Internet Radio
2016
Launching your own online radio station
on Kindle
and 'in print'
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 mighty work - around 77,000
words and was designed as a reference work as well as an educational read.
The reaction has been very good - and we know of several who have
launched stations with the E-Book's help.
It
is difficult to gauge the response of 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 you need to do so on a large scale otherwise the costs (for
short runs) quickly escalates until the actual cost of a book goes well beyond
what most buyers will be willing to pay for a title.
The
size of this book for a Kindle was around 350 pages, and to print and bind up
1,000 copies used to cost about £50 a copy, so we decided to go with the
initial publication being as an eBook.
Many
people are convinced that this digital route to publishing 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 them are about cookery, or children's stories, such as the
highly successful Harry Potter series but there is still a good market for
popular books. But a book will
only ne successful if sufficient marketing is done and the title is of interest
to the public. You can have the best book in the world, but if no one
knows about it, then it simply will not sell.
Where can I read E-books?
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.
Similarly,
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 guide to the content of such radio books.). 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!
Internet Radio 2016 - now IN PRINT
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 £25 24.50 in fact, which includes post and packing!
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 despatched almost immediately and in your mailbox by tomorrow!
