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What is a channel?
By admin | July 18, 2009
In the past, communication to the masses involved tuning into a signal that dispensed information. Over the years, we started to call these informational outlets, channels. It was expensive and complex to broadcast these signals, so great conglomerates of powerful people formed communication companies and invested a lot of money to make sure it would happen. To offset these costs the communication companies used advertising. It worked relatively well for everybody. The people received information, the communication companies made money on their investment by delivering subsidized content, and advertisers reached a great volume of people hungry for what they had to offer.
Unfortunately, one of the problems associated with this model was the dilution of content for consumption by a mass audience. Where there is a limited amount of channels or choices, individual tastes become marginalized in favor of what appeals to the majority of viewers.
This pattern is mimicked somewhat in traditional publishing. People want information and publishers have a channel to dispense this information via books. Printing books via traditional methods is expensive. Therefore, publishers use their channel to cater to the tastes of a majority of readers.
With the adoption of the Internet as a viable communication media, an interesting shift has happened. A shift that has many traditional media outlets running scared. There are many contributing factors to this shift, but three important aspects of it are:
- On the internet, publishing or broadcasting information is extraordinarily cheap and the tools to accomplish it are extremely powerful, relatively easy to use, and available to the average person.
- With almost unlimited choices, people are beginning to wake up from being told what they like, and instead are searching and choosing content for themselves.
- People are sharing this information with each other.
The combination of these three shifts in thinking has created something unique and powerful; the ability to become your own channel. Why is this important?
Traditional publishers need to feed a bureaucracy. In a traditional setting you might get 5% of every book sold; It is the price of admission to the publisher’s channel. The other 95% covers the publisher’s profit and expenses, the editing, printing, designing, marketing distributing, and selling your book. In order for the publisher’s channel to make money, it needs to sell millions of books. To accomplish this feat, your book must be generic enough to appeal to a mass audience. Often you are forced to make compromises in order to compensate for an overhead that has very little to do with your book. In fact you may have the world’s greatest niche book that a traditional publisher will not touch because it appeals to a narrow segment of the market. They will tell you this is “bad” when in fact it is “bad” for their dollar numbers, which they are trying to hit.
Becoming your own channel allows you to leverage the power of independent publishing on the web. For example, you may have a niche book about Victorian era, African American, steam-punk, buffalo soldiers who travel to the moon. This book may have a narrow appeal, but narrow is not none. By keeping your own overhead down and maximizing the profit from each book sold, which can be upwards of 60%, you don’t need to sell millions of books. (Although it would be nice!) You might find that selling hundreds of books more than covers your overhead and selling thousands of books gives you a comfortable passive income.
Becoming your own channel is not difficult. Many people already have a personal channel and they don’t know it. In subsequent articles I will write more about how to create and build a channel and how to use this channel to leverage the sale of books.
Topics: General Content | 1 Comment »
August 3rd, 2009 at 8:15 am
Well done, Administrator. Eagerly looking for the next installment. Thanks for the enticement.