When Innovations Collide: Digital, Healthcare, Marketing & Publishing

I spoke with long-time colleague of mine, Keith Boswell, about his new venture called Master Succeed.  I was intrigued by what Keith and his partner, Mikkel deMib Svendsen, have launched, because they are innovating on several fronts at once, and they are supporting health innovation at the same time.

Both the digital and publishing worlds are changing so rapidly, the modalities and traditional formats have not kept up.  Keith and Mikkel found this frustrating – specifically in that they both want to write e-books on high-demand professional topics, but they felt limited by the old-school requirements of page counts to fit in certain categories (they’ve been wanting to write shorter books, which fits many current readers’ needs as well).  They also noticed that the pioneering authors who are starting to write what Amazon.com calls “singles” (shorter business books) seem to only produce them as one-off efforts, promoted by author only – there is no real brand in the marketplace where you can find a solid selection of short, success-related e-books on business topics that you can “read on a flight”. Thus, Master Succeed was born.

Both Keith and Mikkel were originally part of a digital marketing agency called MarketLeap – when I joined Kaiser Permanente back in 2003, the digital marketing team was already working with MarketLeap, so I got to know Keith and Mikkel as our agency partners.  They are both seasoned digital marketing professionals, so they have presented, written and will be writing on an array of digital marketing topics, with some of them specifically tailored for healthcare, like Digital Marketing for Healthcare, while others, such as Search Engine Reputation Management, are useful for both healthcare and multiple other verticals.  They plan to publish multiple titles per year.  Another plus?  Master Succeed books are very affordable – they are charging $4.99 per title.  The books are available in Kindle format now (Kindle currently accounts for 85% of e-book readership), with other formats in the works.  I for one will be watching the Master Succeed team closely for new, exciting and useful content.

Hilary Weber, founder, Opportu Startup Leadership.  http://opportu.com/