Borders Personal Publishing Beta Test
Borders Books new concept store in Ann Arbor has several innovations. My next book will be part of a Beta test for one of those innovations, Borders Personal Publishing Service. http://publish.bordersstores.com And I would like you to be part of this test. I want the readers of my blog to suggest things to cover or questions to answer in my next book, “Free. How to Thrive in the New World of Abundanceâ€. When the book is published I’ll be making appearances at Borders to talk about Predictive Innovation & Abundance.
Borders Publish Yourself allows you to have your book printed and listed for sale at every Borders store plus others such as Amazon and even Barnes and Nobles. The books are printed on demand through Lulu.com, the leader in on demand publishing. I’ve already published one book using Lulu. The great thing about all of this is how quickly you can complete a project. Instead of waiting months for a traditional publisher to print your book Lulu can print your book the same day and ship it to you overnight. This is exactly the reason I used LuLu to publish Ron Paul Revolution: History in the Making. The content was fresh and it needed to get out while the topic was hot. As a result I beat Ron Paul to market with his book.
Low upfront cost. Traditional book publishing and even self publishing services required printing thousands of copies. Print On Demand allows you to print as few as one book. This fits very well into the long tail. Now that people are able to publish books that might not have large audiences those books can now be sold. The market goes from 0 to 100s and maybe 1000s. Perhaps your market is bigger than you imagined. Until you can get it published you will never know. Abundance makes things possible that weren’t before.
Borders Publish Yourself offers three levels of service plus a selection of individual services.
| Service | ISBN | Standard | Premium |
| ISBN Registration | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Interior Page Design & Formatting | No | Yes | Yes |
| Free Proof Copy of Your Book | No | Yes | Yes |
| Self-Publication Guide | No | Yes | Yes |
| Editorial Evaluation | No | No | Yes |
Action Items
Ron Paul Viral Marketing Success
Ron Paul is winning popularity portion of the united States presidential election. He consistently speaks the truth and does what he says. And lucky for Ron Paul the truth makes a lot of people so happy they sell his message for him.
I pioneered viral media on the web. And have since moved beyond viral to a broader more accurate term, evangelism. Its clear Ron Paul has a lot of evangelists. All of his success is from normal people spreading the message all on their own.
Part of my research on viral / evangelistic marketing is what the trends mean and how to get the results you want. Looking at the trends for Ron Paul and the other candidates I see some very striking results.
Google Trends is accurate unbiased data on what real people actually care about. According to Neilsen/NetRatings 232 million Americans use the Internet. That makes Google Trends the largest most accurate measure in the world.
First, Ron Paul (dark blue line) has more searches than than any other candidate. Plus his searches is continually growing. This is suggestive of real wide spread support. There are 7.7 million pages on Google for Ron Paul.. That is almost 4 times as many as Mitt Romney. Ron Paul has more pages about him, which confirms support not just interest. There are other measures I use and will explain those in future posts.
Romney (orange line) has no real support. You can see this from how his traffic jumps then immediately falls to nothing. He depends on events to get any interest. If Romney was a company I would short his stock. His advertising works but Romney is a bad product.
Hillary Clinton (the red line) is suffering from the same problem as Mitt Romney. She gets big spikes but people don’t like her and try to forget her as soon as possible. Even with a huge budget and over 16 years of national media attention there are only 5.8 million pages talking about her. And much of that is criticism. Hillary Clinton is the political equivalent of Paris Hilton. She gets attention when she does something insane but loses popularity every time.
Barack Obama is in bad shape. Notice that he got a big jump when he announced he was running for office but his traffic has consistently gone down. With only 2.8 million pages and downward trend Barack Obama he is far behind the leader, Ron Paul. The fact Obama doesn’t get any new jumps means its unlikely he will gain any support. He could linger around for a long time but will have a hard time getting new attention. He is played out.
My Suggestions
Hillary has total name recognition. Since people react so negatively she can’t really benefit from Evangelism Marketing without doing something very different. With her long track record she would face the credibility issue if she tried to be different. She depends on spending huge amounts of money and favorable treatment from the big press to get attention.
Romney is dead in the water. He needs to find something unique that he actually deliver. Unfortunately that would require going back in time. He can’t deliver anything unless elected.
Obama can make it to the election with his current trend. He needs to find a new audience, which is unlikely since he already had a huge jump in the beginning. If he offers something new that might get more attention.
3D Print a House
There are so many elements to this article that I need to break it up into a series.
Just last month on the Interactive Technology radio program I mentioned 3D printers that can manufacture things on demand. I also pointed out that China needs houses and the Detroit auto industry needs new markets and suggested Detroit pre-fabricate houses for China.
Now I find an instance of the 3D printer designed to make buildings.
And I find someone making a 3D printer to make more 3D printers.
And you can make your own 3D printer for $2400. And this is their project Wiki for the open source 3D printer.
I am very excited by the development of 3D printer technology. This makes new innovation easier and quicker. The open source 3D printer makes this technology available to more people and empowers them to be innovators. More people with access to this technology mean more perspectives on innovation leading to more, better and faster innovation.
And this new technology that is moving 3D printers past prototyping and into manufacturing changes work from physical labor to mental. Design is now the only work needed.
“Khoshnevis believes his contour crafter will revolutionize building construction, dragging it into the digital age. Today, despite the advent of tech tools like power saws, mechanized cranes, and pneumatic nailers, construction is essentially the same tiring, gritty job it has been for 20,000 years. Workers still have to cut, grasp, hoist, place, and fasten materials, which is why labor accounts for about half of a building’s cost. The process is dangerous, slow, and wasteful: More than 400,000 American construction workers are injured each year, and a typical American house takes at least six months to complete, generating about four tons of waste.â€
Everything he says is absolutely true. Unfortunately the entire structure of the industrialized economy depends on people working to get paid. If people don’t need to work then they won’t get paid. That is very bad. This doesn’t mean this type of technology won’t catch on and it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t catch on. It does mean huge disruption. Disruptions of this type typically are resisted with violence and that harms everyone. I hope to spread the ideas that I discovered to make these innovations a win-win-win.
