Author Of 'Sex' Book For Married Men Wants Ideas On Better Business Models

from the jump-in dept

Over at our Step2 platform, author Athol Kay, who's written a book called The Married Man Sex Life, is asking for some help with his business model. He's been struggling a bit with the question of whether or not infringement is a serious problem for his business model. I first became aware of Kay when Marc Randazza pointed me to a blog post by his associate, J. DeVoy, claiming to be a perfect example of how individuals were hurt by infringement. Except... almost none of that was true. It was in response to Kay being fooled (like many others are) by bogus torrent search engine stats that imply that anything that you type in has been downloaded thousands of times. Kay admitted this error (and bizarrely, DeVoy has not updated his post with a correction), but Kay is still concerned about his business model, and how infringement might impact it.

After talking to both of us, Randazza put Kay and me in touch, and encouraged him to try out my CwF+RtB concept, rather than looking at litigation. Kay agreed to present his business model question on the Step2 platform to see if the community here might help him. He's already got some interesting ideas in place, including coming out with an updated version of the book each year, and then dropping the price of the previous year's ebook version down to $0.99 from the usual $9.99. As I discuss in a response to his question, I actually think the $9.99 itself is limiting, given the research we've seen on ebook pricing, which suggests the sweet spot for ebooks is under $3.99 -- below which many, many more people seem willing to "take a chance" on a book they don't know that much about. But I still like the idea of market differentiation through force-depreciating the older version of the book, while offering up additional value each year.

But, there's a bigger question here about business models, and what else an author like Kay can do to try to build out his career as an author and "expert" in this particular field. I have some ideas, but I'm sure folks here have some thoughts too, so I'll just point everyone to his discussion at Step2 and see what you guys have to say.

Filed Under: athol kay, business models, ebooks