Cyber LawBrett Trout (ISBN 978-1-934209-71-4) is an excellent booka very talented writer. Cyber Law is a major success story for World Audience Publishers, and after reading just a few chapters, anyone can see why!
World Audience’s goal is to be a driving force in the changing business of book publishing, which is being brought abouttechnology. Cyber Law specifically deals with how law is both shaping and trying to keep pace with the Internet. Cyber Law covers its subject in a clear and entertaining manner. It is thus a perfect fit for our press, and Cyber Law’s success bodes well for this press’ vision and goals. It is useful to study how the author approaches his subject and then apply that knowledge toward this press’ pursuit of its vision. It is vital that the authors World Audience publishes have a good understanding of blogging, for example, to market their books, and Cyber Law explains this subject and many others in great detail.
Cyber Law was published in September, 2007, shortly after our press began publishing books. It is a wonderful example of how desktop publishing, print-on-demand distribution, and our press work. Though we have enhanced our operations in the past 2 years, our core model is largely unchanged. We are efficient, and our business model has little overhead. A publishing team, separated geographically, worked online to publish Cyber Law. The author, in Iowa, worked with the book’s editor, Kyle Torke, who lives in Colorado. The final file was then sent to me, the publisher, in New York, and I formatted it into a book using only Microsoft Word. I then sent the file to our artist in Liverpool, England, Chris Taylor, to design the cover with the help of the cover image suppliedanother artist. I then created the final filesconverting the MS Word files to PDF with the use of a Web application that cost approximately $13. I set up the title (with the information that can be viewed at Amazon.com or related retailers) at our printer, Lightning Source, and then uploaded 4 PDF files: cover, back cover, spine, and interior. It took me about 1 hour to do the technical component of providing the files to the printer.
Cyber Law is one of our best-selling titles, and sales increase steadily each month. As publisher, I consider the sales growth of Cyber Law to be an indicator of how sales of a book can develop and the growth of our press, overall.
I am faced with a seemingly unanswerable question with each book I publish: what makes a great book? And what defines a great book in the first place? Perhaps the fact that I ask this question every time drives the press I run in the first place. To complicate further, the answer or answers to this question are changing because publishing itself is changing. This fact has dramatic impact on certain players in the industry, even as many of those players choose to ignore or avoid the reality that not only is publishing changing, but the answer to my question above is changing, too. In other words, the values helda previous generation are not my values as a “21st century publisher,” operating primarily online, nor is what makes a book great the same.