I occasionally write construction project articles for hobby electronics magazines. 

I have often wondered if it would be possible to sell these articles directly to hobbyist rather than to the magazines (of which there are very few in the U.S.). The typical construction project is less than 10 printed pages. Much less than booksize. 

Is it possible to successfully sell small documents such as this directly to the public?

Thanks,

Philip

Thanks for the email.

I have to confess I'm not an expert on publishing short works. I was a big fan of sites like MightyWords when they started up, because they were designed to do just what you're talking about, online. Sadly they were a little ahead of their time and most folded.

You could sell articles on your site, using either a service like PayPal (see my ebook page) or using real shopping cart technology. The beauty of this is that you have few hard costs (apart from transaction fees) and can keep the prices 'impulse-buy' low.

The other alternative is to get into booklet publishing. I don't know a heck of a lot about this but did find a link to Paulette Ensign's site. Ensign is a bit of a whizz when it comes to selling 'tips booklets' apparently. You can find out more here: . There are some interesting articles under the 'articles' link.

You'd have to charge more for these, of course, because you have to cover printing and shipping. However, you might also be able to get appropriate stores to carry a stock of them (stores frequented by your audience). In this case you might want to get ISBNs, but you could check with the stores to see what they require. (Bookstores usually require ISBNs since they order through wholesalers and everything hangs off the ISBN. Gift stores often don't care, especially if they are ordering directly from you, and you might find the same thing with your neighborhood Radio Shack or Bob's Electronic Bits Store).

I think electronics (gadget) folks are quite likely to be willing to download a piece online (especially a short piece) so why not go ahead and set up some kind of online store, put a sig file in your emails and wade into the newsgroups? Maybe you'll even make enough money to finance your first print run...