: How to get the most from your ghost copy-editor. We feel pretty qualified to weigh in on this topic, having ghost-copy-edited numerous books for various authors, some of whose works have gone on to become Amazon bestsellers. First things first: Credit where it’s due. Those aforementioned bestsellers did not become bestsellers because of us. It was due to the authors’ vision, as well as the complete marketing team that guided the book through its gestation. Still. We were along for the process from concept to completion. Interested in penning a business book? Let’s dive in. Division of labor When you hear phrases like “ghost writer” or “ghost copy-editor,” you likely think of some celebrity, sitting back and sipping martinis, while some poor hack does all the work of actually writing the celebrity’s so-called “memoir,” or whatever. And that may well be true, in that instance. But that is not what we’re talking about here. Here, we’re talking about you, as a thought-leader in your business area of interest. You want to share your wisdom and experience with others. Done right, everyone benefits: Your readers elevate their knowledge. And you elevate your status as an authority. Heck, a published authority. So this is, clearly, not about sipping martinis and letting someone else come up with the ideas. The ideas here are yours. All of them. After that, however, it gets fuzzier. And that’s not a bad thing. In fact, the opposite is true. When this process is done right, it’s custom tailored to you, and no one else. We’ve worked with authors who are detail freaks. We’ve worked with authors who are bulls-in-China-shops. And in every case, it’s our job to accommodate their style of working. Ta-dah. If you take nothing else away from this article, it should be this: Your preferred and most comfortable style of working is the one that is best for you, when working with a ghost copy-editor. Period. It’s hard enough for you to get these ideas out of your head and down on paper. And then to pay someone to lubricate that process can feel like adding insult to injury. But if it’s a good fit, it will be the opposite. It will be intuitive, stress-relieving, and rewarding. You’ll get to see pages appear that make you say, “Dang! I never realized I was that good!” And that’s just when it comes to the finished product: the pages. In consultant-speak, that’s the “destination.” Which is certainly crucial. But equally important is the “journey.” How do you like to work? In person? Via Zoom? Transactionally and asynchronously, via email? Or some crazy hybrid of all of the above? Are you serious? Are you playful? Do you work in marathons? Or sprints? Again, it doesn’t matter. Whatever works best for you is what’s best. Period. So we’ve done brainstorming sessions to help authors tease out ideas. And we’ve worked with others who have simply “thrown stuff over the wall” at us, nearly completely baked. And what’s our reward? Sure, we get paid. But the far bigger reward is seeing the happiness that our authors derive from both the journey and the destination. Remember: “Ghost.” Our name does not appear, anywhere, on any of the books we’ve helped shepherd to press. So it’s got to be a good relationship—on both sides—for it to work. Writing a book is a big project. It takes a long time, typically measured in months. So be sure you choose a ghost you can live with. Have a book project you’d like to discuss? Contact us, and let’s see if it’s a good fit.  Priceless photo by Grok. There’s a hint in the headline to this article. Read it again.
We’ll circle back to it in a minute. But the topic is important: You want to fill that room for your upcoming webinar! Otherwise, all of that prep work is for naught. Here, we’ll give you some pointers, based on actual client experiences, to help you boost your odds. To webinar or not to webinar This entire article, and the recommendations herein, predicate on some pretty big assumptions: 1) You think a webinar is an optimal marketing tactic for your business, and 2) You’ve done a stellar job creating the presentation you’ll deliver during the webinar itself. Those are huge assumptions. A webinar is, as we’d noted above, a big commitment. They’re hard to do. It’s much easier, say, to be a guest on someone else’s well-established podcast (we have an article on that topic, too), but that isn’t necessarily easy to get, either. To have a successful webinar—and by “successful,” we mean “one that brings in prospects and leads to future business-generating conversations with them individually”—you need to choose a ripe topic that will attract your desired audience. You need to craft a really great presentation for them. You need to hone it and rehearse it. You need to publicize the event before it happens, in order to “fill the room.” You need to manage attendee lists and email sequencing thereto. You need to nail the presentation when you do it live. And you need to crush the follow-up, because that’s the impetus for the entire webinar in the first place: building new business. Phew. If that checklist sounds daunting, good. It should. But the upside can well be worth it; we’ve helped numerous clients with webinars that they’ve used to build business. While we’ve worked on various facets of webinar development and production, we’d like to focus on just one aspect here. It’s the “teaser” that we’d teased in the headline. Building unbearable suspense Marketing a webinar is like marketing a Hollywood movie that’s slated for theatrical release: It’s all about driving the maximum traffic for one specific date. For a movie studio, it’s opening weekend. For you, it’s your webinar date and time. So your marketing—let’s say, your social ads—for this webinar is exactly like what you see—say, on TV—for a movie. You may not have noticed this, but you’ll almost never see a TV commercial for a movie that’s already opened. That window has closed. Ditto for your webinar. So you can learn—and borrow a page—from Hollywood here. Think about a movie ad or a trailer: It gives you glimpses of the very best moments of the movie. Because the (untrue) assumption you have, as a viewer, is that the rest of the movie will be that good. But it isn’t. It never is. It can’t be. Still, you can tease snippets and factoids from your webinar, since you already know all of its content, and can gauge, pretty easily, what you think are some of its juiciest tidbits. And here’s the last bit of inspiration we’ll give you. It’s the one we’d teased in the headline of this article. And it’s one you’ve seen in several places. Here’s one: You’ve seen it on the TV news. Just as they’re about to head into a commercial. They’ll never tell you, for example: “The U.S. Olympic committee just chose Los Angeles as its next host city! We’ll give you all the details after the break.” That never happens! You know that. It’s always something more like this: “The U.S. Olympic committee just chose its next host city, and you won’t believe where it is! Get all the details after the break.” It’s a teaser. Reading about it, here, makes you groan, but you’ve got to admit that it’s effective. And here’s the lowest form of teaser, but we still love them, in a perverse way; and it’s what inspired our headline for this article: Clickbait! Yep, all of those “stories” you’ll see at the bottom of a news article’s page, with headlines like “You won’t believe how so-and-so looks today” or “My jaw dropped when I saw her dress” or whatever. Now look at your webinar content. Think of what, in it, is exciting. And then tease the heck out of it. Need help with a webinar challenge, or any other marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.  Great photo by Grok. Here at Copel Communications, we recently helped a client of ours to plan, execute, and roll out a new product. It was a big initiative, spanning several months.
Our client, not surprisingly or unreasonably, asked us to craft the rollout plan, along with a Gantt Chart so they could easily visualize the process. You know what a Gantt Chart is, right? It was invented by an early 20th century management consultant named Henry Chart. Okay, we couldn’t resist that one. It was Henry L. Gantt. And the chart—you’ve seen tons of them—is made up of little colored horizontal bars that “move forward” over time, showing what gets done and when. It’s basically a matrix. For ours, the vertical columns represented months, going forward in time from left-to-right. And the horizontal rows represented the different activity streams of this project. Some would, say, start in August and run through October. Others wouldn’t start until November, but would run for six months. And so on. Confession: We are not Excel mavens here at Copel Communications. If you are, we salute you! But you might still pick up a tidbit or two from this article. List, then draw The plan/execute/rollout initiative was, as we’d mentioned, very detailed. Indeed, the way for us to even wrap our minds around it was doing it as an outline. And that’s how we proceeded. It went something like this: Step One: Write up the highest-level bullet points of the outline. Things like “Come up with product ideas.” “Develop the best idea.” “Create marketing materials.” And so on. Step Two: Populate the sub-bullets of each. So bullets such as “Create marketing materials” would include sub-bullets such as:
And then there would be sub-sub-bullets. In the above example, “Develop social posts” would include sub-sub-bullets such as:
And so on. Chart your course Even if you’re an Excel maven, that little bit of Word-play can help you. Just use indented bullets for brainstorming; you don’t need any special Word skills to do that. Here’s the thing: The Gantt chart isn’t as detailed as that outline. It basically just charts out the highest-level bullet points, over time. There’s probably some built-in Excel (or even PowerPoint) command that will “Gantt-ify” a bullet list; if there is, illuminate us in the comments section. In the meantime, if you’re living in Word Land, like us, the chart-“drawing” process is actually quite easy: All you do is create a table in Word. The top row is the months (or days, weeks, whatever). The left-most column lists the titles of the different activity streams (“Come up with product ideas,” “Develop the best idea,” etc.). And then all you do is fill in the colors for where the two will overlap. If the first month of “Develop social posts” is, say, October, then make that cell a color other than white. And click-to-fill the other cells as needed. It takes all of about two minutes. We delivered both of these docs to our client, who was delighted to receive them. First and foremost was the Gantt chart they’d requested: A quick and easy visualization of how the project would play out over time. And, for added detail, there was a Word doc outline of the project, in which each row of the Gantt chart teed up to a top-level section of the outline. It was perfect. It may not have been obvious to the client that we “worked in reverse” to make these deliverables, i.e., starting with the outline and then culling from it to make the Gantt chart, but who cares? They were happy, and the process was efficient. Have a marketing challenge you’d like to address? Or have tips for us on how to make Gantt charting even easier? In either case, we’d love to hear from you! Contact us today.  Awesome photo by Grok. We don’t claim to be a publishing expert. That said, we have ghost-copy-edited several books, for different clients of ours, over the years. We’ve done everything from boutique self-publishing to working with one of the big-name New York publishing houses.
But the lessons we learned recently—and will share in this article—really underscore how much, and how fast, the world of book publishing has changed, in just the past few short years. Big boys can be bullies Boy were we ever disappointed, not terribly long ago, when we helped a client of ours shepherd their book through the process/wringer of a major you-know-their-name publishing house. We—mistakenly—thought that our client would get the white-glove treatment from this storied icon. Were we ever wrong. Their business model had followed—or perhaps preceded—the seismic shifts that have upended the music industry. Rather than the publishers having all the power, it’s effectively the influencers who have all the power. So if you’re, say, an indie rock band and you’ve got a zillion followers on TikTok, you hold all the cards. Why fork over your hard-earned money to some record label? Ditto for publishing. You can self-publish, pretty easily, these days (more on that in a minute), and if you can drive lots of followers and sales, then what value does a publisher—regardless of how big or how storied—have to add? This is, unfortunately, a double-edged sword. In the case of our client, they’d written a brilliant manuscript, but weren’t exactly Kardashians in terms of their social-media influence. And that was all, apparently, that the big-name publisher cared about. They peppered us with questions, such as:
And one other, which we were shocked to hear:
Ouch. You’d think that as publishers, their job would be to, well… publish. But no. They’re looking for coat-tails to ride. They want to “barnacle” themselves onto a trend, rather than expend the effort and capital to start one, regardless of how trend-worthy that manuscript might be. How disheartening. But the story does get better. The Magazine Magnate Before we get to the silver-lining chapter, we have one more churn-your-stomach tale to tell. We worked with another client, recently, and helped them to complete their book manuscript. Shortly thereafter, our client was approached by another huge-name publisher, known primarily in the magazine world, but who were now leveraging their brand name to create a publishing service to authors like our client. Hmmm. Intriguing. Well, it was, until we dived into their sales pitch. They would publish the book. And they would push out a press release for it. And they would feature it on their website. Now, in stark contrast to the old-school publisher we’d mentioned in the previous story—who, to their credit, paid our client an advance (i.e., money) against future sales for the manuscript—this magazine-magnate wanted to charge this other client of ours for the privilege of having their big name on the spine of the book… along with the aforementioned press release and website page. So now the money is flowing in the opposite direction. But okay. We’ll bite. How much did Magazine Magnate want for this service of theirs? Well, they offered different tiers. The cheapest one was $67,000.00. The priciest one topped out at $122,000.00. Can you say “Vanity offer targeted at ‘authors’ whose wallets are as inflated as their egos?” We politely declined. Goliath, meet David As we’d teased above, there is a silver lining to our client’s story—and for your book-publishing aspirations, too, especially if you don’t feel like self-educating on the arcana of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing service which, while valuable, requires a ton of heavy lifting on your part. Turns out there’s a whole category of vendors out there known as book aggregators, and they do pretty much everything, for a sliver of the price we’d mentioned above. Example: For our client who declined the Magazine Magnate, they went with an aggregator who created a print-on-demand book and e-book version thereof, and distributed it to storefronts such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble and tons of others. And the whole budget was under $3k. So there’s no “advance” against sales; you’re betting with your own money. But if you can, say, sell more than $3k worth of books, you’re already in the black, and royalty checks will just keep on coming. So you can see why the old-school publishers are now very old school. Their business model has been shaken to the foundations. What value do they add, beside a logo on the spine? We’ll leave it to you to answer that question. Need help with a book project? We’ve worked on enough of them by now to have experience to offer that, we’d wager, you’d deem valuable. Contact us to learn more. |