Welmer

Although much has already been written on this subject, I still think it’s important to remind the bloggers and readers in my audience about how media is changing. Most of what we hear and read in what remains of the fourth estate is a lament for the decline of traditional media, which from my point of view isn’t all that lamentable. I am not particularly worried about what happens to newspapers and magazines because so many more opportunities are opening up for those of us whose voices would have been excluded from discourse prior to the introduction of online and digital publishing. Although there was never an absolute media monopoly on information, it certainly felt that way due to the advantage newspapers and large publishers had with their economies of scale.

In addition to greater access, eventually the democratization of media will have a positive effect on the quality of content. Of course, there will always be sites and independently published material that resemble the “pulp” of throwaway literature that has been around since the beginning of print, and they will in all likelihood remain the most popular, but the breakdown of consolidated sources of information will buck the trend toward trying to appeal to everyone. As every popular blogger I’ve come across writes or practices, one has to identify one’s audience and stay faithful to it. Lately, this has resulted in a lot of sites oriented toward profiteering that have a motivational speaker feel to them, but even these popular personal success blogs do have some good lessons to impart, the most important being that people who make a living by blogging do it mainly with their content. The motivational bloggers have found that moneymaking schemes are a popular subject, and therefore they can support themselves by selling motivational content. Subjects such as philosophy and poetry will naturally have much less mass appeal, and therefore the number of bloggers who can successfully draw in a lot of readers with that material will be those who are truly good at it rather than old hangers-on at newspapers and magazines or the errant children of the wealthy.

However, even popular bloggers have found it difficult to “monetize” their blogs. Readers do not care much for ads, seeing them more as a nuisance than anything else. One has to wonder whether it is really worth alienating one’s readers with obnoxious advertisements, and whether the majority of people who spend a lot of time online are actually inclined to respond to them at all.

What I have noticed is that those who are most successful online sell their own material. Not only successful bloggers, but businessmen who make a living online all have a product to sell. If you are selling barbecue sauce online, obviously you want to blog about barbecue — how to cook your meat, what wood to smoke it with, best cuts, etc. If you have a successful blog about fishing, you might want to sell your own bait, rods or lures on your blog. Really enjoying what you write about is a great selling point, because your own enthusiasm and fervor adds credibility and does enough to advertise the product without having to resort to deception.

Like a lot of people who spend time blogging and reading blogs, I am a fairly compulsive reader, and I like to read just for the sake of gathering information. This makes me a fairly easy target for publishers, and I will buy books online if I like what I see. Therefore, I was excited to find Morris Rosenthal, a publisher who makes a living by selling books online that teach people to self-publish. His site, Foner Books, offers a wealth of information for the aspiring self-publisher, and I would highly recommend that anyone who plans to make money selling books online spend some time going through his essays on self publishing and selling books online. He explains Print-On-Demand (POD), ebooks, profit margins, marketing and a number of other important considerations. Despite his relatively low-tech site and no-frills approach, Rosenthal has had considerable success in his endeavors.

Online publishers now have a lot more tools at their disposal, but also have more responsibilities than writers did in the era of mass media. In fact, in some ways it is as though we have gone back to the time when the writer and the printer were often one and the same, like Benjamin Franklin, who started in the printing business before becoming an author of some repute. This would tend to favor those with some technical skills, but as Rosenthal has demonstrated with his Foner Books site, the requirements are far from heavy, and one can always count on the true programmers to come up with fixes for just about any problem one might find.

As newspapers and magazines lay off their editorial support staff in an effort to streamline and become competitive online, we will see that their reporters are usually no better than your run of the mill blogger without significant editorial assistance, and this will further accelerate their dissolution into the wider pool of content producers. Once again, we may find ourselves in a country where one does not need to jump through hoops for years to reach out to readers, but instead needs only a sharp wit and the motivation to spread the word.