Digital Publishing with Adam Engst

Digital Publishing with Adam Engst, podcast.
(Download link is near the bottom of the page.  If you don't want to wait for the longish download, you can also find this on iTunes.)

If you are interested in ebook publishing at all, I think you'll like this. Adam is always entertaining, and is one of the few people who are actively a writer, and a publisher, and an editor. He is also the co-founder of Take Control ebooks, which so far as I know, is one-of-a-kind. Run by Adam and his wife Tonya, they do it all, with a small bunch of writers. And they put out excellent and accessible ebooks on technical subjects. They are also friendly to deal with, and put costumer service up front.

Tonya and Adam Engst

And Take Control are one of the few publishers to have the insight and guts to fully embrace not using Digital Rights Management (DRM) to block users from copying their books, and they are proven right in their belief that not only does this prevent all the technical problems that DRM makes for the customers, but the audience responds positively and respectfully when they are treated as ethical beings rather than being seen as probably-criminals up front.

By the way, another concept which Adam talks about in this interview and is fully behind, is promoting a full money-back guarantee, and supporting it strongly with action. This is counter-intuitive to most of us, we feel we'll be robbed blind if we do that. But I'll tell you, I have had hundreds of thousand of costumers over the years, and my refund percentage is less than 0.3%! And it is very, very few of them where I get the feeling that they are taking advantage of me. A vanishingly small number of people.
But the upside, the support to the trust it takes to buy something from a company you don't know, is huge. It's not easy measuring it, but I'm pretty sure it is something on the order of at least thirty extra sales being made for each one which has to be refunded. I not only give the guarantee, I put it high on the page in big letters, and repeat it at the bottom. (I learned this from the Make Your Site Sell ebook, which helped my business no end (this book is free now too), it boosted my sales by over 50%, permanently.)