EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO MAKE A 'VIRTUAL BOOK' (LIKE THIS)
by Michael Mathiesen
COPYRIGHT UFO PRESS - (C) 1991
PLEASE COPY FREELY AND GIVE TO FRIENDS
In this text we will talk about how to publish your ideas in the new electronic media that are developing all the time. In fact, when we first wrote the major part of this text we did not consider that someday we would be publishing on CD-ROM disks. But, now we are putting on the finishing touches to our first CD-ROM title. You will see it in computer software stores by the end of 1993. We look back and wonder with amazement & awe at what new forms of publishing will be in existence by the time we are established in the CD-ROM world.
Probably, we will be talking someday about getting your ideas across the NET to people watching a special channel on their cable TV computer/appliance. It might be called the 'WEVEE' by then.
But for now, let's start you out with the basics. First, you will want to experiment as we did with the text only method of publishing for several reasons. Later on, when you've proven your ideas, gotten a bit of confidence, learned about marketing, distribution and have it down to a science, you can expand with graphics, video, sound, inter-activity etc.
1. You need to define your writing style and ideas as something that people will want to read about.
When we started in this business, we put out the first publication about Operation Desert Storm. We were out first, because we did not have to print a volume of paperback or hard cover books. We did the research and put it down in our word processor, compiled it using a version of what you are reading this book on now and submitted it to the world of computer Bulletin Boards. It was a huge success considering that we published and distributed the entire work for under $200.00. We made back several hundred times that investment from sales of the book through electronic distribution that we will discuss in detail later.
You want to continue with this method first if you don't have a ton of money laying around to invest as we didn't in 1990. And the market for your ideas just might not be there. You need to find out as quickly and cheaply as possible. On the positive side. If you have a writing talent and a marketing talent, you will be successful in this new publishing medium. But you have to have something that people will want to read about. That's a cardinal rule that doesn't change no matter how much technology your want to talk about.
After you have established the fact that you can write well enough for people to support your writing habit, not an easy trick to say the least, you can begin to start thinking about more interesting and much more profitable ways to make your way in the electronic publishing medium. We are going to talk to you at the end of this work about publishing in CD-ROM because the market is exploding right now. The demand is there for many, many new titles and the technology allows anyone with $10,000 to make it BIG! That's still a pretty big investment for most people, however, and that's why you may want to consider starting out as a part-time hobby publishing through the Bulletin Boards and Catalogs. Again, this is how I started and we're now totally independent through our publishing efforts. I have not struck it rich yet, but I'm now able to buy a house and support my family completely without having to work for anyone else. This has been my life-long dream and it's now come true. it can happen to anyone else, if they take the steps in this work and follow what I did. There may be lots of other ways, but this was how I did it and so I know this works.
2. There is nothing more important than number 1. So, go back and read number 1 again if you have to so that you fully understand and grasp everything I just said. Then, start thinking about your budget. How much time and money do you have to spend over the next several months. It took an almost Herculean effort on my part to get started. It wasn't easy, but I got through it because I was a computer fanatic and loved to learn everything about the world of files, directories, executables and everything in between. If you're not as computer literate as Steve Jobs, you might want to re-think the whole thing, because you are going to learn enough to put you on a par with Steve Jobs whether you like it or not. If this appeals to you, learning everything there is to learn about computers, then read on. If not, think about marrying a computer hacker or going partners with someone who is.
I'm exaggerating to make a point, but only a little bit because I tend to forget some of the very frustrating things I had to go through to learn this craft. You will need to get very organized, learn about all the tricks your computer can do, find the software you need to complete your projects, and finally worry about the size of your files and then compress them and copy them to disk or send them over the phone lines with a communication program. It's not impossible, but it is time consuming and very mentally exhausting sometimes. The incentive is that it can make you financially independent and you will never have to commute to a job you hate if you master it all.
3. Next, you will want to have a plan. What subject can you write about with authority or with enough style and uniqueness that other people will want to take the trouble of downloading to their computers. This is not easy and would require an entire book to talk about. I'm assuming you've already thought about this a lot or you wouldn't be thinking now about self-publishing. If you still need help, do what I did for years. I used to go to bookstores and libraries and just look at the titles of the books on the shelves. Very rarely would I actually pick one up and read on or rarer still buy a book because I was more interested in the craft of writing not reading. Browsing through bookstores was like kindergarten for my book marketing education. You will see all the books about cooking, travel, science fiction, etc. and you will quickly learn what subjects are saturated with titles and what subjects are hopelessly out-dated. These latter are the ones you want to concentrate on. And then, the best part is that looking at all these successful titles will give you inspiration and you may think of another title related to one you liked that is twice as significant.
Just remember this rule of thumb. If you can't think of a group of people numbering in the millions at the very least, you won't succeed because you will not be able to reach that entire group, no matter what you do. At best, you will only be able to reach one tenth of one percent which means that out of every million potential readers, your book will become known only to a few thousand. Out of these, how many are actually going to spend the money to buy your product. NOW, you begin to see the extent of the problem.
4. The good news is that once you have a good idea, the potential market of any group of people will number in the millions via the growing number of computer users who communicate by modem to the thousands of Bulletin Boards in this country and the rest of the world. Since, all the Bulletin Boards eventually copy files to their own board for their own subscribers, THIS MEANS OF REACHING MILLIONS OF PEOPLE IS THE LEAST EXPENSIVE OF ALL OTHERS!
Now, you want to understand what I just said. I estimate that my first electronic publication was downloaded to about 100,000 computers around the world. That means 100,000 people read my book and it cost me less than $200.00 to get it distributed this widely. If I had attempted to publish 100,000 paper based books, it would have cost me half a million dollars, and I only had about $200.00
Now, going back to point number 3, the subject matter. I was successful immediately because I was beginning to think about electronic publishing just as the War in Iraq was beginning. By the time it was over, and it was the shortest war in history, I had my book completed and ready to be distributed.
5. This brings me to the major advantage of electronic publishing. If it's obvious to you already, skip this point. In electronic publishing, I have no lag time between the conception of the idea and the time people start to read my work except for the time it takes me to get it down in my word processor. With any other method of publishing, you have to wait months for people to approve and then to begin to print and format and mailing and all that. It usually takes a year to get a book out from the time you finish writing it and submitting it to a publisher in New York. We are the New York Publisher and you will have to start thinking like one too.
But if you have the subject matter and the writing ability, you can get the work formatted in this style that you're now reading in about a day, and then shipped off to the Bulletin Boards the same day. People can literally be reading your work, in two days after it's finished! Think about that advantage and remember my example of Operation Desert Storm. We were the first book out on the subject, not necessarily the best book on the subject, but I was first, I can tell you that. I had hundreds of readers, a few days after the jets landed and the reporters filed their stories.
The timeliness of electronic publishing should not be overlooked or underemphasized when it comes to thinking about ideas. In other words, even though there are thousands of other cook books out there in the bookstores, if you came up with the Operation Desert Storm of Cookbooks, you could be first and launch your careers as easily as I did mine. Watch events, think of ways to improve on the current means of getting information out there about them, and you've opened up a whole new universe to imagination!
All right, enough foreplay. How does one get started. My recommendation is to stop here. Take a day or two to let things jell in your mind and then come back to the following section on HOW TO. If you already know exactly what you want to publish, then you can read on.
PART II - FORMATTING THE ELECTRONIC BOOK.
To make an electronic book you need a few computer programs to
make things go easy.
1. You need a word processing program that can create an ASCII
text file. There are several on the market. I prefer using a
simple text editor like Norton Editor. Lap Write from Traveling software is another great one. We have included one in the public domain for you called Microstar, good for those on a tight budget. Just get it down into ASCII text first. From there you can re-format your work into any other format.
2. You need a reader program such as the one included in this
kit. {We've recently upgraded to a new version of IRIS or PRISM.
It's called Dart. It is much easier to deal with and this is
why we've changed. You are reading this book on the Dart.exe
system, from UserWare. It's great. It is a Shareware program
so there is no need to pay royalties to anyone and you use very
little disk space. Your readers have to read your books and
these two programs allow for some hypertext features such as pop
up words, menus, hotwords, branching etc. These two do not
allow for graphics. If you have a book that is heavily
graphical in nature, you will need to format your book in a
graphical hypertext format. There are only a few good ones on
the market.
In our first book, Operation Desert Storm, we used lots of hypertext, pop up words and other little tricks like that to make it more of a computer book than a straight text file such as this one. In this work, we're only trying to give you the very essence of what you need. But Dart and Iris both give you the ability to place ...
HOTWORDS*
.... in your stories. When you move your mouse to a Hotword more information pops up in a little window. This seems very archaic to me now, but you have to start learning somewhere, right?
So, what you want to do is get a great textual product and then distribute it over the BBS networks just as this one was done. Just as you found this book, others will find yours. Then, when you've made a success of your first book, take a look at publishing in the MultiMedia format. Now, this is a BIG STEP.
You'll have to learn an authoring program. This is not like a word processor. It's like a real programmer's program, where you have to learn some simple programming statements. Don't worry, there's good news. The technical support people at Asymetrix will help you. I'm going to tout Toolbook now for a few paragraphs because I used them all and only Asymetrix has given me the help I needed to get my first title out there. The other authoring tools are not as packed with features and definitely not as easy to use.
PLEASE TAKE NOTE:
If you are going to author something like an educational program in which there are lessons and tests and tutorial visuals and that sort of thing, you need to look into, but perhaps the price will be prohibitive, at Authorware from Macromedia. It's $5,000 and therefore out of the league of many of us, but it is very good if you're going to be developing educational software that will end up in schools. For anything else, you should use Asymetrix MultiMedia Toolbook and it's only about $300. or $500 depending on where you get it.
THE NEXT THING TO WORRY ABOUT IS YOUR GRAPHICS.
There are several ways to include graphics in your work. You
don't need to be an artist. You can get clip art, these are
designs and graphics that have already been drawn by artists and
then placed out there in the market for the free use of the rest
of us. Or you can get one or two very useful devices for
getting graphics into your work. One is a scanner. The other
is a digital camera that takes pictures of anything and places
them into your computer's hard drive. The best devices of this
kind are made by Logitech. The Logitech Hand Scanner lets you
scan images up to 4 inches wide and any length. So, you can
scan a picture in a magazine or art book and then you can edit
it and use it in your own documents to create very professional
looking work. Scanners go anywhere from about $200 and up for a color model. Another nice new entry is the Page Scanner from Niscan. It is portable but will scan a whole page for only about $500.00 street price. We use it and like it very much.
But for even more fun, take a look at FOTOMAN. It's a new
camera that has a built in flash and a single focus-length
lense. You can take it anywhere in the world and take up to 32
pictures. Then you dump the pictures into your computer via a
plain old serial cable. Everything you need is included with
the camera, even the very simple editing software. You don't
need any additional slots or boards in your computer system.
You don't even need to take the case off it. This is a great
product and produces extremely nice looking photos to include in
your work. It's the only one of its kind at the time of this
writing. It runs about $700.00. It's expensive but if you are
a serious publisher, a quick and easy way to get pictures into your work may be well worth it. If you're not planning any graphics then none of this section is of much importance, but you must realize that any electronic publication today is up against some stiff competition. People are getting pretty good at graphics and text and you will want to be able to compete. We started out in text only like this book, but have found the demand to be very small while the demand for MultiMedia is EXPLODING.
NOW WHAT DO YOU DO ONCE YOU GET YOUR PROJECT TOGETHER?
First, have a really accurate picture in your mind of what your project is going to look like when done. This will tell you how much software you will need to put it all together. If it's text only. All you do is format it with an editor and then compile with Dart or IRIS which is the reader program you're looking at these words with right now. This is a good idea because you don't want your readers to be able to change any or your text. A reader program such as this one prevents this. Also, it's lots more fun for the reader than a straight text file because there are hotwords and things that can make it somewhat interactive as we have already discussed. Distribute this idea. See how you do and then meantime pick up a copy of Asymetrix Toolbook and begin to learn it in your spare time. It will take you a few months, if you're like us. But it's well worth it. When you get to a point you cannot figure out on your own, call Tech Support at Asymetrix. They are the best bunch of technicians in the Software biz. If they can't tell you how to do something over the phone, they'll sometimes have a snippet of code they can send you or you can download via their Bulletin Board. This makes them the best software product to use to author in MultiMedia. If it weren't for the fine help we received at Asymetrix we wouldn't be here talking about it to you.
Now, all you do is follow our steps below for creating a virtual
book, format it for use with IRIS or PRISM and now DART and send
it out to the thousands of BBS's and Distributors. The most
current list we have BBS.ASC - included with this Kit.
There are other more up-to-date lists you can get from the BBS community and from list brokers. The list is all important and you should send out your disks to as many as you can afford.
Another useful program we've included for you is COPYQM. This
allows you to make multiple copies of your work to diskette fast
and efficiently. We create hundreds of diskettes in one night
while watching TV because all you have to do is take a diskette
out of your drive every minute or so until you've copied the
number desired for your mailer. It works real good, just make
sure your programs are all perfected before you get to this
stage or you will spend a lot of time correcting three hundred
diskettes.
Before we get into the actual writing of your book, take your
editor, Microstar if you don't have any other, and look at this
file, 'E-bibkit.#1'. You are now reading it in DART. But we
created it in a simple editor. With your editor you do the
same. Simple write the book and pay attention to the use of
HOTWORDS and linking files, the way we have done to make it more
interesting to the reader. You don't want them to take one look
at your book and be bored right away. Let them see that this is
a dynamic new way to gather information and our industry will
explode.
So, create your files with an editor. Link files for fun of
reading. Use hotwords similar to the way we have done. All you
have to do is read the sample text files and help files we've
included to learn exactly how to do this. It's quite simple and
there are plenty of examples for you to use. Experiment, until
you understand the basic principles and then begin planning your
book. We always have three or four windows for people to move
around in. This makes it more interesting for the reader.
EXTREMELY IMPORTANT:
When you have completed your work, when you exit DART, it saves the
configuration in a file called DART.DSK. If you want your
reader to see the book as you created it, you need to exit your
work as you want the reader to see it and make sure to include
this version of DART.DSK with your book. This way, the book
will load using this configuration file to show the work the way
you created it. It's imperative that you make a simple batch
file that types the word, DART, so the program will load
correctly with all your windows exactly as you want them on the
screen. You can see what we mean by loading this book. The
DART.DSK is the file that makes the HELP window pop up the in
the place that it pops up and all the other windows in the order
that we wanted you to view them. It's pretty simple, but you
have to know this secret before you complete your work and
distribute it.
Put a help file in your work as we have so that the first time is not as daunting as other programs and your reader can move right along.
Those are the basics.
What to do next? Get to work on your book, then format it into a book like this one. We'll tell you how in detail in a minute. But next step is to send it off to the Bulletin Boards listed in our database we have included. These people will include your book in their list of files if it's good. The rest you will learn as you go along. The first thing to know is that you don't get paid by the Bulletin Board Sysop or the Catalog distributor. You have to send your first work for free and have other books in a catalog for your 'fan's' to order from. Or you can send out a book that has several different endings and make people pay to hear the ending. You have to get very creative in the income part, even more than you did in the writing part. This sounds cruel, but it's true.
What we did is we sent out Operation Desert Storm and we included a small catalog of other books we knew we could finish by the time the orders came in. A daring plan, but it worked. We put out about thirty or forty books in the course of the following year because we had the orders, so we had to fulfill them. You might be saying to yourself that the quality must have really stunk, and you would be right in most cases. But in a few, we actually did a good job, some of the best writing of my career came about because I was under this kind of 'fill or kill' pressure.
Of course you don't have to use the program that makes this border
around your text and gives you many more bells and whistles like
POP-UP MENUS LIKE THIS AND HOT WORDS*, but you should. Most people
will not read straight text files. It's more difficult to read and
it lacks a certain finished quality that you will need to attract
the money out of the pockets of your readers.
To do this just copy the programming statements at the beginning
and end of this book into your own and experiment until you find
the book you like. My advice is, if you you're not into
programming, DON'T CHANGE ANYTHING. This will give your book
the same look as ours. If you want you can look at other
formatting programs in the Shareware marketplace. We have
others that you can buy, write and request them, send along a
ten dollar donation and we'll send them to you.
You can easily do this by copying our book into your favorite
editor and then experiment and see what changes are made by your
experimentation. Again, if you're not a programmer, don't
change anything unless you have plenty of time on your hands to
correct things that you mess up!
The way this book works is that if you have an * placed beside a
word it will look up a topic that is defined with a : later in
the book. Keep it all in one long document. If you need more
read the IRIS.Doc file which you either already have or comes
with this disk.
The documentation that comes with Dart and Iris will tell you exactly how to do all this.
STEP NINE - ZIP IT UP
We also give you the program that compresses your finished file into
a form that will transmit over the phone lines faster. This saves
you time on the transfer over the phone lines and it also ensures
that the SYSOP gets your entire package, and that nothing is
missing. This is important.
If you already have a copy of PKZIP and PKUNZIP, and you know how to
use them, you've got this handled.
PKZIP is an excellent way to package your entire group of files into one compressed file. Then when your distributor gets the file, he merely unzips it. Look at our 'Readme' files so that you understant everything you need to in shipping files. This is a seemingly fine detail but the installation of your program is probably the most critical aspect of publishing electronically. PLEASE REMEMBER THAT.
If you're customer cannot install easily, he will give up and you've lost a potential customer forever. Make the installation as simple as possible because if anything can go wrong, it will be at this point. You've probably spent hundreds of hours preparing your work, don't let the final few minutes at your customers home or business wipe out all your work!
STEP TEN - YOU'RE READY TO DISTRIBUTE
Now that it's finally finished, you can distribute it to BBS's and
catalogs of software. If you order our kit, you will be given
hundreds of companies that are actively looking for this kind of
product. We give you names and addresses and phone numbers, even
people who will distribute your book for you all over the world for
a nominal fee. Our experience tells us that you want to get your
book onto as many sources of free advertising as you can. There are
approximately five thousand BBS's (Bulletin Board systems) in the
country. No one has time to distribute to all five thousand of them
and luckily you don't have to. Many of them will copy your book to
their system for their customers from some of the major BBS's.
However, the more you have your book loaded onto the faster the rate
of being copied to the rest of them. You will definitely want to
upload to at least the nation's top ten BBS's. We identify these
for you and you can rest with these because amongst them, they have
about three million subscribers. This should be enough to get your
started. Then, many other sources will copy from this source to
their own BBS.
After a brief few months for people to start downloading your work
and reading it and passing it on to their friends you can check your
Post Office Box for the orders and checks to roll in. If you've
followed our ten steps this will happen for you. The amount of
orders, of course, depends on how hot your ideas are. It is entirely
reasonable to expect that you will have dozens of orders per month
per project. As the population of computer users increases over the
years, this rate should increase to hundreds of orders. The more
successful projects you have, the more money you will make and the
more encouraged you will be.
Whenever you get discouraged, just remember this little fact. There
are over 100 million personal computers on desks in America alone
and they are selling 20 million more of them each year. People are
getting them for their homes and offices. They want to educate
their children as well as themselves and they want to be entertained
by these wonderful new appliances. Through this method of
distribution you can reach millions of these people and they will
make copies to give to millions more of their friends. THIS IS THE
KEY. You want them to copy your files. This is the highest form of
compliment you can get!
My own goal, at the beginning, was very modest. I only wanted to
make a decent living from my writing. I wanted about three or four
hundred orders per month for the total of my projects. I have
surpassed that now. I've only just begun. I will not rest until I
have enough income to hire people to handle the ordering fulfillment
end of the business. If you order our kit, we will update you with
a program that will help you keep track of customers and fulfill
their orders. You will need to print mailing labels and keep track
of your orders so that you don't lose any of them.
Don't worry about this yet. You have much to do in the way of
creating this little Empire first.
We've enclosed the editor we work with - Micro-Star. It's not
fancy, but it produces your book in a format that IRIS can read.
This is what you need. Make your files in a *.pge format. Then
load them into IRIS to read them and you will see what effect
you've had.
When you have mastered Micro-Star, you save the file, exit out of
MicroStar and call up IRIS. Just type Iris and optionally the name
of your file or call up IRIS and call up the book. Now you will see
what your book looks like under the reader.
Study this book for examples of how to use Micro Star. Basically
everything that you want to pop up or to be on the menu is called a
topic. You create a topic by beginning with a ':' and the name of
the topic. The colon must be on the left hand margin for it to be
recognized as a command by IRIS.
When you have finished making your book, copy the list of commands
at the top of this book into your own if you want the same kind of
windowing effect in your books. If you don't, you can program IRIS
to have many different kinds of windows. See the manual included
with the program. IRIS.DOC for instructions.
That's all there is to it. When you've completed your virtual book
and are ready to distribute it, use the database that we've included
of all the BBS and catalog distributors in the country for your list
manager. Make copies of your book on 360 KB diskettes and send them
out.
Now, before you spend a lot of money on postage and duplication, let
me give you some good advice.
The Librarians who decide what books to carry in their catalogs are
looking for the same thing we all want - saleability! They want to
list only books that are going to sell diskettes for them and you
want to get copies of your books into as many computers as possible,
so this is good for you too. What you want to do is give your book
to friends and associates for them to read and critique for you
BEFORE YOU SPEND MONEY ON DISTRIBUTION.
Import this data into your database manager and you can sort the
information on any criteria you like. I originally sent to twenty
BBS's just to test my work and they all liked it, so in my next
mailer, I mailed to 150 of them. You might want to try the same
strategy before spending lots of money. Remember, the feedback you
get is always valuable!!!! Don't ever take anything personally.
If you don't have a good database manager, you can order one from us
that will do the job nicely. It's only $10.00
If the BBS librarians keep getting junk from you, they will soon
learn to ignore your mail. So, please, for your own sake, make sure
that you have something that people will be happy to receive and/or
can make use of. As an example, I never spend the three hundred
dollars for duplication and postage until I'm totally convinced that
my program is bug-free, easy to use, and either entertaining or
useful to a whole bunch of people. If you don't go through the same
painful process of self-analysis, you're wasting your time.
Before you make copies of your files, you need to ZIP them up using
a program called PKZIP.EXE which is also included. Before you send
anything out for the public, test your zip files to make sure that
they unzip easily. IMPORTANT: YOU MUST UNDERSTAND THAT THE READER
IS NOT SOPHISTICATED AND IN MOST CASES BARELY KNOWS HOW TO TURN ON
THE COMPUTER. THEREFORE, YOU MUST MAKE IT EASY ENOUGH FOR A
TWO-YEAR OLD TO UNZIP YOUR FILES, OTHERWISE, YOU'RE WASTING YOUR
TIME!!!!!
Please read the above warning over and over until it's embedded in
your brain. We have a great deal of experience at this and the one
thing I am certain of is that you must consider everything that can
go wrong in the distribution process of mailing the files and then
having someone else put your files on their diskettes for
distribution to the rest of the world. Remember Murphy's Law. "If
anything can go wrong, it will go wrong!"
Anticipate all possible problems in disseminating your files and get
around it with simple batch files. I include 'GO.BAT' batch files
that have the commands embedded within them, so that my reader only
has to get to a dos prompt and type 'GO'. This kind of thinking and
planning is essential.
Remember to zip and unzip your files so that you can see how much
space they take up and if everything gets unzipped correctly so that
everything works correctly, especially, the order form printing. If
this order form does not print correctly every time, for your
readers, you're wasting your time.
I have included a program called QMCOPY.EXE that helps with the
duplication process immensely. You merely put unformatted diskettes
in your drive and QMCOPY copies your original to them and formats
them at the same time. This saves many steps in the process. My
philosophy is that you want everything to fit on a 360 KB diskette
because there are many millions of people out there with older
systems that cannot read High Density diskettes. Most BBS's will
only distribute on 360 KB diskettes anyway, but if your program
needs two or three of these, you increase the chances of some of the
files getting lost in the shuffle. KEEP IT SIMPLE!!!
When you're done copying your diskettes, make up a letter describing
your program to the Librarians who will receive them. Make a copy
for each mailer. Also include a blanket authorization for them to
market your work. I've included sample letters for you to copy.
I've also enclosed the name of the diskette people you want to order
diskettes and diskette mailers from. They are the cheapest I've
found.
MEI MICRO 800-634-3478
Now, here's the most important tip I can give you. If you are doing
this to make a profit, you must understand that the BBS distributor
pays you nothing for your work. Therefore, if you want to make a
return on your investment, you must have some kind of gimmick to
make the reader order something else from you directly. This is the
whole concept behind Shareware. Many people started off just like
you with an idea and a personal computer and now their companies are
listed on the New York Stock Exchange. It can happen to you, trust
me.
In order to make something like this happen, you need to either have
a great book idea or a great program that the reader will want to
order more of or upgrade from you. This is how you make money. Of
course, if you're only in this as a hobby, give the entire work away
to the BBS's and they will distribute it to millions of computers
and those people will make copies and give them to their friends.
Eventually your book could be in millions of PC's. If that's good
enough for you, so much the better.
But if you want to make money you have to do either of two things.
Take a lesson from all the TV shows out there. Make a book with a
cliff hanger ending. Make it so tantalizingly good that the reader
is forced to order the second part from you.
The other method is to give away an entire book and have a catalog
of other books at the end so that if they want to order more of the
same thing from you they can. This works if you make it easy
for people to print up the order form. We've included a routine
at the top and end of this book that you can modify to your own
purposes and copy so that the reader can easily print up an
order form and send to you. Use the Catalog we've enclosed for
ideas.
Unless you can claim to being a very good programmer, DON'T
CHANGE ANY OF THIS STUFF BECAUSE IT DOES THE CHAPTERS FOR YOU
AND EVEN PRINTS AN ORDER FORM FOR YOU.
THE ONLY THING YOU WILL WANT TO CHANGE IS THE ORDER FORM TO
REFLECT YOUR OWN ADDRESS ETC.
I guarantee that if you have a good catalog and if you are a good
writer, you will make money at this. I am doing very well and I'm
finally a success with my writing. I make enough now to support
myself and my family, a lifelong goal. I have no doubt that
paperback publishers will get wind of some of my work and make me an
offer that will make me even more successful.
LET'S TALK ABOUT MULTIMEDIA ONE MORE TIME!
Now, finally a discussion about another way to go only after you've
experimented with the above process. When you master selling your
ideas in the IRIS format, you may want to begin formatting in a
graphics format. IRIS does not use graphics. It's the program of
choice because in the early 1990's when this was written, most
computers are not windows based. Therefore, you do not know if your
readers will have a monochrome monitor, a CGA color monitor, an EGA
monitor, or a VGA monitor. When you create something in IRIS,
every one of these systems can read your book, this means there is a
bigger potential market for your product.
In the Mid 90's, however, this is going to change, and most people
will have made the switch to Microsoft Windows as their operating
environment. This is the perfect environment for virtual books, and
when you get to this point in your career, write us and ask us for
details about authoring in this environment. We have a product out
already that is composed in a program called Toolbook from
Asymetrix. It's the easiest and fastest of all authoring systems
for Windows. By the time you need it, we will have a kit that
includes Toolbook and instructions about how to distribute Windows
based Virtual Books.
This program is expensive and we currently sell it for $350.00, but
you also need the Developer's Kit for Toolbook. This gives you a
Runtime license to sell your program to unlimited numbers of people.
IRIS is a Shareware program, and there is no license fee, another
reason we use it. The Runtime License and Developer's program is
another $400.00. So, this is why we encourage you to develop and
perfect your skills in the DOS environment with IRIS. The next
step will be to convert your programs to the Windows environment
later when you can afford it.
There are already about 100 million pc's out there. Ninety percent
of them are DOS based. But Windows is the fastest selling program
outside of DOS and therefore within the next few years, the demand
will slacken for DOS programs and increase steadily for Windows
programs and you will need to learn how to develop in Windows. The
good news is that using Toolbook is fun and easy to learn and you
will have success in selling into this market if you learn the
basics that I've given you so far.
That's all for now. You're free to copy any of the routines you see
in this and in our other books. Experiment until you learn how to
use them, we've developed them all to increase our marketability.
You will want to do the same and even develop some of your own
ideas. If you get stuck, contact IRIS directly. You may want to
register the program. It's only 20 or 30 dollars and the support
you get is well worth it. But you now have everything you need to
create and sell your 'Virtual Books'.
Good Luck
UFO PRESS
P.O. Box 7885
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Good Luck.
The editors.
One last tip: K.I.S.S. (Keep it simple stupid!)
GLOSSARY
"upload them"
When you upload a file, you merely copy it over the phone lines to
the electronic database such as Compuserve. Compuserve has
currently almost one million subscribers. There are others like
Genie, Pc-Link, Exec PC, The Source, Delphi, etc., who also have
another several hundred thousand subscribers. By 'Uploading' your
files to these services, you make them available to millions of
people and THERE IS NO CHARGE. Why? Because these services know
that the more files they can offer their subscribers the better off
they will be. It's like having access to all the magazines in the
world and being allowed to publish your articles in them so that
millions of people can read your work, FOR FREE. Now, these people
don't pay you for your articles and so you have to have other
strategies for making money. We will tell you all about that later.
HOTwords
Hotwords are very useful for any kind of instructional material or
where you want to emphasize a concept separately from the rest of
your book as we have done here. It's an excellent way to make up an
instructional book, for instance, with different hotwords for more
advanced readers. It can also be used any number of ways.
KEY
By this I mean that you should understand that even though you are
giving away a great deal of your information, you should be prepared
to sell portions of it to your readers. You want millions of people
to get a portion of your work because if it's good and valuable,
they will want to buy more from you. This is the same concept that
got the shareware industry off the ground a few years ago. Many
companies like Norton and Buttonware got their start by giving a
shareware version of their software and then asking that their users
send in a registration fee which entitles them to upgrades and
telephone support. These two companies now sell millions of dollars
per year to their loyal customers. AND there are thousands of more
success stories like this. This is the same concept that we are
using but for information that you create without being a
programmer. The market for this kind of information is at least a
hundred times greater than the market for software programs alone.
This is the key concept!
*
:hotword
THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF A HOTWORD. YOU MOVE THE CURSOR TO THIS PLACE IN THE TEXT AND ANOTHER EXPLANATORY WINDOW POPS UP RELATED TO THE HOTWORD.
