Create Long Product Lines from Victorian and Earlier Public Domain Information

People in Victorian and earlier times spent much of their day reading and so publications of the day were usually printed on much bigger pages and had far higher page count than today’s magazines. This means you will often find books from the 1800s and very early 1900s contain hundreds or thousands of pages and sometimes millions of words.

So you find individual books from the period are just perfect for turning into dozens of different products, which you can develop and sell as a line of related products or as separate publications.

Consider craftwork books, for example, created for Victorian ladies who spent much of their day knitting, embroidering, doing crochet, which were usually massive publications containing hundreds of individual craftwork projects.

Find books like these – very easy on eBay and locally at craft fairs and flea markets – and you can republish those hundreds of projects in one new volume or, better still, republish patterns and projects individually.

Publish items individually and you’ll find a happy customer for one pattern from the book is likely to buy from you again and again, and might even buy all of hundreds of different eBooks and reports produced from one original publication.

But there are other reasons to consider breaking a big book down into smaller components and they have to do with product download times and perceived value of downloadable products.

*  Very large books, in pdf format, for example, with lots of graphics, can take a long time to download, even on fast connections.  Customers with slow computers, and lacking broadband, may find themselves unable to download really big eBooks or they wait and wait and get frustrated and eventually give up trying.   Smaller books with fewer graphics, just sufficient to show the finished products with close up views of specific craftwork procedures, are adequate for most people and minimise download times.

*  Imagine, if you will, a 1,000 page eBook containing hundreds of different types of craftwork creations, and another with instructions for making just one item, each eBook with stunning cover and contents page and detailed graphics throughout.  Forget the product download time for a while and let us consider perceived value.   Your potential buyer is almost certainly interested in just one or a few patterns probably for just one craft, say crochet, or knitting.  He or she is unlikely to want all of the patterns in that 1,000 page eBook and may even consider the additional pages a hindrance to locating their special interest pages.  Some may even consider they are being charged for all that other stuff they don’t want and may not appreciate the bargain they are probably getting or that you’d probably charge the same price for one pattern as for a complete compilation.  Now imagine buyers choosing one pattern, getting a ten page downloadable report, and being immediately able to print out pages they want to work from today.  No time wasted at all!  And I dare bet most people will happily pay as much or even more for that one pattern than for the complete opus from which it came.  This is niche marketing, specifically tailoring individual buyers’ requirements, and allowing new customers to test you and your product and pave the way for you to grow a mailing list of customers for all the patterns from that one book and many thousands more available in the public domain.

*  Be careful choosing publications to create multiple products from one basic mother publication.  Essentially, the best books are those where individual chapters or sections are self-contained and can therefore be republished in individual sections without the buyer thinking something is missing from his purchase.  So a book about dogs, containing separate chapters for individual breeds, and no overlap between chapters, can be split into separate books for individual breeds.  The same might go for a history book with chapters focussing on individual eras, or specific towns and other geographical locations, particular people, and so on.  The breaking process if much less effective where individual chapters make reference to other chapters or leave too many questions unanswered.  A great example of a huge book that breaks wonderfully into individual eBooks is Vero Shaw’s ‘Book of the Dog’, in itself one of the best and probably the first book to describe and illustrate individual breeds of the day.  Each chapter describes and illustrates a specific breed and makes no reference to other breeds or other parts of the book.  I have created dozens of individual dog breed information products from that one book without changing a single word, and I’ve also sold individual artist drawn prints from that one book for dozens of different breeds.

*  There’s another very profitable  reason you should break bigger publications into smaller units which focuses on niche marketing and back-end selling. It’s a very good idea to include links in your digital eBooks to other products that might interest your buyers, be those items your own or someone else’s products.   It’s very easy to recommend more of your own products inside every title you create.  But just in case you run out of titles to create yourself from public domain information - FAT CHANCE! – let us talk about recommending other people’s products in return for a commission on all items sold through links in your unique information products. This breaking up of big books principle works well because the best affiliate rewards come from carefully targeting prospective buyers and choosing products that closely match their needs and desires.  The tighter the niche subject for your eBooks the easier it is to choose products your readers might buy. So you break the bigger books covering several subjects into much smaller products relating to one specific theme or subject.  Let’s go back to that big dog book, packed with information about many different dog breeds.  Imagine how much easier it might be to recommend an eBook about caring for a specific breed of dog to someone who has just bought information about that particular breed, than to find another book to interest dog lovers in general.  The fact is, the tighter the niche, the more passionate your buyer market is about their special interest and the more likely they are to buy whatever products you recommend.

*  Last, but not least, it’s much easier, and far less expensive, to sell to past customers than to constantly target new buyers for your products.  You need to attract regular buyers and the best way to do that is to constantly create and market new products based on subjects those people have purchased already.  Building a line of related products, from one or more publications, gives scope to back end sell to past buyers and grow a profitable database on which most publishing fortunes are made.