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Have you every stared at your computer screen while reading an e-book until you just could not focus your eyes anymore? Have you ever wished you could reach up to the screen and jot a quick note in the margin? Do you find the speed of downloading an E-Book satisfying but the lack of a physical book limiting? There is a solution that is easy, inexpensive, and fun!

Bad Ways to Print an E-Book

E-Books are a wonderful invention. I have dozens of them on my computer and PDA. But some books just need to be printed. In the past, when I came across one of these, I would print it out and staple the corner or punch holes in it and stick it in a bulky 3-ring binder. Printing one page per sheet of paper seemed wasteful, so I got fancy and printed out all of the odd pages, flipped the stack and printed out the even pages. That cut my paper useage in half.

Later I learned that Adobe Acrobat Reader (the software that displays PDF e-books) lets you print more than one page to a sheet of paper. It will shrink 4 or 8 pages of your book and print them onto one sheet of paper. A neat trick that saves paper, but I was still carrying around a stack of paper and the text got very small and hard to read. What I really wanted was a book, but I did not think I could make one on my own. Not true!

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A Simple Way To Create A Paperback Book

Turning an e-book into a paperback book is a surprisingly easy and inexpensive process. With a few simple tools and supplies (my first book was made using paint stirring sticks, 2 cotton swabs, and some cheap office binder clamps) you can create a 5.5″ x 8.5″ trade paperback book.

The most complex part of the whole process is printing out the book. You can either print each page to a full size sheet of paper, printing all of the odd pages first and flipping the stack to print the even pages on the back, or print the pages in booklet format with two pages printed on each side and then fold the printed sheets in half to create a booklet of 4 pages. In order for the pages to be on the right order when the sheet is folded, they have to get swapped around in a process called Imposing (as in “Imposing a new page order.”) Special software is required to do this, but there are options available for around $100. You can also purchase your paper at a copy shop and ask them to cut it in half using their heavy-duty paper cutter. Then you will not have to deal with paper folding and still get the advantages of a smaller book.

Once the pages are in order you can clamp them together along the spine and glue them together. After the glue dries, you can create a cover out of heavy cover stock paper, fold it to wrap around the book, add more glue to the inside edge of the cover, and assemble the book. I usually let everything dry overnight and have a good strong paperback version of my e-book ready the next morning.

E-Books Are Not the Only Books You Can Print

Since I learned this technique I have bound over a dozen books. With a little creativity you can create books with glossy color covers that are hard to distinguish from a store-bought book. You do not just have to limit yourself to printing e-books. If you have a manuscript you have written, it is easy to set the page formatting in your word processor and print our your own book. No need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars for a print shop to make you a pile of books, print them on your desktop.

There is no excuse for squinting at your computer screen anymore. Print out your favorite e-book and turn it into your favorite paperback! Visit my bookbinding tutorial for a step-by-step demonstration of the process with photos.

The Go-To Guy!

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My most recent failure cost me $4.46. I couldn’t be happier. For the price of a Venti Latte at Starbucks I was able to market test a book idea and drop the project before investing major time or money in its development. There just wasn’t enough interest in the product to turn a profit – I discovered this BEFORE I had even written one word.

Market Testing Before Product Development

Have you ever worked for a company that was trying to market solutions in search of a problem? These types of products are usually created by teams of people who brainstorm ideas, pick the one they like best and start creating it. They miss an important step: Finding out if anyone wants or needs their product! Welcome to the realm of market testing.

I’m full of ideas. A lot of them are brilliant – in my mind! Even if I can persuade a few people to agree with me, it’s still a shot in the dark trying to pick a project worth of investing time and money in without market testing.

I do not have a background in product development or marketing – I went to film school! My strengths are coming up with ideas and making stuff. But, I want to create successful projects. I want people to fund my film ideas. I want to be successful, not just busy. The big question, when assessing my book idea, was how to test the concept without going broke or earning a marketing degree first?

Market Testing With Google and a Little PHP

While scouring every book and website I could find on building online busnesses and making money online, I came across an e-book on making money building niche content websites with Adsense ads. It is not an earth shattering subject, the author explained a very practical process for identifying target niches and building sites to draw traffic. In the middle of explaining how the Google Adwords and Adsense programs work he mentioned, as an aside, that running and Adwords campaign would be an excellent and cost effective way to market test an idea! Bells started going off in my head. I made a note to use this idea.

Fast forward a few months and I found myself listening to a 2-part podcast by one of my favorite bloggers, Yaro Starak. The topic was developing and selling e-books for big profits. The guest, Daryl Grant, spoke in great detail about the system that she and her husband were using to develop and market profitable e-books. One of the steps was to conduct a market test using Google Adwords and what she called a ‘survey site.’ The familiar sound of bells started ringing!

I examined Daryl’s sample survey site and set about designing a template for testing my own ideas using a similar process.

The Adwords Market Testing Process – 8 Steps to Success

The process itself is very straight forward:

1. Pick a product concept to test
2. Create a survey page that promotes your proposed product and has feedback mechanisms
3. Write several ads for your product idea
4. Start a new Adwords campaign
5. Select relevant keywords and set prices
6. Upload your ads
7. Run a 3 day test of your ad campaign
8. Evaluate your results

Picking your product. This is where your personal genius comes in. You have to think of some product (e-books are my initial target) that you think others would want. This is a whole seperate discussion. As an independant filmmaker I thought it would be great to have access to interviews with 10 filmmakers, like me, who had created profitable movies. I’m always interested in these types of interviews in magazines and thought that a book focussed on this topic would interest others. 10 filmmakers spilling all their secrets.

Creating a survey page. The survey page is version 1.0 of what will later become your product’s sale page (if it is successful, that is!) Let people know that the product is not available yet, but sell them on it. Write copy designed to excite them and motivate them to purchase. If you are grammer challenged, get someone to edit your copy for you (if you don’t know any editors, consider a service like OnlineProofReaders.com.) Now, make sure there is a feedback form for them to send you comments and suggestions, and a way for them to join a mailing list to get updates.

The first part is just copywriting and basic web design. The feedback form and email sign-up will require a bit more work. I used a basic HTML form on the survey page with a little Javascript to validate the email address. I then created a second PHP page that processed the form data, sent an email to me with the users name, email, and comments and, if they requested updates, submitted their information to my email list management software.

Now that I’ve created this survey site, I can just tweak the copy for each product I want to test. I’m not much of a programmer, but I got it all setup in about 2 days.

Write ads for your product. Sell your product. Write your ads as though the product is available today. Don’t say you are conducting a test, sell! visitors will find out about the test once they click over to your survey page. You want at least 2 or 3 different ads with slightly different editorial approaches. Adwords will tell you which ads generated the most response, so this is a way to start testing your ad campaign while testing your product. Knowing what people respond to may also help you shape the editorial slant of your product. Here is a sample of two of my ads:

Resist the temptation to just write something fast, but try not to over think things either. If the idea is viable, you will spend a lot of time later optimizing and testing your ads for maximum response rates. The goal here is only to get a fair assesment of the products viability.

Start a new Adwords campaign. If you don’t already have an Adwords account, now is the tie to sign up. It will cost a few dollars to get your account activated. Start a new campaign and follow the prompts to set all of the main parameters. Set the campaign to run for 3 days. This should be enough time to gauge performance. If your test is on the borderline of success, you might extend the test a few more days to get a larger sample of responses. But, remember, the goal is spend only as much as you need to to validate the concept.

Select keywords and prices for your campaign. There are several books on my free e-book page that discuss how to select and test lists of keywords. The Adsense Mint gives an excellent tutorial on the subject (it is focussed on finding high cost keywords for Adsense websites, but the techniques and tools discussed work for this purpose.) Coming up with a good list of keywords will improve your chances of success. You want to identify what topics your potential customers might be searching for and you do not always want to use the obvious approach. Sometimes a group tangential topics will connect with the right people, and cost you less money.

For my campaign I did not just try keywords focussed on things like “filmmaking book” or “interviews with successful filmmakers.” I looked for “film festival listings” and “independant film distribution.” Filmmakers trying to sell a film would be looking for those keywords and might be very interested to read how others found success.

Upload your ads. Enter your ads into your campaign. Google has hard limits to the number of characters per line, so you might have to make some adjustments if you have to much text. Once your ads are in the system, Google will take care of dividing up the visibility of each one.

Run your test. This step is the easiest. There is nothing to do but wait – and repeatedly check your campaign statistics every 5 seconds!!! Try to find something else to distract yourself (am I the only one with this problem?)

Evaluate your results. When your campaign ends, look at the number of clicks you got. Total up the number of email responses you received. Check them against your targets. If you are close, you might want to test a little longer (or wait a few days and conduct a second test.) If you exceeded your numbers, start creating that product now! If you missed, test the next idea and be grateful that you didn’t waste any time creating a product that isn’t profitable. Notice I didn’t say it was a bad idea – just not profitable. It might be the perfect hobby project to work on after you start raking in the money with your profitable projects.

What are good targets? Daryl Grant says that she looks for an overall response of 500 clicks per day. She also looks for 5% of the visitors to be motivated enough to leave feedback or sign up for more information. If you reach or exceed these numbers, you have a winner.

Pay careful attention to how much it costs you to get clicks. You should plan for 1% of your visitors to make a purchase. That means you have to pay for 100 visitors before you find 1 customer. If it costs more reach those 100 people that you expect to earn on each sale, you have a problem. Daryl recommends that your costs for each customer should not exceed 1/3 of the income from your sale. For an e-book selling for $34.95 that means the total marketing cost should not exceed $11.65. Divide that number by 100 clicks and your top cost-per-click comes to $0.11.

$0.11 is not a lot of money, so you need to check your keywords carefully and study the market to determine how much you can charge for your product. You may need to bundle in other items to increase the value of the package and get your income per sale high enough to make the numbers work. Throw in plenty of bonuses too so your customer feels they’ve truly gotten their money’s worth.

Bonus Tip Always try to capture the email address of the people who click through to your sales page. Give them a free taste of your product or offer them a special report in exchange for their email.

Every time you get permission to add someone’s name to your list, you reduce the cost to market to them again. Over time you will have a large collection of people who will grow to trust your advice and recommendations and who you will not have to buy access too.

My Test Results – A Hidden Bonus

My idea is a big dud! I got a dismal response of 25 clicks and 0 comments over the run of my ad. There does not seem to be much pent-up demand for my filmmaker interview book (and I really wanted to do this project!) But, the price of my failure reveals a hidden bonus in this product market testing strategy.

The beauty of the Adwords pay-per-click system is you only pay when people click on your ad – no clicks, no charge! I only had to pay $4.46 to find out that this idea wasn’t going to work. The worse your failure, the less money it costs you. (Conversely, if you spend a lot of money on the test you have got a moneymaking idea on your hands.)

Traditionally, if you took an ad out in a magazine or newspaper it would cost you the same regardless of your results. Joseph Sugerman, direct response genius and author of the book Triggers: 30 Sales Tools you can use to Control the Mind of your Prospect to Motivate, Influence and Persuade, writes about how he used to roll out his ads in regional publications first before buying space in more expensive ones. He would even run 2 or 3 different versions to test refinements in the ad copy. The concept explained here is exactly the same, but much faster and more affordable.

Even if you are planning to market products in the offline world, use this system to run preliminary tests to weed out the lowest performing ideas before you put big money behind them.

I might go back to do some keyword research and see if I can find another angle on this book idea that might test a little better – maybe I should just let it go!

Let me know how testing works for you,

The Go-To Guy

Building a home theater? I just posted a new article on my www.ColossalTV.com website titled How to Make A Projection Screen.

Check it out and let me know what you think. I’d appreciate feedback.

The Go-To Guy

Do you know a lot of information but can’t seem to get focussed enough to write a book? This is one of my biggest problems. I start trying to write down everything that I think is important and before long I’m looking at pages of information that are as overwhelming as what is in my head.

This problem never gets in the way when someone comes up and asks me for help! When that happens, I can zero in on my audience and give the information that is necessary to answer their questions.

A visitor to this website recently asked me a few simple questions and I ended up writing a 780 word mini-article in response (rendered in 12 point Arial type on a 5.5″ x 8.5″ page – that’s 4 solid pages of text!) This lead me to my ‘ah ha!’ moment. (I’m sure I didn’t invent this, it just finally occurred to me.)

The 20 Questions Book Writing System

This idea couldn’t be any simpler. Recruit one or more people who would benefit from the book you want to write. Ask them to provide you with 20 questions on your topic that they have always wanted answered. Steer them to ask big picture questions rather than detailed ones.

When you get the questions back, sort them into a sequence that makes sense to you. If a question is too narrow, try to make it more general and group together related topics into sections. This list is the chapter structure of your book. Now it is time to get to work.

Answer each question with a 5 or 6 page response that is directed toward your audience. You are on your way to a first draft of your book. I recommend creating your document in the same physical format as you envision for the final format. I have a 5x8_book_template in Microsoft Word format that you can download and use as a basis for your project.
Give your answers back to the people who provided the questions and have them review your responses. Ask them to give notes about anything that is unclear or extraneous.

Revise your first draft using the notes you get back from your question team and then start looking for experts in your field to submit chapters to for professional feedback. (Do not send them the whole text, just the chapters that are focussed on their specific expertise.) These are also the people you will want to approach for promotional blurbs for your book cover, front matter, and promotional materials. (Thanks go to Dan Poynter for this strategy.)

Revise your book using the notes provided by your subject matter experts. This draft should be a fairly well developed manuscript. At this stage it is a good idea to hire a professional editor to edit your book for spelling, grammer, consistency, and style. You may chose to go it alone, but a good editor will give your work a level of polish that is hard to do by yourself. If you don’t know any editors, a service like OnlineProofReaders.com can help you locate one.

Next Stop, The Printing Press

Once you have your manuscript is done, it is time to decide how to publish your book. You can create an e-book, submit it to publishing houses and agents, or go the self-publishing route. (If you want to pursue a traditional publisher, you should consider submitting your chapter outline – the list of 20 questions – and a sample chapter earlier in the process. If they want the book, this may be enough to get a contract.)

There are lots of layout and design issues to consider before your work is complete, but you have a book now!

I have been wanting to write a book on video lighting for independant movies for a while now. I asked a good friend, who is planning his own movie project right now, to help me with my 20 questions. I’m also soliciting questions on my indie film blog too! I expect this to be a useful strategy in my writing endeavors.

The Go-To Guy

I know a guy who needs to stream video from his blog for users. I searched your blog and did not find anything.It’s a 12 second video in MPEG format. What’s the best way to stream video? Should it be in a particular format?

This question came to me recently from a reader. As an online information consultant, my initial answer to the question is, “it depends.”

There is more than one way to put video on a blog. The blogging software or service you are using will determine what type of code you can place on your pages and whether there are special tools available to facilitate the process. (If you want a quick step-by-step without the details, scroll to the bottom of the page.)

I use WordPress for this blog and have a plugin installed called vPIP. It assists me in generating the code required to embed a file on a web page and works with Quicktime, Windows Media, and Flash video. I enter the address of the video file and a placeholder graphic, select a few options, and click on the ‘Generate Code’ button. I copy the code, paste it into my web page, and I’m done – but the video is not streaming! What???

There are two types of video delivery available on the web: Progressive Download and Streaming. Behind the scenes there is a big difference how they work to get a video delivered. But to the user, the results are nearly identical.

Streaming Video requires a special streaming server to handle the delivery of the video files (it costs significant money.) Streaming means that the video is displayed as it is delivered. Other than a small amount of buffering, the video is not stored on your local computer. If you want to rewind the playback, the server resends the video. The Streaming Server also monitors the connection speed and can adjust the playback quality and frame rate up and down to maintain the playback rate (if you have ever watched a video that suddenly freezes on a frame, but the audio keeps going, you’ve seen the effect of this.)

A key benefit of streaming is copy protection. The complete video file is not stored on the users computer so it can not be copied and redistributed.

Progressive Downloads don’t require a special server. When a user watches a Progressive Download, the media player begins downloading the video file and storing it on the local hard drive. The player gets a headstart on the download and starts playing the video before the download is complete. If the connection speed remains good and the playback doesn’t catch up with the download, the video will play uninterrupted to the end. Since it is stored on the local hard drive, the video can be replayed without having to resend data from the server.

The key benefits of Progressive Downloads are that it is cheap and the playback quality is consistent once the video is downloaded.

Most likely you will find yourself using Progressive Downloads. The sample video below is a Progressive Download Windows Media Format file embedded in the page via the vPIP plugin for WordPress. Just click the picture to start the video.

Play Windows Media version

So How Do I Put A Video On My Blog???

If you don’t have WordPress with the vPIP plugin, here is a good old fashioned way to code the video into your site using the Object and Embed HTML tags:

• Step 1: Convert Your Video to either Quicktime, Windows Media, or Flash format using your video editing software or a program like Cleaner.
• Step 2: Upload the video to your web server via FTP (if you are using a hosted blog and don’t have FTP access to your website, you may need to find a seperate server space to store yuor video files. You can also use a service like YouTube.com to host your video.)
• Step 3: Modify the sample code below with the web address and dimensions of your video file
• Step 4: Copy the code and paste it into your webpage

Sample code for Embedding a Windows Media File:

<object width="260" height="320" type="application/x-oleobject" standby="Loading Microsoft Windows Media Player components..." codebase="http://activex.microsoft.com/activex/controls/mplayer/en/nsmp2inf.cab# Version=6,0,02,902" classid="CLSID:22D6F312-B0F6-11D0-94AB-0080C74C7E95" id="MediaPlayer1">
<param value="http://www.yourdomain.com/videofile.wmv" name="FileName" />
<param value="false" name="animationatStart" />
<param value="true" name="transparentatStart" />
<param value="false" name="autoStart" />
<param value="true" name="showControls" /></object>

If you have problems placing code into your blog pages, first check to see whether your content entry tool is modifying the code when saving. Most blog tools strip out tags and may require you to wrap the HTML in a special set of tags to prevent filtering.

Notes: When setting the dimensions for your file, remember to account for the size of the playback controls. If you don’t, they will overlap your video and cover a portion of it (some of the Flash control styles are designed this way and are semi-transparent.)

Also, there are two entries for the filename and dimensions in the code. One in the <object /> tag and the other in the