Q. What inspired you to write your book?

In the late 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century magazine publisher were experiencing a lot of anxiety having to do with the changes in our industry from print to digital. As a consultant my background was print but I was getting involved with some of the people on the cutting edge of digital and saw that many businesses were actually ahead of publishing in implementing the wide range of online opportunities. That seemed wrong to me. As media, we should be in the lead, over dating sites or carpet cleaners or any of the other businesses that were blazing new ground. Most of the so-called online “gurus” were ignoring the publishing business because of the business-to-business aspect of it. They were more interested in consumer markets. So I decided to make this niche my own, and I wrote the books to give a flavor of the vast world of possibility out there.  

Q.  What do you want people to take away from your book?

I’d like them to see the wider possibilities of internet marketing and SEO. Publishing has its own set of imperatives and they aren’t all the same as other businesses. You see sales sites and catalog sites that are trying to do things with internet marketing and SEO, but the challenges and opportunities are different facing those of us in publishing. And we have resources that other online businesses can’t begin to match.

Q. What did you learn from writing your book?

Writing these books led me to develop a concept called Online Audience Optimization. It’s SEO for content brands—SEO on steroids. It includes maintaining a brand consistency throughout all ones SEO and SEM efforts, and it draws in all the resources that rich content brands can provide.

Q. What’s the best thing about writing?

It helps one develop and solidify one’s own concepts; also it’s fun!

Q. What’s the worst thing?

When you’re done you think about all the things you should have put in the book but left out. Also unless you keep re-writing the book it locks the ideas into a specific point in time. The book doesn’t reflect all the new things coming along. On the other hand, when I go back and flip through my older books I’m surprised at how much I knew back then. A lot more is the same than has changed, and I’m sometimes astonished to find “new” ideas and approaches articulated in books I wrote years ago.

Q. What’s your next book project?

I’m working on a novel—watch for it!