Self-Help Books    

Self-Help Books, Cheaper and Better

by Bob Rich

From abseiling, building or cooking, to using a yoyo, a xylophone or a zither, you can learn any skill from self-help books. Personal growth, psychological help, coping with any conceivable disease, preparing for travel, marriage, birth, divorce or death... There are a thousand books to help you with whatever your current needs are.

And that's the trouble. The competition is fierce. Authors and publishers of self-help books need an edge.

Using new technology offers the promise of a marketing advantage. There can be big savings, and big opportunities, in joining the fastest growing sector of the publishing industry: electronic books.

An electronic book is simply a computer file. It can be printed and bound, one copy at a time, using ‘Print On Demand’ (POD) technology; used as a computer-based reference; or read on a variety of handheld devices including PDAs and even some mobile phones. Special purpose e-book readers are rapidly being developed, and there is the promise of a cheap reader with better reading quality than print on paper.

The conventional publishing process requires that some thousands of copies of a book are offset printed. These then need warehousing with its costs, and the risk of deterioration. There is only a limited window of opportunity for sales, and if they don’t materialize, the book needs to be withdrawn.

Electronic books don’t have these problems. A computer file can be stored indefinitely for no additional cost. Even though the per copy cost of a POD-printed book is presently higher than for offset, the book is only printed at need, and therefore no warehousing is necessary, and there is no spoilage. With the cost of paper rising all the time, this will be an increasingly important consideration. And of course books read in electronic format don’t use paper at all, and have no shipping costs (or only minimal if sent on a CD-ROM).

Weight and storage space are other considerations. A traveler can take hundreds of books on a simple storage device, or in a laptop computer. An entire reference library could sit in a corner of a user’s desk.

Ebooks can do things you cannot reproduce on paper. With some applications, they can include video clips, music and other sound effects, and, easiest of all, hyperlinks. Links within a book allow for complex cross-referencing. Links to the internet convert the book into a portal that leads to an infinite amount of information. In addition, a simple search of the files on your computer’s hard drive in total will allow you to find multiple resources that address the same issue in different e-books you own, in effect creating a database of information on any subject, at your fingertips.

Yet another advantage is the cost of revision. Revising an offset-printed book is expensive, especially if there is still unsold stock. With an electronic book, the cost is little more than the author’s or editor’s time. Typos, errors of fact and the like are easy to correct. It is no problem if new information needs to be incorporated or new developments in the field force a change in content.

There is only one obstacle to the use of electronic books; they are new. There is always resistance and misunderstanding when new replaces old. “I'd certainly never read one. The only thing they're good for are doorstops,” said Alfred Hitchcock about paperback books. David Sarnoff's associates said in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s: “The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?” There are hundreds of such quotes. There will be similar ones about electronic books.

To find out more about this new technology and its promise, visit http://www.epicauthors.com/

Dr Bob Rich is an Australian author, currently with 13 published books, 3 of which have won international awards. He is a psychologist and professional book editor when he is not planting trees, looking after wildlife of building houses. One of the joys of his life is to be a professional in another field: being a grandfather to some dozen little people, a few of whom are genetically related to him. These children seem to like him, probably because he has no sense of humor whatever. You are strongly advised not to visit Bob's writing showcase bobswriting.com People have been known to burn the dinner, miss appointments or do without sleep because they get lost within the offerings.

Reprinted with permission of the author.