One of the advantages of publishing your book as a webbook is that you can get your book published in basic form and then can steadily improve it. I would be the last one to advise you to publish something that isn’t up to high professional standards. But once you’ve published a well-written and well-edited book as a webbook, you can continually revise, enhance, embellish, and add to it with great convenience. You simply revise webpages, one at a time.
For instance, a well-designed cover is a necessary marketing tool for a printed book, but it’s not absolutely essential for publication on the web. You can publish your book as a webbook with a simple cover page: the title in an interesting typeface against a contrasting color background. Now with your webbook up and running with its plain cover, it can start to develop some SEO and get off to a good start. Then when you start promoting the book, part of the promotion will be coming up with a good cover design and rendering the design in different aspect ratios to be used for marketing in various places on the web.
It doesn’t make sense to promote your book without a good book cover image or an icon for your book, but while you work on your book cover and promotion, your webbook is already up and running and building an audience through your initial SEO.
Another example is adding diverse media. If you will add diverse media to your webbook as an enhancement rather than as an essential part of the book, you can do so at your leisure after you’ve published the webbook text. For instance, note the technique Authoritative Voice as outlined in Chapter 31 in Publishing by Voice. The voice-bites that you record for the beginning of each chapter don’t have to be there the day you publish your book as a webbook. They may be a valuable addition to the webbook, but the webbook can stand alone without them. Therefore, you can add the voice-bites later.
Another example is for travel writers. When you write a travel book, you will want to include some nice color photographs. And you should do so in the initial publication of your webbook. Nonetheless, you have the opportunity later to go back and supplement your initial photographs with the addition of many more photographs.
If you are going to use affiliate advertising to create a revenue stream for your webbook, you don’t have to do it before you publish the book. Publish the book without the affiliate marketing to enable it to get a good start on SEO. Then add your affiliate ads later. Adding affiliate ads in the appropriate places in your webbook is a substantial task. And it always requires some rewriting of your text. Although this is something that would be ideal to do before the book was published, it makes more sense to do it after the book is published because you can test its effectiveness as you do it.
If you place a comment box at the bottom of each chapter, you will get comments from your readers. Some of those comments will be the correction of typos. Others will be useful comments on the content of the chapter. You may want to use such reader comments to revise the chapter, and it’s quite easy to do so with a webbook.
You may have plans to go the whole 100 yards to have your webbook be a masterpiece of text and diverse media. If you go the whole 100 yards before publication, however, you may be fully committed to a webbook that’s a bust. It might be a better strategy to get out the essential media such as the text plus color graphics to determine whether there’s really a market for the webbook. If the response to the webbook looks promising, you can move forward with your plans for adding enhancements and diverse media.
Finally, you might be happy to publish a webbook with just text and little bit of diverse media. But when you get an unexpectedly good response to your webbook, it may inspire you to change your strategy. You can add supplements, new chapters, diverse media, and all sorts of other enhancements because you have a proven publishing product that’s worth working on.
The only thing I would advise is that you don’t carry this idea too far. The book is a definite block of information that a user (reader) can wrap his or her mind around. If your webbook is successful and you decide to add a lot more to it, you are well advised to think through the implications of what you’re doing. If the book becomes too large in scope, it may start to resemble a specialized encyclopedia. And people don’t like to read encyclopedias. They like to read a limited amount of information that they need or in which they’re interested. Thus, there is a danger that in expanding your webbook, it will become too much for your readers. Don’t try to make your book infinite just because you can do it. Keep it definitive.
Indeed, for digital publishing it makes more sense to break up a large book into smaller books than to expand a book into a version that covers too many topics.
Serial
Charles Dickens would love this idea. He wrote many of his novels in serials in the newspaper. A chapter a week, a month, or whatever. You can do the same with your webbook. You need to have your serialization planned ahead of time and have your promotions working in overtime as each chapter of the series appears.
You might also consider using affiliate advertising creatively. For instance, if your promotional plan is powerful enough, you might want to get a sponsor for each chapter for the first year the chapter appears. In doing so you will expect the advertiser to also independently promote the chapter sponsored.
Summary
The fact that you can simply, conveniently, and immediately revise any portion of your webbook or add to it at any time enables a whole new way of looking at the webbook as a special type of publication. Or to put it more bluntly, an ebook cannot begin to provide all the creative possibilities that webbook publishing opens up to authors and publishers.
