Using Internet publishing to drive book and freelance sales

About six years ago, wine critic Natalie MacLean discovered that text-based e-mail was an efficient way to share the articles she published in regional magazines with colleagues and friends. Thanks to the grassroots nature of the Web, that small group of people began to forward her e-mails to other interested wine buffs until the demand for her current and archived articles became big enough to launch a website, Nat Decants (www.nataliemaclean.com). Now, paired with a sophisticated newsletter 60,000 subscribers strong, this heavily-trafficked, multimedia-friendly and database-rich website has helped her to foster a dedicated audience that extends around the globe.

MacLean credits this online community with both enabling her to increase her opportunities in print and for creating a built-in audience for her new book, “Red, White and Drunk All Over.” With the fresh perspective of her recent excursions on a book tour, MacLean chatted with OJR about the ways the Web has created a synergy that expands the voice of this successful, independent wine critic.

Online Journalism Review: Like many independent online journalists, you started your career in the print world. How did the Web become an important medium to expand your audience and distribute your work?

Natalie MacLean: When I was [exclusively] a print journalist and many of my articles appeared in city-based magazines, friends and colleagues who didn’t live in the that particular city couldn’t read the article or buy the magazine on the stand. I retain the copyrights to my work, so I started by e-mailing about 25 folks the articles, which they would forward. Soon there were 200-300 people who were getting these articles, just through text-based e-mail.

OJR:So what point did you realize you needed to maintain your own website?

MacLean: About a year out, when people who joined [the e-mail list] started asking how can they could get all of my previous e-mails. So every time someone joined, I’d be sending 30 e-mails, to pass along all the back issues, so to speak. I thought this is getting silly; I better archive these somewhere, so that’s the birth of the website.

OJR: Do you have any technical knowledge, and did you design the site yourself?

MacLean:Yeah, at first I was doing it because I used to work for Silicon Graphics in California and my focus was the Internet. I loved HTML but I’m no wizard and my skills quickly became very rudimentary compared with where websites were going. It wasn’t long before I hired a webmaster, then things just kept evolving. The newsletter kept growing, the website’s content and functionality kept growing, and I started using forms to sign up for the newsletter.

OJR: Why do you think that niche topics such as yours do so well online?

MacLean: That’s [a reference to] the long-tail theory from Wired Magazine. I just love that theory. There are probably millions of wine lovers out there from all around the world and the brilliant thing is that we find each other on the Internet. So I get stories from wine lovers everywhere, from the night nurse at the emergency ward in Saskatoon to the water reservoir manager in Tulsa. [I’ve heard from] someone in Afghanistan who is making wine in his basement- I think it’s illegal! The Internet is efficient, and it’s also–I put this in quotes–cheap. It’s not cheap to make a good-looking website and to have forms that work and links that don’t go dead, but still I could never reach all of these people in print, cost-wise or time-wise.

OJR: You have a distinct, humorous tone to your writing that makes something as daunting as wine selection more accessible to those of us who aren’t sommeliers. Does your writing voice change online? Can you adopt an even more casual or conversational tone?

MacLean: Yeah I think so, although I know 78 people whom I call “Wine Lovers for Better Grammar.” They e-mail me every time there’s a misplaced comma. It’s like this giant editorial board. So it’s that contradictory thing of being relaxed and at the same time having an obsessive level of attention to detail, which is fascinating and helps me clean up my work in print.

OJR: You both write and edit your work, so how do you ensure accuracy when you source and cite information? You’re saying your readers call you out, and not just on grammatical mistakes–

MacLean: But on other things too, yes. They’ll correct anything. I once wrote an article about kir royale—a drink where you infuse any champagne or sparkling wine with the liquor Cassis–that has a black currant flavor. The black currants are famous around the Dijon area of France in Burgundy and I had misspelled a street name. Someone from Dijon contacted me and said that street is close to where I live, and it’s spelled this way.
I get far more corrections online so the feedback has been far more powerful than the print feedback.

OJR: What tool do you use to distribute the newsletter and what does it tell you about who your audience is and how to engage them?

MacLean: It’s called GotCompany.com. It’s a front-end tool and a back-end tool. I think the interface, the aesthetics look beautiful, but really the power is in the database and the reporting tool. It will tell me how many people have opened my newsletter and I can also see who has clicked on what link.

OJR: Can you tell anything about the user demographic?

MacLean: I can tell what topics are most interesting to people by the open rate and which links are most interesting to people. I stay pretty high level, but it’s only because of the time I have to devote to this sort of thing because I have a full-time journalism slate of jobs for print and then I’m just coming off the book.

I do find it synergistic. Every column I write in print, at the bottom there’s a tag that says for Natalie’s free newsletter, visit nataliemaclean.com. Then, of course, I use the newsletter to help sell the book, then point the book to the website, so I make sure that they’re all linked all the time. These days–especially if you’re trying to sell a book–you have to bring the audience, your readership, with you. [Book] publishers [tend to] spend very little on marketing, so you’re the one who has to develop your readership and then keep communicating with them. If I can’t pump out a book every year or two, at least I’ve been communicating with my readers [online] every two weeks in the interim and I hope they’re around the next time a book comes out.

OJR: Your site offers a modest selection of streaming audio and video. How do these multimedia elements advance the functionality of your site?

MacLean: I think people love to watch TV clips and listen to radio interviews, and people [who visit my site] are clicking on them. It’s an expensive form of information because I have to pay for extra bandwidth for no real monetary return. But now I’m starting to post video and audio clips that are interviews about the book.

OJR: So it also becomes a marketing tool–

MacLean: Yes, absolutely. To me it’s part of a multimedia-rich site, and that’s what I want to provide to the best of my budget and the best of my ability.

OJR: You actively encourage user feedback throughout the site. How do you deal with the volume of response and maintain this intimate relationship with your readers?

MacLean: Well, I get a couple of hundred e-mails a day, but a lot of them are questions that I get over and over again, so I’ll refer people to my FAQ. I think it will get to the point where I can’t [respond to everyone] because I have to earn a living and write my columns, but I like the feedback. I encourage it and welcome it and it’s helpful so I try my best to respond to people.

OJR: How do you select which articles you feature on your website or include in the newsletter?

MacLean: I’m more global in my approach. Now I think about which topics will I take on in print that can be repurposed, so it affects what I choose to write about in print and get paid for. In the past, I selected topics such as best restaurants in Ottawa that are really only relevant to people who live in Ottawa. Now I’m more likely to choose a topic like how to choose from a restaurant wine list that everybody can relate to, no matter where they live.

OJR: You run some Google ads, but otherwise ads aren’t featured prominently on your website.

MacLean: It [earns] three bucks a day for Google ads. That won’t even buy cheap wine! I’m going to look at adding advertising in the next year for related products and services that I think are reputable. I won’t be personally endorsing them. It will be clear that they’re ads and I’ll have someone else handle the booking, payment and invoicing so if a winery wants to advertise, I’m not the one negotiating ad rates while they’re also sending me bottles to review.

OJR: Finally, can you recommend some ways to choose a great holiday wine?

MacLean: Sure! All of my wine picks are on my website. It’s also a matter of your budget and whether you like wines that are full-bodied, medium or light. Develop a relationship with a knowledgeable person at your local wine store and ask what they’re excited about. Also, you can buy a mixed case of 12 within your budget and experiment. Try a new one each time you want to crack open a bottle and I’m sure you’ll find at least two or three that you really like.

Q&A with Work.com editor Daniel Kehrer

Suppose your blog or website has garnered some journalistic credibility and engages a steady audience, so now you want to know how it can earn you a living, subsidize your income, or at the very least, pay your hosting bill. When and how does your blog or site become a business? How do you attract advertisers? How should you keep track of money spent on content, function and design? Want to optimize search results and drive traffic to your site? As an independent Web publisher, can you manage it all–editorial, accounting, advertising?

Utilizing the Web for small business solutions is an obvious resource, but a basic, unguided search can yield an overwhelming and extraneous amount of information. A recently launched website called Work.com aims to focus those results by publishing and updating how-to guides that illustrate tangible and practical solutions. An offshoot of the successful search engine business.com, Work.com is both an internally-rich content site and a search directory, continually updated and ranked accordingly. The current offering—around 1100 guides–covers topics on everything ranging from developing a business plan and establishing a business account to obtaining a business license and tax id number.

We asked Work.com content editor and syndicated business columnist Daniel Kehrer to take OJR on a basic tour through the site, and explain some of ways that it can help independent web journalists who need a crash course in business management.

Online Journalism Review: Who’s writing the Work.com guides?

Daniel Kehrer: When it first [began], we launched a huge effort to create a thousand of these things, so we hired 70 or 80 freelance writers all over the country to work simultaneously at a rapid pace. Now we’ve toned it down, so we still have a small core of freelance writers working on a paid basis. We also have people showing up on the site because they want to share their expertise by writing guides. Then we also have experts in various fields writing specific guides.

OJR: For the users who are writing guides, how do you ensure that information is factually accurate?

Kehrer: People come in and write the guides and we do an initial rating, and then [the work.com community] will also rate people, so the guides that are bad will fall out the ones that are good will rise to the top. But initially everything gets read by the [editorial department].

OJR: Before it goes live?

Kehrer: It actually goes live but we look at it really fast and so if something is just not up to par, we may e-mail someone and say, hey we looked at your guide and we think you can get a much better rating if you do this, that and the other–so we may in fact offer advice. Right now it’s easier now because of the volume, but it might just have to be the user ratings eventually. That’s the way the system works- the highest rated guides would show up first and the lowest ratings might not show up at all. So it creates a self-policing mechanism.

OJR: How can Work.com help independent Web journalists in ways that conducting a basic search can’t?

Kehrer: It will provide a much more focused approach if it has anything to do with operating a business as a journalist and an entrepreneur. The site has information on all the things that go into establishing the business side of setting up a website: managing the money, establishing a credit card, paying people, opening a business account. They can find precise recommended solutions in a much more focused way.

OJR: The site features broad topics- everything from hiring employees, government resources, website design- how do you plan to stay current on such a broad range of topics? Isn’t there a danger of oversimplifying or missing relevant information?

Kehrer: It’s just the opposite–we’re so focused that we may have 15 different guides on one narrow topic. The system allows everyone to comment- and we encourage this- if there’s something missing or out of date, users can post a comment and the guide writer will hopefully update the guide. If a particular guide doesn’t have [the latest information], that guide will disappear and something else will take its place. So there’s a built-in mechanism for keeping things, fresh, up to date and ever-expanding.

OJR: How do you think journalists can maintain ethical integrity if they’re managing both editorial content and advertising on their websites?

Kehrer: You could ask the publisher of The New York Times the same thing- it’s the same issue for everybody who’s involved in [journalism]. You always have to have to ultimately decide that ethics comes first. If your information doesn’t have credibility, and you don’t have credibility, then you’ve got nothing.

OJR: You’re the author of “100 Best Resources for Small Business.” Are any of those resources applicable to journalists who want to become online publishers?

Kehrer: Sure, and a lot of those resources are now on business.com. A lot of it deals with general business start up information. Certainly if you’re a journalist/entrepreneur who wants to start your own website, you need to do some of the same things as anyone who’s starting a business. You need to write a business plan; you might want to take some training classes on business management; you might want to know where to seek free counseling.

You can incorporate quickly with an online service. You can go to various places to get your website set up as one big package, and you can find places that will help you with a marketing plan of some kind. Also, if you’re a sole-practitioner, even if you don’t employ anybody, you still have to get a tax ID number.

OJR: Various business laws and tax laws are complex and vary state by state. How familiar does a journalist/entrepreneur need to become with these issues before launching or trying to earn a profit online?

Kehrer: You can get bogged down in this stuff and that’s kind of the danger. You don’t need to know the intricacies of all the tax laws. You need to know that you have to file a tax return as a business and if you don’t do that you’re in big trouble. If you hire someone else to do some writing for you and pay an independent contractor you’ve got to report the income on a 1099 to the IRS.

There are guides on Work.com that have answers to all of those things in the taxes section. There is a long list on licensing on finding an accountant, on getting tax software, and finding local, state and regional tax requirements.

OJR: If you were to publish a guide for journalists who want to launch profitable websites what you would include?

Kehrer: Packaging does count. Hiring a Web designer is going to cost a lot of money, but there are various hosting packages that include [customizable] software.

OJR: Say you aren’t a techie–do you recommend being able to access all aspects of the site and update it yourself?

Kehrer: Yeah, I do actually because I believe in simplicity and control … and the technology has advanced so nicely that there are so many tools available online with a minimal amount of technical knowledge required. Keep it simple and…that will let you focus on the writing.

Quality Control: Q&A with John Battelle, Web content visionary

[Editor’s note: OJR welcomes back Sarah Colombo, a USC Annenberg graduate and former OJR student editor, who is rejoining us, now as a contributing writer, to cover the business side of online journalism.]

As founding editor and publisher of Wired magazine and the Industry Standard Magazine, John Battelle has certainly witnessed and experienced enough ebbs and flows in both the new and traditional media business to advise journalists on how to avoid common mistakes when establishing themselves online.

As a veteran technology journalist, Battelle is also highly skilled at engaging and maintaining an online audience on a level esteemed by many of his colleagues. His latest incarnations, Federated Media and Searchblog both appear to be strong examples of how to do it right.

Speaking by telephone from Federated Media headquarters in Sausalito, Calif., Battelle discussed the importance of establishing good conversation, and how his latest publishing venture has evoked a new way to help independent Web journalists get the bills paid.

OJR: What do you find that most journalists are lacking when they attempt to launch websites?

Battelle: The advice I give any journalist friend or colleague is to make the transition from that which I call packaged goods media–a finished television, news or radio report–to the conversational approach to [online] journalism. For most of us journalists who have spent a majority of their careers in the packaged goods area, it’s terrifying to hang it all out there and to admit that you might be wrong and to make mistakes and be corrected. It’s scary to say, I don’t have an editor and I don’t have a title but here’s my opinion and I can’t hide behind a newspaper or magazine masthead.

[Online journalism] is much more like performance art. I would compare the skill set [with that of] a radio talk show host. They talk to each other, they interview people and they take calls, and 50 percent of the callers are regular commentators. We as audience participants love to listen to the conversation. Blogs in particular have that same kind of conversation. On Searchblog, there are three to four times more comments than there are posts from me, and I would say that of the 10,000 comments on the site, probably 50 to 100 people are responsible for 8,000 of them.

OJR: Then how much freedom do you grant to them? Do you restrict usage or do users have to earn the right to comment?

Battelle: No, anyone can comment, but I will delete comments that are off-topic or that are obviously for self-gain. You have to be a moderator of the conversation. Journalists are very good at this, particularly the ones who are good at interviews because they know how to keep things on topic.

OJR: Searchblog is a member of your current publishing venture, Federated Media. Describe the general philosophy behind FM.

Battelle: The general idea is that not all journalists or authors who can draw a community want to be the CEO of a publishing company. They care about getting paid but aren’t very interested in selling ads. They care about making the site look good, but they don’t want to take care of the back end. They don’t want to necessarily hire and manage an accountant and controller, but they certainly care that their check comes on time.

After working on Searchblog for a while, it struck me that the site had gotten to the size of a respectable trade magazine, and I could tell the audience was pretty influential. So as a publisher I was thinking if I had 50,000 influential people reading a publication, it could be a real publication, but I didn’t want to do that again.

Meanwhile, Boing Boing came to me and said our hosting bill is way too high we can’t keep doing this little hobby of ours, so maybe we can figure out a way to turn it into a business. I started working with them on doing that and it struck me that between my site, which was a mini Industry Standard, and Boing Boing, which was more like Wired, there might be something there.

So I started looking for other sites and thought what if we federated all of our inventory? It struck me that the only way to really maintain a high quality of sites was to maintain a reasonably small number of them. These are not $1 or $2 RPM (revenue per thousand page views) sites, these are at least $15 to $20 RPM sites, and they needed to present themselves to advertisers as worthy of that premium. So, we’re now at about 85 or 90 sites and we have federations in various categories, including media and entertainment, tech, parenting and automobile markets.

OJR: So FM sites have already met a certain criteria.

Battelle: Right. They have a validated audience. We’ve done demographic surveys, we’ve joined comScore, we’ve done all the things we do if you’re a real media company. Yet Searchblog is never going to spend $35,000 to join comScore. But FM is going to spend that $35,000 and everyone in our network is now in comScore–that’s the power of federation. And many of the sites that are small cast large shadows. Even though Jeff Jarvis’ site (www.buzzmachine.com) isn’t that big, it’s influential. Marketers like that mix, you get reach and good demographics.

OJR: What do you think the journalism sites on FM have accomplished to get to that point?

Battelle: For the most part the sites that have risen to influence, particularly in the technology sector, are sites that are written by people who are seasoned journalists. I think one of the reasons these sites are so influential is that they’re so read by journalists who have crossed the bridge from the conversational medium back into the packaged goods medium and write second-day, more definitive pieces. You see that a lot in The New York Times, and you know the political writers and tech writers are reading those blogs.

OJR: Especially considering the importance of user participation. The blogger may initiate the conversation, but the important piece of information is the conversation itself, not just the initial posting.

Battelle: Blogs have become archival footage in a way. I’m often referred back to posts I wrote six months ago or a year ago. One of the early examples of a major company breaking news through a blog is when Amazon let me break the news that they were getting into the search game. Later, Amazon announced that they were going to launch [a search site called] A9. Someone wrote me recently and said, remember that post? The A9 thing seems to be going away. I reread the post and 20 comments. When you see it as a whole, it’s really a powerful statement and [sometimes] the comments far outweigh the pure words of the post itself.

OJR: According to a recent post on the FM site, you’re not adding any new authors until you make sure everyone’s happy with what you’ve got.

Battelle: We’ve built momentum … so I had to make a business decision. Some of the FM sites have very ambitious plans. We have a different kind of conversation with them. But for the sites who are doing it on their own for the first time, we help them decide whether they should bring on an editor and how to use financing. There might be a time at which they want to hire their own sales force and fire FM. Frankly I expect that to happen and I expect to lose some sites at some point.

OJR: What if one of your bigger sites starts expanding on a huge scale right away? How do you decide whether FM should grow to accommodate it?

Battelle: That’s a very good question. With some of our sites that are bigger and have significant revenue opportunity like Digg or Boing Boing, we have to make sure that this still a true partnership, and we always have to be asking [whether it’s still] making sense. This is not a new model in terms of business, but in terms of the media business, it’s kind of new ground.

OJR: You posted a response on your blog about the Washington Post’s recent attempt to offer to sell ads on blogs and split the revenue with bloggers. Do you think it’s a profitable idea?

Battelle: I believe there’s a place for it. There’s no doubt that traditional media can and will continue, but it has a hard hump to get over. Traditional media is in the business of sort of corralling talent. [As a newspaper reporter], you don’t talk to readers. Your job is to talk to your sources. Institutionally, these organizations have grown up managing reporters, not talent. When I was editing at Wired, my job was to produce writers and manage 50-150 talented, half-crazy freelance writers, and I think it really got me ready to do what I’m doing now. People with influential blogs are talent and they don’t want to be told what to write about.

OJR: So, is the Post trying to copy the Federated Media model?

Battelle: It’s similar, but I don’t think it’s copying any more than I copied the ad rep/book publishing/music label/talent agency model. There’s a lot of great content out there and we all want to figure out a way to get involved in it.

OJR: In your book, “The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture” (Portfolio, a Penguin imprint), one of the principal theories that you describe is the “database of intentions.” What will the implications of search mechanisms be for online journalists over the next few years?

Battelle: The key thing here is that anything that has existed online will exist online forever and the privacy issues, the citizen versus state issues and the corporation versus reporter issues are profound because now so much exists. I don’t think that culturally we’ve really gotten very far in the discussion of what it all means.

Think about it: Every place you go, everything you do, everything you click on- it’s all meta data. And what really got me excited is that my great-grandchildren can access my searches. That’s an artifact that I want to give them. I’d like to have access to and editing rights to that information, but right now that’s an artifact that I don’t own.