BOOK PUBLISHING: AN IDEAL BUSINESS

I have been discussing business ideas in the last few of articles. As regular readers will know by now, my definition of a business is a system which is established to provide goods or services which satisfy the needs or solve the problems of society. Going by this definition, I have said that the best way to develop business ideas is to look for needs or problems and come up with ways to satisfy them. The more efficiently you are able to solve problems or meet needs, the more successful your business will be. I have made the definition of a business as wide as possible to impress upon you that the only limit to the kinds of businesses you can engage in is your imagination.

In this and the next several articles, I would like to discuss a number of business ideas which readers can think about getting into.

We just had the National Book Week in PNG, which concentrated on encouraging people to read. This is good. But one problem (or business opportunity) I see that most of what people are encouraged to read is material written and published by foreign authors. I believe that we need more Papua New Guinean writers. I also believe that PNG is becoming a more literate nation. The number of readers in the country has been increasing and will continue to do so. Just look at how many people are reading newspapers now compared to the past. That is why I believe that it is now time for people to start writing for a living.

I would like to share my personal experience in writing and publishing as a business. I have met many people who are interested in writing, so this article may be a source of inspiration to them.

Book writing and publishing is an ideal business, for the following reasons:

• We live in the information age where the thirst for knowledge and information is unquenchable. I believe that everyone has at least one book in them, which if they wrote and published, would help other people. I don’t believe people who say that there is no market for books in PNG. From my experience, there is a big market for books in the country. The challenge is to find it and meet its demands.

• Considering that we live in a world without borders or a global village, when you write books, the whole world is your potential market. The challenge is to find the market for your particular kinds of books. There are 6 billion people in the world today. Stretch your mind and imagine if you could sell your book to a million people or just 0.02% of the population. Multiply that by the average price of your book and see how much you could make. There may not be many readers in the country, but there are hundreds of millions of readers in the world. You can sell your books on the world market through the Internet, both in hard copy and electronic book form. The book market is valued in the trillions. You have a better chance of making millions in such a market. That is why successful authors are multi-millionaires. Some of them are so successful that they get paid millions even before they start writing their books!

• Book publishing is a mobile business. If you have a laptop computer, you can literally take your business everywhere you go. I live in Goroka but I have written my books in Port Moresby, Lae, Hagen, Tabubil, and even in the village using a generator as the power source for my laptop. I have written parts of my books at airports lounges while waiting for the plane. There aren’t many other businesses that are as portable.

• And with today’s information technology, you can be in touch with buyers anytime. I get book enquiries and orders through email or my mobile phone anywhere and anytime I am able to get access to the Internet or phone access. You can take your books and sell them everywhere you go. When people get to know that you are in that business, they will always ask you if you have copies with you. You show one person a copy and may end up selling several because others may be interested as well.

• When you get into book publishing, it can be a one-man show, at least until you need to get other people to help out. You can write books and get them edited by other people. You then engage a printing company to print the books, after which you get a distributor to sell your books if they have a good network. Otherwise you can market and sell the books yourself. You can sell single copies or in bulk. Your operational costs can be very minimal.

• Your mark-ups can be substantial. For instance, you may spend K15,000 to print 1,000 copies of a 200-page book. The more books you print, the lower the unit cost. In this case your unit cost is K15/copy. Your freight and marketing costs may add up to K3/copy. So your total cost is K18/copy. When it comes to pricing, you have monopoly power. (There may be other books that are similar to yours, but they aren’t exactly like your book, so your book is literally the only one of its kind on the market). So you can set any price you want. Say you decide to set K45/copy as your retail price. Your profit margin would be 150%. Every time you sell one copy, you make K27. If you print more than 1,000 copies, your unit cost would fall; consequently, your profit margin would be higher. Imagine if you sold 10,000 copies. What if you sold a million copies on the world market?

• When you publish a book, you position yourself to earn what is known as ‘residual’ income. What this means is that your hard work in writing and publishing the book gets rewarded over and over and over. When you work at a paid job, your labour does not have residual value. When you work, you get paid; when you stop working, your salary stops coming in. So the only way to keep money coming in is by going back to work every day. It is different when it comes to book writing. You may expend several months or a year writing a book. So you do all the hard work over that period of time. When it comes to selling your book, there is no time limit. If you run short, you don’t rewrite the book again. You simply instruct your printer to print more copies, and you just keep on selling. The time and effort you put into writing the book has residual value, that is why the money you earn can be labeled as ‘residual’ income. The beauty of it is that copy right laws cover you for the next 70 or so years! So you can write a book over a period of one year and get paid for the next 70 years.

• When you write books, you make money but at the same time you become prominent in the community. Many people will recognize and respect you, and some will even consider you as an expert or authority in the subject you have written your book on. Such recognition will open many other doors into your life. You will definitely meet a lot of people of all walks of life. You may get interviewed on radio or TV. Newspaper journalists may follow you around for stories. You may get invited and paid to speak. You may even create a secondary source of income by converting the main ideas in your book into a seminar or training material. This has been my experience since I started writing in 2006. I have been interviewed twice by Radio Australia; I have spoken on NBC and local radio many times; I have been featured on newspapers; now I am writing for this paper; I have been invited to speak at school graduations; I have met prominent people like our Governor-General and many MPs; and I have been doing seminars for corporate organisations. Seminars is another business of its own, which I will discuss in the next article. People who have known me for long know that I have always been a quiet and obscure person. Writing books has completely transformed my life. It was difficult initially but my persistence is now beginning to pay off. It is now much easier to sell my books than it was when I first started. My readers are always asking when the next book will be published.

There are many other benefits you can realize from writing books as a business. But I believe that I have given you enough in this article to get you thinking seriously about writing your first book. If you are a teacher or ex-teacher, I encourage you to put your experience into a book. The education system is short of teaching materials. You can meet that need by writing a book on the subject you have been teaching. Schools need all kinds of books. If you are an economist, accountant, lawyer, mechanic, technician, food technologist, engineer, journalist, etc, there is a market for your expertise. You may not believe what I am saying but it is true.

You need to transfer your knowledge and experience to the next generation through at least one book, otherwise all the knowledge you possess will become food for the maggots in your grave.

DEVELOP BUSINESS IDEAS BY ASKING QUESTIONS

I have discussed how to develop business ideas in the last two articles. I emphasized the importance of identifying needs or problems and coming up with products or services to meet those needs or solve the problems people face. The more effectively you can help people satisfy their needs or solve their problems, the more you get paid. The emphasis once again is not on money, but on people. If you help people and make their lives a bit more comfortable, they will give you their money. So remember this: A business does not exist for the purpose of making money; it exists to make solve peoples’ problems.

I also discussed the importance of meeting needs and solving problems using your unique set of talents, hobbies and skills. What I would like to add here is that every one of us is multi-talented, meaning that you can do several things well. You may also be multi-skilled, and you may have more than one thing you do as a hobby. What I encourage you to do is therefore to look out for more than one problem or need that people have, and how you can address them using your different talents and skills.

Let me say here that the majority of business people took their ideas from existing businesses. In other words, not many businesses are novel or completely new. While many businesses are exact copies of existing businesses, many are variants of existing businesses. I would like to see more Papua New Guinean businesses that are completely novel, meaning that they are addressing needs and problems in a completely new way. That, I believe, is true innovativeness and entrepreneurship. But such businesses emerge from a lot of conceptualizing and meditation. People look at the needs they see around them, and they think up solutions without any visual reference. It all takes place in the mind.

But I also realize that most of us see more with our eyes than we think (or see with our minds), and we tend to believe what we see more than what we hear. Therefore, when it comes to business, we normally tend to look around to see what other people are doing, and most of us think about doing exactly the same things. The result is that competition increases, and we end up driving prices down. This is obviously good for the buyers of our products and services, but as business people, competition works against our "bottom line".

That is why I have been advising in the past two articles that you either do something completely new, or do what other people are doing but in a different way. Do what others are doing, but set yourself apart from them by the way you do it. It is called differentiation.

Questions You Should Ask
How do you set yourself apart from others? How do you do what existing businesses are doing but differentiate yourself from them? Here are some questions you can ask yourself. Each question forces you to think deep and look for hidden opportunities which others have overlooked (because they were not obvious). As you consider each question, think of real examples of businesses that have differentiated themselves from others doing the same things or selling the same products.

1. Is there a better way for meeting a need or solving a problem? This question indicates that you are thinking of doing what other are already doing, but you are looking for ways to improve on what they are doing. Let your imagination run wild. Look at needs that are being met, but think of ways you can do it better or more efficiently. You will be surprised at the kind of business ideas you come up with.

2. Can I make it bigger? Sometimes size and price makes a big difference. Remember the days when Bmobile was the only company in the market providing mobile phone services? Services were very unreliable, and limited to the major centres. Unreliable services provided the opportunity for another operator to enter the market. When Digicel entered the market, it concentrated on developing its network. It built an extensive network of towers, even into rural areas where Bmobile didn’t think of going into. It can therefore now boast of having “The Bigger, Better Network”, and it is still expanding. The result is that Bmobile has become a follower, even though it was the first to be in the market.

3. Can I make it cheaper? Price is probably the most important factor that determines peoples’ purchasing decisions. Generally, the cheaper the product, the more people will buy it (assuming that minimum quality standards are maintained). If you can introduce a good quality product or service at a lower price, you will have no problems attracting buyers.

When Bmobile was the only mobile phone service provider, their prices for handsets were very high, and they forced customers to buy K200 worth of credits at the same time as they bought the handsets. It was expensive for most people to own mobile phones. When Digicel came, it made mobile communication much more affordable by introducing cheaper phones. Today you can buy a phone for as low as K29. As well as that, Digicel introduced the K3 prepaid phone card. This brought mobile phone services to the level of grassroots people.

Bmobile had no choice but to follow suit, because K3 was more affordable than K20 or even K10 cards. You will notice that Digicel did something Bmobile was already doing, but in a much better way. If Bmobile had made mobile communication affordable by building a network covering the country and sold cheap phones and cards, Digicel may have found the PNG market unviable.

4. Can I introduce a product or service that solves problems faster? In today’s fast-paced world, people are always looking for ways cut down on the time it takes to do things. The search for faster ways of communication led to the invention of the telex machine, followed by the fax machine. Today most people communicate by email and text messaging. Fast-food outlets help people satisfy their hunger much faster than if they were to cook themselves. Taxis ferry people to their destinations faster than buses that are required to follow established routes. Think of products such as instant coffee and two-minute noodles and you will get what I am talking about here.

5. Can I add something or subtract something? This question can help you to fine tune your business ideas until you get the unique business idea that you are willing to execute. For instance, Jasmine rice is basic long-grain rice. But producers knew that consumers add colours or flavours when they cook rice at home. So they added the jasmine flavour to make it easy for housewives. They are therefore able to charge higher prices than normal long-grain rice.

6. Can I make people’s lives more convenient? Generally people want convenience, meaning that they want to have their needs met as and when those needs arise. If you think about it, the bulk of goods and services available exist to make life more convenient living. Think of a convenience store. It sells most items people like, and it opens very early and closes very late. The owners know the basic items people need on a daily basis, and they know that the opening and closing times of the major shops are inconvenient for most people. So they make those items available for as long as they can in a day.

If you think of the food sellers around the government offices in Waigani, they are making life convenient for the workers. If government workers were to go to fast-food shops or the markets to buy lunch, it would be both costly and time-consuming. So to solve the government workers’ need for food and shorten the time looking for it, they bring food to where the workers are.

7. Can I complement an existing business? Look at an existing business and ask yourself how you can complement what that business does. For instance, I have a friend who runs a vehicle repairs workshop. On the same property is another person who sells car parts and accessories. He is a major supplier to the repair shop owner. I have also seen people with hire cars operating out of hotel rooms. Their aim is to get the hotels’ clients to rent their vehicles. So look around and think about what you could do to meet that business’s needs, or the needs of its clients.

As I stated in last week’s article, I now sell many of my books during seminars. When I first started doing the “Seven Steps To Financial Freedom” seminar, I brought copies of only one of my books from which the seminar was based. It soon turned out that the seminar was an opportunity to sell my other books as well, because people starting asking for them. Today I carry a case full of all my books. And I usually sell several copies of all the books. So the books complement the seminars, and the other way around.

8. What else can people use this for? This line of questioning would enable you to take an existing product and sell it to people to meet needs which they are not aware of. Maybe people are not buying enough because they do not know of certain qualities of the product that they could benefit from by consuming it.

Several years ago an elderly man from my village had a blocked prostate which made it very hard for him to relieve himself. I took him to the hospital and was advised that he needed to have a major operation to free the blockage. Unfortunately the hospital ran out of supplies for its operation theatre due to a major blockage on the Highlands Highway. We were told to wait, but the longer we did, the old man’s situation worsened to a point where he just couldn’t sleep. At our point of desperation, somebody suggested to me that I should try giving the old man aloe juice. I bought a container, but the patient was very reluctant. He asked, "I can drink it, but where will it go out”? I pointed out to him that he had no choice, so he took it. That night he slept very well for the first time in many weeks. He was also able to pass some urine. I bought several more containers and he drank until he was completely free of the affliction without the operation. He is still alive today. Based on this experience, I introduced the juice to two other men with similar problems, and both experienced the same results.

Nutritionists say that aloe juice provides many benefits to the body. For instance, it is said to delay the ageing process. But from my experience, it is very effective for men with prostate problems. I could easily start a business by identifying men with prostate problems and selling them the juice. I don’t have to manufacture it. The product is availabe already. All I need to do is to sell its benefits to men who suffer prostate problems.

There must be products you can start a business on by presenting their benefits in a different way to a specific group of customers.

9. How can I make this more marketable? Study an existing business to find out if you can introduce better packaging or a better delivery system. Once again, you don’t have to produce the product. You take it and deliver it more efficiently than it is being supplied to buyers.

10. What if I do something that is the opposite? Some businesses that are thriving now were started with business ideas that people considered crazy!

I could go on listing so many other possible questions you could ask when developing business ideas, but I shouldn’t give you all the answers. My aim in this article was to provoke you to start asking questions. As an aspiring entrepreneur, you must come up with your own questions and answers.