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The challenge: Reverse the bad fortunes of a retired real estate investor attempting to market his own book.

The solution: Throw the book out, as it were, and start from scratch.

The skinny: Many times in my life I’ve had ideas that I thought would revolutionize the world only to be humbled by reality: Either I was the only one who shared my optimism for the idea or everyone else in the world had already made the idea work for them.

So when Henry, a retired property manager and real estate investor, called me one day with his idea, I politely declined. He had written a guide for the prospective home buyer, for which he wanted to charge $12 a copy. In fact he had already tried, unsuccessfully, to market the booklet through ads in the real estate sections of newspapers across the country. He was spending thousands and getting nowhere.

He thought a website would be the answer. I declined to build the site because everyone else had already thought of the idea. A quick search revealed that nearly every real estate broker, mortgage banker and attorney on the Internet had something on their sites dealing with the same issues Henry addressed in his book. And their information was free.

Henry insisted there was competition everywhere and in the end I did as he asked and then some. I had an associate redo the cover of the book and I rewrote the introduction. Both moves were designed to relax the reader in preparation for a very matter-of-fact read. I left the content of the book as is. The author believes his delivery style is valid in light of all the fluff that’s on the market.

Some compromises were made to keep costs down. The entire site is only 8 pages and a canned e-commerce solution was used. Yet the entire message is delivered quickly and with an upbeat tone.