Mequoda Daily recently ran an article regarding online publishing. Here are two key points:
“All information products will be digital by the year 2025. In a few years, customers will expect to be able to buy any digital product — newspaper, magazine, or video — and download it immediately to both their desktop computer or their portable digital reader.”
Here’s the good news:
“Digital products make micro-publishing viable. A book that previously could only be published for as few as 100 – 2,000 special-interest readers could be economically viable. Digital products mean the previous expenses of typography, printing, binding, warehousing, picking, packing and shipping are eliminated. An author who can sell as few as 1,000 copies at $20 each might be satisfactorily compensated for his special-niche written material.”
The more sobering fact, of course, is that you still have to find those 1000 people, but if the product is special-niche, that may not be so difficult.
(And if you need some help writing that book, get a copy of my book, "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey and available on Amazon and other online and offline retailers.)