Make Easy Money with Google has been out for a bit more than a month now, but I think it's still trying to find its way to its audience. Let me tell you, the hard part about writing a book isn't writing it, it's getting people to buy it! Seth Godin, author of various business bestsellers like Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable talks about this in his recent Advice for authors blog entry. There's a lot of truth in what he says. I especially like his third point, there is no such thing as an effective book promotion by a book publisher, because it's true: most publishers simply have too many books in print to devote more than a small micropercentage of their time and effort to promoting all but the “blockbuster” hits (think Harry Potter and various other books by big-name authors). For a book to sell, the author has to actively promote it.

This, of course, is where many authors fall flat on their face. Selling is an art, and few people are truly good at it. Those who are can make a phenomenal living selling just about anything, it seems. If you know me, you know that selling is not my strong point. And, according to Seth, I shouldn't even have bothered to write the book because I don't have a “permission base” of thousands of people hanging onto my every word. How depressing!

Well, not every book is going to sell millions of copies. I've been lucky to have written a book that has obviously helped others already, and that makes me very happy. If you've bought the book, I thank you, and I'd love to hear what you have to say about it. There's a good selection of (mostly positive!) reviews up on Amazon now, but feel free to add your own observations and comments there as well.

Of course, I wouldn't mind it if you told your friends about the book, too. Positive word-of-mouth is always the best publicity. Despite what you might think, this is a book for a non-technical crowd. Retirees, stay-at-home parents, students — anyone looking to do something on the Web and maybe making a bit of money at it will find it useful.

And if you're walking by a bookstore… Every time I visit a Chapters or Indigo store (I live in Canada — think Borders or Barnes & Noble if you're in the United States) I make sure to find the copies they have of my book (it's unfortunately on the E-Commerce shelf of the Business section, not the best placement) and make sure they face out so that the catchy cover gets seen. I even try to get the store to put the book out on one of the tables, though in reality most of those spots (you probably didn't realize this) are actually paid for by publishers in order to promote specific books, so that's not always possible. But I can't possibly visit every bookstore, so feel free to do the same at your favorite bookstore!

Alright, enough selling. I'd love to get the book featured on Oprah, but there's no angst in it, so I doubt that will happen. The book will have to succeed on its own merits. Just like most things.

Last week I participated in a Slashdot discussion on copyrights. The discussion was specifically about the Creative Commons initiative. For those who don't know, Creative Commons (CC) provides free license texts that you can attach to copyrighted content that license the content for use by others in specific situations and with specific conditions. A typical CC license would allow people to use content for non-commercial purposes, for example. People confuse CC with copyrights, but CC is about licensing copyrighted material, which may not be as simple as you might think and is why CC was developed. Many blogs (but not this one) are licensed under a CC license.

The reason I bring this up is to point out that there are obstacles to using other people's content. In almost every country in the world today, including the United States, content is granted copyright protection automatically, as soon as it's created. That protection exists whether or not there's a copyright notice. In other words, a lack of notice is not an invitation to copy.

If you want to use someone else's content, you must get permission from them. This is where licenses like those from Creative Commons come into play. Many times, the copyright owner (note that this may not be the actual person who created the work, depending on different factors) gives explicit permission to use the content in certain ways. For example, I've licensed my recent articles The AdSense Formula and When AdSense Makes No Sense to any site or newsletter that wants to reproduce them, providing that they are reproduced in full with no changes and that the copyright message and the biographical information that accompany them are also left untouched. The result is that you can now find those articles on many different sites like SelfSEO or EZineArticles. This provides me with a bit of extra publicity for my AdSense book for non-techies Make Easy Money with Google.

Remember, though, that once your content is on the Web it's easy for others to copy it. For example, my original Google AdSense Tips keep finding their way on other people's sites even though I haven't given them permission to do so. Someone had even copied them to a site and placed a Creative Commons-type license on them, which meant that other sites picked them up and republished them, thinking they were free. If it's not yours, be wary of using it, and check out its pedigree as much as you can. (I discuss this all in Chapter 3 of the book, by the way.)

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Google is really an advertising company, not a search engine company. Like I said in my AdSense book, “Google is one of the major players in online advertising”. For proof of this, just take a look at Google's second quarter earnings release (PDF). In particular:

• 46% of Google's revenues ($630 million) came from partner sites, which includes sites displaying AdSense ads. Presumably the majority of those revenues came from the AdSense Premium sites, but I'm sure the “regular” AdSense revenues are nothing to sneeze at.
• Google paid $494 million to partners in revenue-sharing.

Now, 494/630 gives you 78%, so it looks like Google is only keeping 22% of the revenue it makes from advertising, but I'm not sure that the traffic acquisition costs can actually be allocated that way. Still, it looks like the majority of the ad revenue gets shared with its partners. Again, the Premium partners would get better payouts than the regular guys.

Any way you slice it, though, $630 million is a lot of advertising revenue! It's going to be hard for them to keep up the kind of growth they've seen, no doubt — at some point the ad revenues will flatten out.