Robert Kiyosaki is the latest business author to take the collaborative approach to writing a book. His newest effort, Conspiracy of the Rich, is being released chapter by chapter on the book’s website. Readers must register to view the full text of each chapter, and are then encouraged to share their thoughts on each topic.

From the website:

Conspiracy of the Rich: The 8 New Rules of Money will be an interactive project in which Kiyosaki will not only offer his written ‘draft’ chapters online, but invite feedback, commentary and questions from readers across the globe via website forums and blogs. Reader feedback will then be incorporated into the book as it is written and released, chapter by chapter, on the Internet.

Designer: Tania Fitzpatrick, Red Dot Design

The Brief
Fit to Succeed is a book that demonstrates how companies can reduce health care claims and insurance costs by encouraging health and wellness in their employees. The lessons are conveyed through a story about two fictional CEOs in the construction industry — an industry the author had worked with extensively.

The cover brief began with six key words: Fitness, Healthy, Strong, Company, Growing, Construction.

The Concepts

	Cover A combined a number of the key word elements. The tall building represents the corporate world, and the orange and yellow color scheme are drawn from the construction industry. The tape measure cinching the building stood in for both construction and fitness. But the cinching of the building created a feeling of budgetary belt-tightening and reduction that contradicted the sub-title of “driving profits.”
	Cover B used just the tape measure and a variation on the orange-yellow palette. Note that the sub-title was still in development at this stage, so different ones were being mocked up on the covers. This cover lacked too many of the key word elements — nothing here really spoke to fitness, health or strength. And at this stage, it was decided that visually tying the book to the construction industry was too limiting. Though the author used construction company executives as the protagonists in his story, the concepts he was conveying were applicable across every industry.
	Cover C changed things up with the introduction of an apple and a fresh green color, but the design looked too much like that of a food or cookbook. The corporate tie-in was missing.
	Cover D married elements of the earlier covers. The apple and green palette remained, and the tape measure was added back. Here, though, combining the tape measure with food spoke to dieting, and the book was about a much broader approach to health than just weight loss. It was also felt that the diet imagery made the cover too feminine. By this time, the sub-title had been finalized.

The final cover, shown below, removed the tape measure and instead punched a dollar-sign bite mark out of the apple to make the corporate connection. Stronger shades added to the colour scheme helped ramp up the energy and visual impact. The result is a crisp, vibrant cover that matches the themes of the book.

March 8 -14 is Read an E-Book Week. In keeping with the spirit of the event, I thought I’d try to summarize what an author should know about Kindle, the e-reader from Amazon.

I’m going to assume that you’ve heard about the Kindle but you don’t really know too much about it. My aim with this post is to provide enough information for you to evaluate the market and figure out if it’s worth pursuing. So let’s get started.

What Is the Kindle?

• The Kindle is a dedicated e-book reading device, meaning it reads e-books, along with some newspapers and magazines, but not much else. Version 2 of the Kindle was released in February of this year.
• It uses E ink technology for the display. E ink is very different from a computer screen or the screen on, say, an iPhone. It is not backlit and so the experience of reading on a Kindle is very much like that of reading off paper. There’s no eye strain and it can be comfortably used for long periods of reading.
• The Kindle is relatively small and lightweight. It weighs just 10.2 ounces and has a 6″ screen on the diagonal. It’s very convenient for carrying, and many users appreciate its portability over heavy books.
• The Kindle 2 can hold about 1,500 books at a time.
• The device currently sells for $359 USD.

There are many video reviews online that will give you a more detailed look at the Kindle and its features. Here are a few good videos I have found:

• Kindle 2 first impressions from Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers
  
• CNET Kindle 2 review
• Kindle 2 user feedback video from Amazon

Who Uses a Kindle?

• Amazon will not release any sales data about the Kindle devices so no one really knows how many they have sold or who is buying them. Guesses from industry watchers range from 300,000 units sold to as high as 500,000.
• Contrary to what you might intuitively guess — that the biggest users are kids of the ‘Net generation — anecdotal evidence points to users 40 years of age and up as the primary market. This older audience appreciates the resizable type, the light weight and portability, and the convenience of instant access to content. Typically, they also have more money and are able to afford the $359 ticket price.
• Oprah Winfrey endorsed the Kindle on her show in October 2008, raising the device’s profile with the public in a big way. Demi Moore twitters about how much she loves her Kindle.
• Right now, the Kindle is only available in the United States. There is some speculation that version 3 will be available in other countries, but Amazon has yet to confirm that this is true.

What About the Content?

• There are about 245,000 book titles currently available in the Kindle format, including 102 of 111 current New York Times bestsellers.
• Amazon reports that Kindle books have been selling briskly, now accounting for about 10% of sales for titles where both print and Kindle editions are available.
• Kindle books are proprietary files. The files are wrapped in DRM (Digital Rights Management) technology, meaning they are encrypted. They can only be read on a Kindle or on the Kindle app for the iPhone. There is a great deal of debate and criticism in the publishing industry over Amazon’s choice to encrypt its files. Many publishers are pushing to standardize e-books around an open file format called ePub. (More on that in a later post.)
• The typical price for a Kindle book is about $9.95. Amazon keeps a 65% commission on each sale. This is higher than the 55% commission they keep on print book sales.

What’s the Upshot?
While Amazon has taken its share of criticism over the Kindle for a variety of reasons — some of it well deserved — it can’t be denied that the device is helping bring e-books to the mainstream and creating new opportunities for book sales.

If you are an author with an existing print book, or one in production, publishing a companion Kindle version is pretty easy and inexpensive. For a small additional investment, you can make your book available to an audience that craves new content and wants it quickly. This audience is relatively small right now but will continue to grow over time. It’s almost certainly a good investment to make.

At least one major publisher is on board with a strategy that Seth Godin, Jeff Jarvis and other industry observers have been advocating for a while: shaking up the single serving model of book sales.

Thomas Nelson announced yesterday that readers who buy certain of its hard cover titles will automatically gain access to the audiobook and e-book versions at no extra charge. Buy the content, choose your containers — an appealing offer, don’t you think?