The Business Blog at Intuitive.com

Dave Taylor has been involved with the online world since 1980 and is recognized globally as an expert on both technical and business issues. He has been published over a thousand times, launched four Internet-related startup companies, has written twenty business and technical books and holds both an MBA and MS Ed. He's a columnist for the Boulder Daily Camera and Linux Journal and frequently appears in other publications both online and in print. Additionally, Dave maintains four weblogs: The Business Blog at Intuitive.com, Ask Dave Taylor, Dave On Film, and GoFatherhood. Based in beautiful Boulder, Colorado, Dave is an award-winning speaker, sought after conference and workshop participant and frequent guest on radio and podcast programs, as well as active member of his community and busy single father to three children.

Who shares in the risk/reward of publishing books?

Unfortunately, he got lost in the world of "paradigm shifts" and his enthusiasm for the new, the different, and the adoption cycle (without remembering to call it that) and forgot to address what I believe is the fundamental question of this conference...

Tim's main point, I think, was that authors represent early adopters for technologies and that the role of book publishing is to ease the adoption of new technologies by the masses, to "reduce the learning curve." As Tim colorfully put it, "our job is to be midwives in the birth of a new paradigm."

The question of ebooks? "I certainly think that EverQuest is a great example of an online fantasy ebook." which is an intriguing perspective worth exploring in a different 'blog entry.

The problem I have with Tim's perspective on authorship is that getting closer and closer to the front edge of the adoption curve with technologies makes it harder and harder to differentiate what's going to be a success and what isn't. For every successful prediction about an up-and-coming technology, there are three where publishers, authors and even readers waste time learning, paying for and adopting ultimately dead technologies. Since the challenge of publishing is to try and simultaneously anticipate the future and reduce the risk of any individual publishing effort (and companies like the recently dead WROX demonstrate the dangers of focusing too much on one side to the exclusion of the other) it's disappointing that Tim didn't address that issue directly.

My personal view is that publishing needs to move into a place where authors have the option of choosing either to share the risk and have a potentially higher upside for riskier topics, or accept a lower upside/risk for more proven technology. It's a problem with the "artistic" view of writing: are authors part of the business of publishing, or are authors artists who should be compensated for their efforts by the publishing industry independent of the success of the book? To some extend I'm arguing advance/royalty versus work-for-hire, but there's a deeper issue here, and one that should be addressed here at the conference: are authors able to contribute to the improvement of the risk/reward picture for a book, or not?

More as the conference progresses...

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