Urging Authors to be Entrepreneurs: iUniverse CEO Kevin Weiss (Part 5)

SM: From a writer’s perspective, one of the biggest issues is marketing. If you are an author without an existing platform, how do you market your book, aside from to your friends and family?

KW: That is the biggest complaint that writers have. We will launch something focused on author marketing by the end of the year. It is not easy – you have to really invest the time. A lot of people think that they just need to get listed on Amazon. It is definitely not that simple. We have to create tools and tips for authors. What we are doing now is creating templates. Authors can find some for different genres on Wordclay. If they want to write a story of their life, there’s a template to help. The more we encourage people to write, the better we are all going to be. We are not going to satisfy our investment community if we get people to write in a free offering and they buy just one book. I want to use the template approach because it is good for everybody. There are more people writing today than reading.

SM: What is your strategy with regards to India? That is a big reader market.

KW: India is a challenge from a distribution perspective. I have seen how they sell books in India, and I don’t know how to get to the guy who lays out 300 books on a street corner. We’re in advanced talks with a publisher in India to OEM Wordclay and re-skin the entire application for them. We are going to use them as our entrance to the market, and penetrate that market with partnerships.

SM: There is India Book Distributor, the largest distributor in the country. You have to find companies like that to do deals with and find your entrance to the market through them.

KW: I may need to come back and talk more with you about that. I don’t want to go somewhere where there is no skill.

SM: What is your financial story? Where are you revenue-wise, where are you in terms of profitability?

KW: We’ve spent an enormous amount of money getting this DIY publishing platform implemented this year. We are in the midst of a multi-million dollar investment in core technology to build the world’s most state-of-the-art publishing solution. We’re doing it on SalesForce.com, built on Force.com and all the core front-end applications. That will go live in July. Those two things have put us behind the 8-ball in terms of profitability.

SM: What are you trying to do with the SalesForce.com platform?

KW: We are using it as the workflow engine to create an entire infrastructure system that will allow the publishing of books in an automated way. The ability to move a piece of work from manuscript submission right to the final piece, with all the interface points such as editorial, design, review, and use of Internet-based technology, is all being built on SalesForce technology.

I would have done it again the same way, although perhaps not as fast. We are way out on the edge here in terms of what we are doing. SalesForce has terrific technology. For us it creates a platform. I am not going to buy every self-publisher out there. However, because I have the lowest cost of delivering services in the United States, I will start offering my services to competitors. This will help them remain competitive, and I am fine with that. There is a cap to how much any of us are going to be able to charge. Services will never be high margin. I just need to make sure we have a fair profit for the industry. We just want to use the SalesForce platform to remove costs on back-end infrastructure, so that I can spend money on people who can spend their time helping and interfacing with authors.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Urging Authors to be Entrepreneurs: iUniverse CEO Kevin Weiss
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