So a while back a major book publisher read my ebook and said they loved it. They wanted to publish it & we went right up until the day I was supposed to get the contract with them saying that it shouldn't be a big deal for me to keep ebook publishing rights. On the last day they changed their mind on that front, and if I killed the ebook to make a print one it would likely kill the business model unless I started selling services or got big into AdSense & click pimping.

I may be able to segregate out the print book content stuff and the ebook content stuff and use the print book to upsell the ebook, but generally I am a bit uncertain as to what all should go in which.

My options are as follows:

• turn down the publishing house, continue as I have
• kill the ebook and just make the print book an amazing value for it's price
• kill the ebook and sell a monthly newsletter service
• try to add more advanced stuff to the ebook and maybe pull out most the for newbies stuff (but then it may be a bit hard for me to figure out where that line is)
• if I altered the ebook stuff in any way those who are in on the ebook free updates would get whatever else I did instead (although I probably could not afford to buy and ship thousands of print books, so that would be treated as a separate product on that front)

If I got published the upsides could be

• added distribution
• those who wanted a print version or cheaper price point could get my book in a format that is more appealing to them
• I would have more credibility / authority in the eyes of some
• I would learn about the publishing process (which in turn would make it easier for me to publish future books if the idea sounded / felt cool down the road)
• if the marketing worked synergistically then it would cause more flow
• updating this channel and ebook is exceptionally time intensive compared to the time required to run a network of lower effort channels. If I changed my business model (doing lots of affiliate work and click pimping stuff I would probably make far greater profit)
• if my ebook is pretty good then more people reading a print version would mean I could help more people

If I got published the downsides could be

• if I did not update the ebook any longer or took large pieces of it out that could piss off many people who bought it already (and I am not willing to piss off past customers to gain market share...as that is just bad karma)
• it would take significant time
• it could hurt the profitability of this site...since largely they would want this site to market the print book, and that could cause my added value higher priced offering to sell less
• creating multiple price points, etc. is not one of my strengths & I think the simplicity of the current setup makes it easier to buy
• print books have low margins
• another company would control much of my content
• there are already a number of print books covering the search space...I think most of them were printed to upsell services instead of another book or newsletter...am uncertain how much volume / demand there is for a print version
• my potential publisher is one of the book publishers sueing Google, and I am not sure I would want my book publisher to do that
• I have already sold more ebooks than the average physically printed book has sold. If I did self publishing or went with a smaller publishing house there would be added flexibility.

If my ebook was not my main source of income this would be a no brainer, but currently it is, and that makes the decision a bit harder.

I am not certain if I will say what I end up doing, but I like the idea of getting feedback.

Travel - one way to deal with search spam is to give more options at the top of the result set

Classifieds

Google Inc. has unintentionally provided a sneak peek at what appears to be a looming expansion into classified advertising - a free service that might antagonize some of the Internet search engine's biggest customers, including online auctioneer eBay Inc.

the classifieds looks to be a huge extensible Google database

To be honest, I normally think rather highly of Mitch Ratcliffe, but this anti blogspot spam comment is off the mark:

The solution to the problem it to click gratuitously and never make purchases on the links at blogspot sites and to keep doing so to drive down conversion rates. This likely will be interpreted as click fraud by the system and, if it isn't, the advertisers are going to be so angry about the costs of these clicks that turn into nothing that they'll drop the program or exclude BlogSpot from their placements.

What is the best that would come out of that? Spam blogs would quickly and easily be built elsewhere and bloggers would screw themselves out of any blogspot earnings?

Mitch continues in his comments

The problem is Google is too smart to listen to ordinary people about Page Rank, so we have to create a front where the message is clear and painful to the source of the revenue. If every blogger who gets a spam trackback or posting clicked 10 ads on those blogs for each incident for two weeks, we'd break AdSense in a way that couldn't be addressed by futzing with the PR algorithm, so Google would actually have to pay attention to us.

Bloggers are well known for openly abusing the PageRank algorithm, so that suggestion in and of itself is nothing but humorous.

The problem isn't PageRank (as most of the garbage sites rank better in Yahoo! & MSN). The problem is the strength of Google's ad network and complete lack of enforcement of legitimate publishing quality standards. This is about my 30th post on the topic and the A listers still haven't figured out the real issue.

While people are bitching about the lack of AdSense site quality Google is making it openly clear that they are willing to accept just about any site in the AdSense network (accepting one page sites and delivering ads for as low as 25 cent CPM).

Can you believe bloggers are openly suggesting click fraud? Who will be the first blogger to recommend automated click bots?

Skaffe has $2 submissions for the next 2 days to celebrate their 2 year anniversary.

"They really need to fix the search engine, and that seems like that's a March quarter event," he said (while shaking his magic 8 ball).