If you have ever thought about writing a book, and actually got to that stage beyond the dream and investigated what is necessary, you will know what a daunting task it can be. Your best romantic novel or sci-fi epic or whatever needs lots of time to create a plot, storyline, build the characters and so on, all before putting a single pen to paper – figuratively speaking of course.

In other words, the creative side of writing comes long before the actual act of ‘doing’. And even then, you tend to leap around a bit as while you are typing (or dictating) as other ideas pop into your head and can cause some plot twists and turns. This means that you have to be very careful with continuity (Inspector Plod finds a Nike trainer footprint when 60 pages back the villain has been described as being barefoot).

Much harder is the creation of a technical book; there is far less creativity, but much, much more attention to detail needed. Quite a few years back I was asked to write a book for IDG Books Worldwide for their Bible series – around 700 pages worth. The money was good, the subject matter I knew intimately and I had the time and inclination.

Would I do it again? Well after nearly two years, and two rewrites later because of version changes in the software during the project and even a sabotage attempt (I kid you not!) I swore blind, never again. The money I made and the grief and stress over that period was just not worth the effort in the overall scheme of things. However, I confess, when you get the very first copy of the press in your hot little fist, you do tend to think “it wasn’t THAT bad ...”. And you get certain bragging fights by being allowed to call yourself an “author”.

A trend these days is to self publish. The advent of the Internet has brought about this possibility to a large degree, as printing can be done anywhere, and there are many companies that will do small print runs local commercial printers won't touch. The drawback that is often overlooked here is that of marketing. It’s all very well having the product creation made easy(er), but unless you sell it, then it is (mostly) a pointless exercise apart from the aforementioned satisfaction of calling yourself author.

Bill Jelen hopes to give away 5 million low-res versions of this e-book

One neat model for this I have come across is indeed a technical book called “Learn Excel 2007 From Mr Excel”. I was introduced to this book via the “Lab with Leo” TV show on the How To Channel on Foxtel. It is a serious tome dedicated to Microsoft Excel 2007 and shows you how to do things I had never even dreamed the program could do.

The model to sell the book however is interesting (accepting that gaining access to TV is a bonus in this case). The author, Bill Jelen a.k.a. Mr Excel, has a goal to get 5,000,000 copies of a low resolution, desktop e-book version to people for free. From there, they have a choice of downloading a higher resolution version or a print-ready version, or of course, buy the physical book. Details are at http://www.mrexcel.com/learnexcel2.shtml.

It’s an interesting concept and it remains to be seen if this method will pay for itself in the sense that people will later pay for the upgraded version. A similar proposal was tried recently by the band Radiohead where their latest album was a download only and you, the buyer, decided how much you wanted to pay. Despite the thought that most people would just say “bugger it, it’s on the ‘net so it should be free” and simply download the files, it turned out the average price paid was US$9.
If you think about it, this is a little like the much vaunted music piracy. Many, many moons ago, in another life, I was a PR manager for one of the largest record companies. While the “official” stance was that piracy was bad, bad, bad, in actual fact, it was known in a large number of cases – very large – those that pirated records off their mates to cassette bought the physical album later as they wanted the original. Sure a percentage didn’t and these were mostly those would never have bought one anyway – music magpies so to speak – but I suspect this same model will work for Mr Excel and others who follow the model. The only trick, as always, is getting it out there that you have done this.

Like this blog has in effect!