Online Radio 2016
book now in print
21 July 2016
Earlier this year I published a book called "Internet Radio 2016". It tells readers what's needed and where to find everything that you need to set up and run your own Online Radio station. It is a huge work - around 77,000 words and was designed primarilly as a reference work as well as an educational read, so it can be read like a novel, instructing readers in a logical way how to build and then launch their own radio station.
The reaction has been very good - and we now know of several who have launched stations with the E-Book's help. It is difficult to gauge in advance what the response will be to niche books such as this. My previous books have sold up to 10,000 copies but this one, . . well, perhaps we are expecting not quite so many! To print and bind large numbers of books is very expensive and a publisher needs to do so in big numbers to benefit from the economies of scale otherwise the costs (for short runs) quickly escalates. Anything under a thousand copies and the actual cost of a book rockets to beyond what most buyers will be willing to pay.
The size of this book for a Kindle was around 350 pages; to print and bind up 1,000 copies would cost about £50 a copy, so we decided to go with the initial publication being solely as an eBook. Many are convinced that this digital route of eBooks is the future of book publishing, although if you look at any crowded book store any Saturday afternoon, you will see there are still tens of thousands of books being sold every week. Most of the books sold 'over the counter' are about cookery, or children's stories, such as the highly successful Harry Potter series. There is however still a good market for popular books, if sufficient marketing is done and the title is of wide interest to the public. Marketing is the key however: You can have the best book in the world, but if no one knows about it, then it simply will not sell. And Marketing costs REAL money!
Advantages of eBooks
E-Books are more versatile than the printed editions, as you can incorporate audio and video recordings into them as well as web links to other sites for more information. You can read an eBook via any device with a screen: a desktop computer (Apple Mac or Windows, they work on all types), laptops, tablets (such as the iPad) or even Smartphones. And of course the many Kindle based devices, including the Amazon Fire.
One huge advantage with eBooks is that the reader is able to vary the size of the print to suit you eye's capabilities. It’s so easy to increase the size of the print, which makes for a really easy reading experience.
Book Prices
The average price of general radio books, the semi-autobiographical ones, is from £10 to £25, and the more information, technical and academic books that impart knowledge, etc, sell for about £30 to £45, as anyone who has had to buy text books for university courses will know!
We decided to pitch the "Internet Radio 2016" book in its printed form at £25 or so. By removing a lot of the logos and using a slightly smaller text size we have been able to trim the size down to 280 pages and the cost to just below £20 - £19.81, and that price includes post and packing! Similarly, book pricing is just as important as availability. We studied the few books that are available about radio stations, and the number is not huge. (There is a section on them in the Internet Radio 2016 book; the Bibliography includes a short guide to the content of such radio books.).
So, in answer to those who want a hard copy of the Internet Radio 2016 book, its now available, either via bookstores (who take a few weeks to stock such specialist items) or via AMAZON's excellent mail order service, which can get YOUR copy into your mailbox by tomorrow.
http://amzn.to/29SjuAl
Happy reading!
PS. The eBook version is still available in the Kindle Store for less than £7, via this LINK.
