Review: Poor Richard's E-Mail Publishing

Poor Richard's E-Mail Publishing
by Chris Pirillo
Top Floor Publishing, 1999
Paperback, 334 pages

The book's subtitle, "Creating Newsletters, Bulletins, Discussion Groups, and Other Powerful Communication Tools" gives a pretty good idea what this book is about. The author is the publisher of the popular Lockergnome newsletter about computers. http://www.lockergnome.com While Stern and Priore's Email Marketing is aimed at using e-mail as a commercial marketing tool, Pirillo's E-Mail Publishing is much more interested in the communication that goes on between people on the Internet. The author compares the significance of publishing via the Internet with the invention of the printing press.

Business people, however, can learn a great deal from Poor Richard's E-Mail Publishing, since Pirillo goes into detail about all the elements that make for a successful newsletter or discussion list: formatting, listserver software, the role of the moderator, and subscribing and unsubscribing policies. Though the book is in its second year, the author still has helpful information on HTML newsletters, as he was one of the pioneers of this e-mail publishing format. One chapter discusses how to moderate an e-mail discussion list in such a way that it stays healthy and the moderator doesn't lose her sanity in the process.

Remaining chapters explain how to find a high-level list service, promote the newsletter, and make money from the list. These are followed by several chapters written by editors and moderators of well-known lists about their experience and learnings from the trenches. The book concludes with several appendices that detail service providers, mailing list software, online e-publishing resources, e-mail client programs, and mailing list e-mail commands for several popular listserver programs: Lsoft Listserv, Cren ListProc, Lyris, and Majordomo.

If you want to find out everything that's involved with setting up an e-zine or e-mail discussion list, this book is a great place to start.

You may purchase Poor Richard's E-Mail Publishing at a discount from Amazon.com through these links:
US: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0966103254/wilsoninternetse
CA: http://chapters.ca/Affiliates/ItemPage.asp?producttype=1&affid=104410&ISBN=0966103254
UK: http://amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0966103254/732
DE: http://amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/0966103254/wilsonweb
FR: http://amazon.fr/exec/obidos/ASIN/0966103254/wilsoninternet
JP: http://amazon.co.jp/exec/obidos/ASIN/0966103254/