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As a freelance online community consultant, I spend a lot of time thinking about ways to stabilize my income to reduce the ups and downs that come with having my own business. The most obvious solution is to manage your pipeline to make sure that you have new projects to replace the ones that are completing, but it’s also a good idea to have alternative income streams to complement your main client work and fill in any gaps.

In an ideal world, you finish one project on Friday with your next project ready to start on Monday; however, we don’t live in an ideal world, and even our best planning efforts occasionally go awry. While my client base has been fairly steady, I’m always concerned that I might have gaps. I would rather have plans to fill those gaps rather than being caught off guard and unprepared, so recently, I have been experimenting with alternative income streams that will generate regular revenue without relying entirely on client work.

This isn’t a new topic on WebWorkerDaily. Georgina recently wrote a great post with some of her recession avoidance techniques: saving more, managing debt and spending, and strategies for finding new work and staying motivated, while Anne Zelenka wrote a great post with 10 new ways to make money online, and Mike and Aliza followed up with 10 more new ways to make money online. However, I wanted to write about my personal experiences with alternative income streams.

Regular blogging and writing gigs in your area of expertise are a good place to start. I started blogging here on WebWorkerDaily last December, and I have really enjoyed the experience. I can do the writing whenever I have some spare time, in between client meetings or in the evening, so it doesn’t interfere with my regular client work. In this case, I get to do something that I love and I get paid for it, so the revenue stream from blogging was an easy first step for me.

My second regular income stream comes from a self-published book. Late last year, I decided to take the online community content from my blog and turn it into an e-book: “Companies and Communities: Participating Without Being Sleazy“. While I started this project as a PDF e-book, it eventually snowballed into something bigger with Kindle and paperback versions now available. This was a great experience in a couple of ways.  Not only is the revenue from the book useful, but by taking the existing content from my blog, updating it and reorganizing it, I found several gaps in my writing where I had talked about the later steps in the community-building process without first outlining the work that needs to come before. You need to be a little careful with this approach, since you must make sure that you own the rights to the content before republishing it. If you are blogging for a company, you probably don’t have the right to republish that content.

I am also experimenting with training classes. I held my first Yahoo Pipes training class last week in Portland, Ore., with about 10 students. As a first class, it went pretty well, but I still need to work on the course content to make a few improvements before I do a second class in late June. I’m hoping to expand my training classes with face-to-face training on other topics, like online community management, and I also hope to reformat the material into an online course, too. Offering it online would allow me to make it available to a wider audience and, hopefully, increase the frequency of the class.

These efforts have come with a whole new set of challenges for me. The biggest challenge has been pricing, which seems to be part art form, part science that I have yet to master. I tend to make the rookie mistake of pricing things too high and then needing to offer discounts or lower prices later. I am starting to get a better feel for pricing these types of products and services, so hopefully this should get easier. My second challenge is marketing. While I do a pretty good job of promoting my work and getting the word out via social media, the people who need more training and my book are not the people who live and breathe social media, so I need to get better at finding traditional marketing channels to augment my marketing strategy.

What are your alternative income streams? What are your success stories, and what challenges have you experienced?

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For me, it also raises the age-old question: is self-publishing really just a form of vanity publishing, along with all the negative connotations that implies?

It’s a thorny question, and one that takes on new significance as we slowly but surely move away from print media towards online publishing. I went to school for writing, and had it drilled into me pretty much every day that unless it was someone else’s name on the masthead of the journal or press I was publishing with, I wasn’t accomplishing anything.

Online, however, many of the most successful professionals are self-published, and self-made. Darren Rowse, Guy Kawasaki and Om Malik Richard MacManus come to mind. They are dealing primarily in the medium of the blog, however. The stigma associated with self-publishing doesn’t seem to have entirely disappeared when it comes to books.

Smashwords is a service for self-publishing your own eBook. Once you’ve signed up for an account you can upload your original work and offer it for sale at a price of your own choosing. Your book will also be available for purchase via Stanza for the iPhone, the most popular and fastest-growing eReader available. Authors make a royalty of 85% of the net proceeds from the sale of their work. Readers using the service get free samples of all the books available on the site, and get access to search and library-building services.

It’s a good system, but will it work? Even if you already have a built-in readership from a successful blogging career, will users be willing to take the extra step and pay for your content in eBook form? The answer probably depends on what kind of content you’re offering. If you’re just repackaging your blog as paid content, it probably won’t pay off. But if you’re offering valuable content that extends, rather than mirrors, your blog-based content, Smashwords may be a useful platform.

To me, the benefit of a service like Smashwords, and self-publishing in general, is the same benefit that consulting firms get from preparing free research reports for distribution to clients. It’s a proof of competency, a means to show you can and will deliver the type of results they’re looking for. And with distribution via Stanza, there’s also the possibility that you could reach potential clients where you otherwise wouldn’t have, even if you do end up just reformatting your blog content for alternative distribution.

What do you think about self-publishing? Is it a good means to increase your revenue or profile as a web worker?

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So what is WEbook, really?
From what I understood so far, it is a collaborative tool for writing books. You can create a book project, invite anyone to co-author with you – including an open invitation to the entire WEBook community – invite feedback from others including the community, and then submit for consideration to be published by WEBook in either print-on-demand, e-books, audiobooks or all of the above. The community votes on a submitted manuscript (the American Idol portion of the site) through a 1-5 rating system.

The first published book from WEBook’s Alpha phase is titled Pandora, an international terrorism thriller composed by 17 writers.

Available through WEbook, BN.com, Amazon.com (although this could change based on Amazon’s recent announcement that they will stop carrying non-Amazon POD books) and even SMS. The first four chapters of Pandora, for example, are available by texting “WEbook” to the phone number 41411 or by visiting Mobile Pandora from any web-enabled mobile device.

According to the company’s press release, WEbook is breaking the traditional publishing models and not a moment too soon.

The staid $50 billion publishing industry is dominated by a few traditional publishers that wield tremendous power over the titles that reach bookstores. Writers face a daunting challenge—the odds of an unknown writer securing a publishing deal are 15,000:1.

What about protecting one’s book ideas?
Copyrights and IP issues are top of mind with WEbook, and they’re working on sophisticated IP protections. Any member can keep their writing entirely private and opt never to submit to publication through WEBook. So I can, for example, start using WEBook to collaborate only with the co-author on a new book project where I already have a book deal.

Or my husband could start working on the third book in his science fiction/fantasy trilogy about a new age after the Third World War and allow an editor, family and friends participate to give him feedback before he shops it around with the first two books that are already finished. At the moment, WEBook doesn’t provide tools to upload a completed manuscript with ease for further feedback and editing.

The company’s Terms of Use covers copyright and ownership issues, and they will have a short video explaining the risks (and rewards) of publishing any writing online, particularly in such a collaborative environment. There are also safeguards in place to monitor for plagiarism.

So why try publishing through WEbook
If you go for a regular book deal with or without a book agent and going through traditional publishers, you are looking at least a year from acceptance of the proposal to publication of the book but more typically two years. WEbook says the process from acceptance (by the WEbook masses and the WEbook company) to publication is about two months.

If you self-publish, the long and hard part of book-writing is writing it, getting feedback and editing it. Bringing in other writers could certainly ease the time suck of writing the whole book by yourself, but even enlisting editors or people to give feedback on your edits can speed up the entire book-writing process.

Personally, I am looking forward to seeing how it works on several book projects I have – one with a single co-author, one with two additional co-authors, and several essay anthology ideas that have been in limbo but through WEbook, I can solicit essays from other writers and begin compiling the actual book.

And the deal with WEbook if submitted for publication is not onerous. They have six months to decide if they will actually publish the book or not. Most traditional publishers want a year.

WEbook pays royalties from sales to the writers, editors and other contributors to the finished work so everyone can share in the rewards of a successful book.

What else can members do?
Once a member, you can ask to participate in a variety of open book projects. Right away a children’s book about the plight of wild mustangs caught my eye, and I’m going to see what other anthologies are in the works so I can possibly contribute an essay or two such as the one about ex-pats writing about their experiences living abroad.

And of course, WEbook has all those little social networking tools that link members with like-minded writers and editors including a Friends list.

All in all, I have to say I’m pretty excited about putting this tool into action for my book writing projects. I’ll report back in a few months to let you know how it is going.

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