Why Would Anything Old Enough To Be In The Public Domain Be Worth Anything Today?

Many people have the misconception that anything old enough to be in the Public Domain, (i.e. old enough to have had its copyright protection expire) isn’t worth anything today. There is no way anyone would be interested in something that some joker wrote 100 or even 50 years ago.

I love this one because it’s just not true and people that think this way have blinders on that keep them from seeing the enormous potential of Public Domain material.

These people think that that a work written before 1923 won’t have any relevance today and you may feel the same way, however here is the truth of the matter.

Ever since the beginning of time, mankind has been dealing with essentially the same issues no matter how far we think we have advanced.

It makes no difference whether you were born in 1874 or 1974 you still essentially have the same problems to solve and challenges to overcome. For instance, you may want to:

1. Learn ways to raise your kids better
2. Learn how to improve your relationship with your spouse or other loved ones
3. Learn how to become more successful in your business dealings
4. Learn how to make more money or how to handle your finances better
5. Learn how to save time by doing certain things more efficiently
6. Learn how to do something quicker and easier than you can do it now, thereby avoiding effort.

You get the idea. We’re not that different really than we were 100 years ago. There are still today millions of people on the internet searching for ideas that will help them improve their marriages, or help them advance in their careers, or help them achieve a better quality of life physically, spiritually, and emotionally.

Sure, fads come and go. Nobody cares about hoola-hoops anymore, but there are lots of timeless “evergreen” subjects that people pursued way back that are still pursued today.

There weren’t such things as computers back in 1935 (at least not like we have today) so you won’t find any books written about them from back then but there are plenty of ideas that you will be find that can be very easily carried over into the digital age. What are chat rooms and blogs if nothing more than just more modern mediums for human communication?

Much of what lies on the realm of Public Domain is still relevant today.

For the purposes of information publishing and this discussion, it must be understood that I am speaking exclusively of non-fiction works not fiction. Public Domain fiction gas a place too but we’ll leave that for another discussion.

Any type of “how-to” book could potentially be a goldmine if positioned properly.

How-to type books are where the money is at – these sell really, really well as long as there is a demand in the marketplace for the subject of the book. How-to books are the easiest type of books to repackage as information products.

By how-to books I am referring to any book or course that takes a specific topic and breaks it down into step-by-step detail, with or without lots of pictures, and shows the reader how to do something they are interested in.

Here are some examples of how-to type books:

1. How to improve your fly-fishing skills
2. How to grow a vegetable garden
3. How to play the guitar
4. How to improve your golf swing
5. How to boost your self-confidence
6. How to make money in the stock market
7. How to train your dog

The more specific the topic, better. For instance:

1. How to take 3 strokes off of your golf game by improving your swing
2. How to get your dog to stop barking all night long
3. How to grow 10 pound tomatoes in your own backyard

People love step-by-step instruction showing them how to do something they are interested in. In my opinion, being able to provide this how-to type of information is the key to success in information publishing.

Of course before you try to start marketing a book on “How to grow 10 pound tomatoes in your own backyard” you have to make sure that there is a hungry market for that topic.

If nobody is looking for that particular info then it is a waste of time to develop a product about it. You have to be able to determine the demand in the marketplace for a particular subject before you send a lot of time developing a product.

There are hundreds of thousands of great how-to books in the Public Domain that can be republished for profit right now and sold to an almost unlimited number of niche markets.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that just because a book was written 100 years ago means that it is worthless today.

In fact, I have found quite the contrary. A book written 100 years ago will surely contain “long lost secrets”, and if you market it this way, people will eat it up.

Also, I have found that people had a tendency to write better back then. Today, we are all so busy, distracted with this and that, our minds being dulled by the television screen.

People placed much more importance on communication skills in past decades, the farther back you go, the more you will find this to be true. They wrote better, they are more skilled at expressing ideas and teaching. You can use this to your advantage over and over again.

I once heard someone say, “What’s old is new, and what’s new is old.” Think about that for a little while. There is truly nothing new under the sun.

People have been dealing with the same basic issues for centuries, writers have been writing about how to deal with these same basic issues for centuries. You have a large body of work that you can pull from to help people solve their problems.

You can always update it, freshen it up a bit, and put your own spin on it - but either way most of the heavy lifting has already been done for you – take advantage of that!

Until next time,