As you can see I am building a new website. I am hoping to make this website feature rich, while also making it fast and secure. The goal with this effort is to own another potential marketing channel. I believe in the importance of owning versus renting. If a person uses an exclusive website to publish their book and uses that platform’s tools to market the book, they don’t really own the book. They own one product in one rented instance. That means that the rent can go up, the platform could change its rules, and many more things. This has already happened to me several times and I am tired of building on shaky ground. My hope is to build up my own website, my own mailing list, my own promotions, so that I can truly own my destiny. I believe that fully owning your sales chain, from production to repeat sales, is a stronger strategy for the long term.
There is short term risk with this move though. The main book platform, which requires exclusivity, has the majority of the market. That means that in order to build my own sales chain, I may sacrifice short term profit. That’s going to be really tricky to do. Still, the name of my effort is ‘long tail writing’, which is about building a writing platform that will last for a long time. My personal hope is that this is something I can relish in during my twilight years. I want to look back at all this effort and go “I am so glad I did that”. I think the key to that isn’t just a single trick or short term gain. I think the key to that is human connection and bringing value wherever I go. I think that if I can build a platform that is really useful, that will have a more lasting impact than simply grabbing the easiest cash and running.
