There are a lot of steps that need to be followed in launching a new business such as Seascape Publishing. Read on to find out the latest news about what we are doing to bring our ideas to the marketplace.

Our motive for starting Seascape Publishing is to electronically publish and sell new, unique, interesting and informative books based on a 21st century view of publishing (and not 19th century). We reject the obsolete process of taking a submitted work, using some gut feel about whether it will sell or not, and throwing it out to the market, often with very little followup or marketing.

Instead of the scattergun approach, we want to find out what people want, then write the books based on our own style guide. Our development process is more like writing software than the normal process of writing a book. In the meantime, we want to build a community where ideas can be discussed and debated, with the best ideas becoming the books that readers really want.

We want to be the nimbler, leaner and faster alternative to traditional publishers.

Incidentally, we find digital rights management to be a very annoying way of enforcing copyright – our books won’t have it.

We have one book finished and ready to go soon, and a few others that are in progress, with text written.  In the meantime, we are developing our site.

The basic site that you are looking at now is working, but we aren’t selling anything yet. Before we do that, Lila, a talented graphic designer who we contract for all our design work, is coming up with a new look for the site, and we will replace the temporary header with a new design.

Lila is also developing a colophon, or a printer’s mark for our books.  Since our books are electronic, this will be a small graphic.  Here are some examples of colophons (printer’s marks) from old books in my library:

Our colophon won’t look like these Victorian era ones, but having one is a link to the past in publishing paper books.

We are adding new articles which are hopefully useful to our readers, but we have a slight delay in that. We have a range of underused source material from our other sites and we are freshening it up and bringing it in here as a resource for our readers. Unfortunately we have a delay in obtaining a suitable and reliable contractor to rewrite our material. We are working through that now.  Our articles are opinionated but well researched and we want someone who can write to a high standard and not just churn out text that hardly makes sense.

In the meantime, look out for a new look for the site and our first book How to Regain Your Freedom which we are adding soon.

Tags: site developments

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 10th, 2010 at 9:31 pm and is filed under Site news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.