About

A Unique Publishing Brand

Shoestring Venture is a new type of brand in the publishing industry that unites several various strands into a unique configuration. A series of books, videos, and online resources dedicated to an audience of bootstrap entrepreneurs, the Shoestring Venture brand includes:

• Mainstream book titles following standard distribution models
• Long-tail titles on obscure topics using innovative, new media distribution models
• Producer-driven titles

The key to the Shoestring Venture brand experience is that the series identifies a highly definable reader and user group, produces a series of mainstream titles that specifically address that audience’s needs, and then uses that brand platform to launch an entire series of producer-driven, low distribution, long-tail titles.

For the first time in publishing, we are producing a brand that offers long-tail selfpublishers a “multiplier” and offers the consumers of long-tail books a trusted brand.


How it Works:

The Shoestring Venture series of books, videos, and other resources specifi cally targets entrepreneurs running home-based or low-resource businesses. This audience is responsible for most if not all of the business’s decisions and requires resources that address their unique concerns, including limited budgets and the bootstrap economics of a self-funded business.

The series offers a set of mainstream resources that uniquely address the bootstrap entrepreneur’s situation, such as books on business plans, budgeting, e-commerce, setting up a Web site, etc.

However, many bootstrap entrepreneurs have specific, long-tail concerns, such as how to develop a product, how to make and use a planogram, how to use specific open-source software solutions, such as Boot Camp project management software. Resources on these issues are few and far between and the average consumer has no guarantee of quality.

Shoestring Venture, however, as a brand promises certain qualities that the consumer can trust – for both mainstream and long-tail books.

So the consumer can trust a Shoestring Venture producer-driven, long-tail title on such unique concerns such as planograms, open-source software, or making fitness videos for next to nothing.

To self-publishers, Shoestring Venture offers a trusted brand, a built-in audience, brand marketing, and “accelerators,” such as inclusion in the Shoestring Venture catalog. In exchange for a licensing fee and publishing costs, self- and vanity-publishers can gain a wider audience and a marketing boost.

The best analogy would be something like food service. An entrepreneur could always open an independent restaurant – or they could buy into a franchised brand, such as McDonalds or Olive Garden. That’s what we offer to self-published, long-tail authors and to the audience they want to reach.