Joint Venture Lightning

How do you help a new author get his first book published and in the hands of readers around the world?

Geoffrey Zimmerman is an experienced world traveler and writer. He’s written for television, including the hit show Miami Vice. He’s a poet, novelist, and self-described romantic. He’s also trying to break into the publishing world with his first book… a romantic adventure set in Europe and New York.

He explained to me that he has been floating the transcript around to agents but no takers so far. So, he has been looking into self-publishing his book but wasn’t sure how to begin and he didn’t want to pay a ton of money to get a few hundred copies printed.

I recommended that he consider e-publishing and offer sample chapters to subscribers. Since his new book is part one of a trilogy, he has ample opportunity to build a fan base to whom he can sell his future books.

Since this was a new market niche for me, I had to do some research to see if this was an area worth getting into. Why do I sound so picky? Because if I get bogged down in an unproductive niche market, then I can’t be working with clients who are in highly productive and profitable niches. So, I have to research the potential before I invest my time and resources as a joint venture partner.

I have decided to take on this new challenge with Geoff and have started his web site with www.geoffreyzimmerman.com.

This case has some unique challenges.

• Fiction is a luxury so there are few pain points to drive customer response
• Geoff is located in another city far from my location, so video / photography must be sub-contracted
• We are starting totally from scratch which means we need to get some reader testimonials
• We’re exploring how to tap the power of video for a book / text based niche product

These are the biggest challenges at the moment. There are others but we’ll address those as we come to them.

For now, I am in the process of editing and loading his content and waiting on his new photos so that I can customize his site. Our plan is to load chapters from his book into the iContact auto-responder so when visitors subscribe, they immediately begin getting his book. Every couple of days they will get new chapter. Along the way, we will include updates on the development of book two in the series.

Also, visitors will have the chance to read some of his other works like short stories and poems that Geoff has written. The graphic elements of the site will include photos Geoff has taken during some of his travels and story research trips.

But what about the video? Good question. We are planning to load short video clips of Geoff telling about how came up with the story idea, what inspired him, various scenes in the book, the history behind the story and so on. Geoff also knows a professional reader whom we are hoping to get to read some of the book as an mp3 audio file listeners can download.

We’ll keep you posted on the progress of this interesting case study as it develops.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 at 9:11 am and is filed under Case study, Phase 1, Product Creation, Publishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.