CNet has a story about a new self-publishing company with an interesting business model. Hyperink is based in San Francisco and funded by a venture capital fund founded by Huffington Post chairman and co-founderKenneth Lerer. It plans to commission and publish books based on obscure, niche-specific topics (such as “How to start a mommy blog”) that currently rank high in Google search results.
The company uses freelance journalists as ghostwriters, who interview experts and then write that expert advice up into books. The authors can write a book in less than a month, and keep up to 50% of sales. (Though it’s not clear at this point whether “authors” means the experts or the journalists who ghostwrite.)
Of course, this sounds a bit like Internet content farms that thrash out content based on popular Google searches in order to draw ad revenue. The CNet post itself makes the comparison to content farm Demand Media, which got hammered after Google added anti-content-farm code to its search algorithm. On the other hand, books aren’t ad-supported, and if Hyperink can put out high-quality content that people doing those searches will want to buy and read, more power to it. I’m not sure how they can really call it “self-publishing” if the company itself hires ghost writers, however.
My understanding is that if the “expert” who proposes a topic for publication actually writes the book themselves, they can get “up to 50%” of Hyperink’s revenues from the title. If the title is written by a contract writer on the basis of interviews with the expert who proposed it, the royalties are split between the expert and writer on the basis of an undisclosed formula, but typically, its a 50:50 split.
There has been a great deal of consolidation within the industry. Many titles have been sold or discontinued, some publishers have disappeared altogether and others taken over or been subjected to significant cost