Current location:	The Nerve Center (aka my office)
Current mood:	satisfied
Current music:	"Rude Mood" by SRV
Entry tags:	blogs, secondary income, word of the day

The Countdown Begins . . .

The excuse du jour.

Yesterday I created an "official" blog for our publishing operation. ("Official" means that it is innocuous and upbeat, unlike this blog that is an equal mixture of desperation and venom/contempt.) The big question now is: how many more days will it take before it is officially approved so that we can link to it from our offiicial publishing site? (There is, of course, a whole long back story here concerning the so-called channels by which things like this can be okayed.) I sent the link to the various powers-that[-shouldn't]-be yesterday. I can tell from the email properties and traffic tracking at the site that they've all taken a look at it. Any word from anyone? Of course not. Thankfully my current boss is hip: unless someone has actively complained to me by next week he said to go ahead and link it to our publishing site. You go, guy! I'm glad someone like him is around to egg me on. We had a big presentation by the school's president last month about how we need to be radical thinkers who think ourside the box yak yak yak and that if it isn't immoral, illegal, or unethical and, as well, MAKES money, then go ahead and do it. So there it is.

Blogging is, of course, what is called new media marketing. (Mainly that seems to mean internet-based applications that try to be interactive and build community.) You see a lot of authors with their own blogs to try and keep interest going in them and their work and build their audience . . . hence, the blogs of Michelle Brooks and Stephen Graham Jones I linked to earlier this week. For our part, though, I couldn't see that anyone would necessarily care about the publisher as opposed to the writer. But, the most potentially interesting aspect of this is the Amazon Associates program. That is, once you register with the Amazon Associates program they will send you specifically tailored code so that if you have a link to one of their products from your site and someone follows that link and buys the product, then you get an 8.5% referral fee. And, since I already wanted to list the reference books we use with thumbnail descriptions, this is a perfect match. Will it ever generate any significant money? Not at all. But, much publishing income--and often times the ultimate profit margin--comes from a combination of secondary income sources like this. (Another recent example would be when we licensed the foreign rights to one of our books to a publisher in India for a $1000 up front plus 10% of sales for the next three years.) So, once again, there it is.