User Forum
Steve Carlson of Upper Access Publishing and I (Ron Lawrence) have started a conversation about how we might help independent publishers make better use of information technology in promoting their businesses. There is a wave of new internet-based tools that are being touted as the new way to reach your market. Since we are in the IT business, I feel we owe it to our user community to provide some guidance in making use of these new tools; but frankly, many of these tools are new to us as well.
So, we decided to make our journey public. We hope that we offer a powerful combination: Steve has a wealth of experience as an independent publisher. I have been working with him for close to twenty years--lending a background in database and web development skills. We have further enlisted the help of Ryan Meravi, a representative and key player at Power Shift--our Web Hosting service. Power Shift is actively engaged in providing many of the tools we are about to discuss. But perhaps the most important component in this offering is our user community. We invite you to join us in these discussions. Please, sign up for an account, and offer your thoughts, your questions, and your expertise.
The following are some of the topics we hope to explore:
EBooks: What should your offering look like?
EDI: What is it? What should you be concerned with?
ONIX: An international standard that will help introduce your books to the world.
SocialNetworking: Which tools do you use? How do you best spend your time using them?
Web 2.0: What is it? How do you make the most of it?
PubAssist Features: How does Publishers' Assistant fit in? What are you looking forward to?