Write Once, Distribute Many: The Content Publisher’s Dream

You spend days, weeks, sometimes months gathering your facts, composing your content, obtaining the necessary reviews and approvals, formatting the document, and, in most cases, either printing it to paper or creating a PDF so you can send it out.

And then the questions come:

• I don’t really need all of this. Can you send me only the pages I care most about?
• I’m about to get on a plane. Can I get this on my smartphone so I can read it there?
• I’d really like my whole team to see what you wrote. Can you put it all on the Web?

Sure! you say. Love to! But who has time to reformat all that content so it displays properly on all those different media? What you really need is a tool that can take what you wrote and automatically ready it for distribution in whatever ways your readers desire.

Fortunately, such tools actually do exist, and yours truly is about to take a snapshot of ‘what is,’ ‘what could be,’ and where the benefits accrue.

Please let me know, here or via a private message, if you have any experience with multichannel publishing – good or bad – and/or if there are particular vendors you’d like me to query. Depending upon the response, I’ll let you know what I find out.