Is Your Product For Your Customer - Or For You??
Kind of a silly headline, but not really.
As you know if you’ve been reading for anytime at all, my biggest thing is research. To a fault, actually, because I’m often stuck in the research mode and forget to move onto the actual doing mode. However, this time I jumped directly into the doing before the research. What a dope!
It started when I picked up a public domain tool. Public domain, if you don’t know, is information available to be used without limitation because copyrights and patents have expired, whether because of time passed or no action taken by the rights holder. It’s a tremendous resource for anyone interested in information marketing. One very famous use of public domain material is that of the The Secret. Rhonda Byrne built a billion-dollar empire that started with a reworking of the 1910 book, The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace D. Wattles. So you can see the power of this.
Anyway, I got the tool and was looking around the Project Gutenberg site. Their mission is to make all the public domain material they can available on the web. It’s an amazing collection, and it’s growing daily. I was looking at the top 100 downloads and came across The Encyclopedia of Needlework, and I was stunned. It’s over 600 pages of information, and it has more than 800 illustrations to go with it. Wow! I decided that I needed this, and that I would organize it and sell it.
I downloaded everything, spent a few days on formatting and getting a table of contents with links, to avoid the need to scroll through all of that to get where you wanted in the book. It’s beautiful and I love it and nobody seems to want to buy it at eBay.
In my own defense, I did do a little research on eBay. There are physical copies of the book that do sell, but apparently the sales have more to do with buying an antique book than with getting the information. I did not do any research outside of eBay. I still haven’t, to tell the truth, but I’m thinking I won’t find a lot of demand for the product. Oh well…
One thing that was reaffirmed in doing this work was how much I love OpenOffice. It’s an alternative to Microsoft Word, and is a free program. I’d used it before, but it’s a huge program and I had to remove it from my old computer. Now that I don’t have a problem with disc space, I’m using it as my word program. But the really incredible thing is how easy it is to use to write books. A number of the features mimic those of a wysiwyg html editor: I can insert images and have them stay put, links are easy to add, and it’s just generally fun to use. The help section can be a little funny (a geek’s take on the problem doesn’t always match the way I’m searching for an answer, but so far I’ve been able to find what I need). It’s certainly no more difficult to work through than Microsoft. The crowning feature is that you can save your work to .pdf with a click of a button, and all your stuff stays where it’s supposed to stay (pictures, boxes, links, etc.).
Oh, and did I mention it’s free? Completely free! I’m using it instead of Word and haven’t found a single thing lacking, certainly not for my needs.
All right. Moral of the story is that you really do need to research your ideas to see if there’s anyone out there willing to pay money for what you want to share. And try Open Office.
Enough for today. Be well.
