Entrepreneur designs career around Photoshop - Military Careers, Second Careers - Air Force Times

Entrepreneur designs career around Photoshop

LOS ANGELES — You can’t get rich writing computer books. Advances are low, and the lifespan of the book is short.

But you can get rich — ask Scott Kelby — by turning the book model on its head and expanding it into a $20 million-a-year empire.

Kelby’s books have topped Nielsen BookScan’s computer and photo categories for three years. But he has much more on his plate than the eight books he’ll write this year.

There are also magazines (he publishes three), a highly rated weekly video podcast, seminars and conferences (more than 65 a year) and the 65,000-member association he runs, all devoted to his favorite subject: Adobe Photoshop software.

“I wish I could tell you that there was a master plan,” says Kelby, 44. “That we had it all worked out. The reality is, one thing led to another.”

Kelby is a former rock musician who switched careers after 12 years to open a graphic design shop with his wife. On the side, the Florida resident started a local newsletter for Apple Macintosh aficionados. Then he decided to self-publish a book of fun things to do with Adobe’s Photoshop imaging software: “Down and Dirty Photoshop Tricks.”

That book sold a very respectable 22,000 copies and led to a distribution deal with Peachpit Press. Forty-three books later, Kelby’s books have in aggregate sold more than 1 million copies. His best sellers are “The Photoshop Book for Digital Photographers” (350,000 copies) and “The iPod Book: Doing Cool Stuff with the iPod and the iTunes Music Store” (more than 275,000 copies).

Now, Kelby is a journalist, publisher, podcast star (his Photoshop TV is the second-highest-rated tech podcast on Apple’s iTunes, with more than 3 million downloads monthly), teacher, businessman and association president with extremely close ties to Photoshop maker Adobe Systems. He gets software releases months ahead of time, and Adobe heavily promotes his seminars.

Kelby admits that what’s good for Adobe is good for him, and vice versa. But he insists that if a new version of Photoshop were a flop, he’d say so.

“If I say differently, my credibility is shot,” he says.

In his writing, Kelby “has said he didn’t like (certain) features, and that’s his prerogative,” says John Loiacono, general manager of Adobe’s Creative Solutions unit, which oversees Photoshop. “If he gets it wrong, we’ll call him on it, but the reality is, he can say anything he wants.”

USA TODAY caught up with Kelby in Los Angeles at his first seminar for Photoshop Lightroom, a $300 software program released in February that helps professional photographers manage large photo collections. Eight hundred people showed up, at $99 a pop.

Including revenue from sponsors such as Canon, Hewlett-Packard and the B&H photo retail chain, the seminar generated more than $100,000, says David Moser, chief operations officer for KW Media Group, the umbrella organization that oversees Kelby’s businesses.

Seminar attendee Marvin Derezin, a professor of medicine at UCLA, spends hours working with his digital camera and Photoshop. “I’ve fallen asleep at many a medical lecture, but he kept me riveted all day,” Derezin says of Kelby. “It’s like a postgraduate class in photography.”

Derezin is a member of Kelby’s National Association of Photoshop Professionals, which offers members free magazine subscriptions, product and seminar discounts and Photoshop tech support.

Kelby is a Photoshop master, but he says that Lightroom slowed him down this year. While writing eight books sounds like a lot, many are updates of older books. Most are based on Photoshop, or Apple’s iPod music player. He knocks them out in two to three weeks.

But his just-released “The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book for Digital Photographers” (New Riders, $39.99) took four months and was brand new. “I had to rewrite it four times, because I was learning the software as Adobe was making changes before release,” he says.

His efforts have paid off with another bestseller. The book is currently No. 1 in Nielsen’s photography category.

Seven easy steps

Matt Wagner, a New York literary agent who represents computer book authors, says the key to Kelby’s success is that he used the books as a base.

“Computer books don’t sell like they used to,” he says. “Bookstores stock fewer of them, because so much information is available on the Internet.”

He says the average advance for computer books ranges from $5,000 to $15,000 and that only a handful of writers make big money.

When Kelby isn’t on the road doing seminars or private consultations (the photo teams at the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are clients), he begins his day at home writing, then goes to the office in the afternoon for meetings. He likens himself to a restaurant critic.

“I find a place I love and want to tell people about it,” he says. “Same thing with Photoshop tips. When I discover a cool tip, I can’t keep it to myself.”

His idea of relaxing, he says, is watching sports in front of the TV with a portable computer on his lap. He says he often freezes the action with his TiVo to scrutinize an image, as he did recently when a spot for Sony’s PlayStation 3 aired.

“They had this really cool logo, and it was obviously done in Photoshop,” he says. “I had to figure out how they did it — in seven easy steps. That’s my life.”