Customer Reviews

Start Your Own Newsletter Publishing Business (Start Your Own Business)

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At the end of the last chapter of the book, the authors say that 'this book just scratches the surface of the knowledge that you will want- and need- to acquire in the course of starting your newsletter business and making it grow.' That statement accurately sums up the contents of this book.

The book does a good job of skimming some of the major points involved in running any home business, but does not delve deeply into the mechanics behind newsletter publishing. It contains a lot of good, common sense advice on general business practices, but precious little on the design, production, and marketing of newsletters. The book contains ample space and sample worksheets for organizing your own thoughts with regard to writing a good newsletter, sample worksheets for start-up costs, accounting, and listing areas forfurther research on one's own. It also contains a fairly good list of resources the reader can turn to for further information on specific aspects business.

However, none of this makes up for the utter lack of good information on the creation, design, organization, and production of a quality newsletter to be found in this book. Only one useful line was devoted to choosing suitable desk top publishing software, computer hardware information was too general to the point of being useless, and absolutely no information or examples were given on newsletter formats, conventions, and types were given. Other than some of the business aspects (tax issues for subscription newsletters was blatantly omitted) behind running a newletter publishing business, everything was discussed in general terms. Moreover, any person of average intelligence already knows much of the information presented.

For those of you out there who are looking to start a business of some sort, think that newsletters are an easy way to make money, and know absolutely nothing about business, then by all means buy this book. Though the book had a (very) few good pieces of information, there was not enough to justify its list price. More advanced readers should skip this tome and buy Barbara Fanson's excellent guide to newsletter publishing.

It was obvious that this book contained quite a bit of boilerplate copy from another, or even possibly several, "home-based business" topic(s). In fact, I found "how-to" references that were not applicable to newsletter publishing in any way, shape or form, which indicated an extremely sloppy editing and proofing job. It was apparent that their approach was a serial publishing concept, in which they took the framework of the "how-to" and superimposed a variety of topics onto it, but what a rush job. . .and, in essence, a snow job.