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The Fan Economy: Becoming Fan Focused

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:13:55 +1100

The Fan Economy: Becoming Fan Focused View more documents from Bud Caddell.

How to best package higher education

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:40:24 +1100

Inside Higher Ed details how “skill training” is delivered at Kellogg Community College in Michigan. This is a story of breaking up the standard way that postsecondary education is packaged. …

Collective Intelligence and E-Learning 2.0: Implications of Web-Based Communities and Networking

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:00:17 +1000

Collective Intelligence and E-Learning 2.0: Implications of Web-Based Communities and Networking:

I am pleased to announce the book, “Collective Intelligence and E-learning 2.0: Implications of Web-Based Communities and Networking,” that I co-edited with Professor Harrsion Hao Yang…

If Craigslist cost $1

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:47:30 +1000

If Craigslist cost $1:

Some things are better when they’re not free.

If Craigslist charged a dollar for every listing, what would happen?

Well, the number of bogus listings and repetitive listings would plummet, making…

'Chronicle' Readers Debate the Merits of Online Learning

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:01:16 +1000

'Chronicle' Readers Debate the Merits of Online Learning:

The debate over how online courses compare with face-to-face ones is old. But readers were quick to re-engage it in response to a Chronicle article today that reported on the findings of a …

joshkaufman: "On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction." http://su.pr/1SFFR5

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 14:01:57 +1000

joshkaufman: "On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction." http://su.pr/1SFFR5:

joshkaufman: “On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.” http://su.pr/1SFFR5

cpaaustralia: Ideally a would-be protégé should build up a team of mentors from all areas of their life...MIT Sloan Review http://bit.ly/xeTUp ^ZH

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 20:12:57 +1000

cpaaustralia: Ideally a would-be protégé should build up a team of mentors from all areas of their life...MIT Sloan Review http://bit.ly/xeTUp ^ZH:

Shared by nigelburke
Substitute peer group for team of mentors?

cpaaustralia: Ideally a would-be protégé should build up a team of mentors from all areas of their life…MIT Sloan Review…

Open Textbooks Gaining Ground: Flat World in 400 Colleges

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 20:12:56 +1000

Open Textbooks Gaining Ground: Flat World in 400 Colleges:

Do you remember college and all the textbooks you couldn’t sell back to the bookstore? I do. I own one of the most expensive doorstop collections in existence. For this very reason, Flat…

P2P U., an Experiment in Free Online Education, Opens for Business

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 15:18:04 +1000

P2P U., an Experiment in Free Online Education, Opens for Business:

A group of professors and graduate students from around the world has started a new university of their own online, with an unusual model that is more like a book group than a traditional course.

…

Education at the crossroads

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 16:56:55 +1000

Education at the crossroads:

Actually, there isn’t one, there are three choices that anyone offering higher education is going to have to make.

Should this be scarce or abundant?

MIT and Stanford are starting to make classes…

How To Get Into Business School

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 16:56:55 +1000

How To Get Into Business School:

Matt Symonds on Forbes, 05 Aug 2009

Applications to business school are up. Way, way up. The economic downturn, the demographic boom of Gen Y and … dare we whisper it? A handful of top…

Bits of Destruction Hit the Book Publishing Business: Part 4

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:15:00 +1000

Bits of Destruction Hit the Book Publishing Business: Part 4:

Bits of Destruction Hit the Book Publishing Business: Part 4

Written by Bernard Lunn / August 17, 2009 1:11 PM / 2 Comments « Prior Post Next Post »

In this fourth part of our investigation into the ongoing changes in the book publishing business, we look at the author’s point of view. What are they getting today? What would they like to get? What can they reasonably expect to get as this drama unfolds? Authors are the creative juice of the whole eco-system. If they don’t create material that people want to read, no one will make any money.

Their struggles in the old model have been well documented (of course, we should have expected them to write about their experiences): the starving writer up in the garret who uses rejection letters from publishers for wallpaper is an established literary hack. In the new world of print on demand, e-books and social media marketing, the author takes center stage. Those with an appetite for it can really take control of their work and commercial fortune.

Part 4 in Our Series

In Part 1, we looked at the three big waves crashing down on the traditional book publishing business: Google Search, e-books, and print on demand. In Part 2, we tried a bit of science fiction, speculating on how this might play out for all participants: readers, authors, printers, publishers, retailers, and e-book device vendors. In Part 3, we looked at the economics of returnability and the impact of the Espresso Book Machine on the supply chain. In Part 4 here, we focus on authors, without whom we would have nothing to read.

Narrative or Reference?

The impact of digitization depends on the type of book you’re talking about:

Narrative books, such as novels, biographies and other stories. The printed book is an ideal format for narrative books. Amazon had to recreate the print-reading experience to make the Kindle work for narrative books. Using an e-book device scores on many counts: choice, delivery, price (possibly), storage; but whether it beats the experience of reading a good old fashioned book is still unclear. In any case, narrative books are not well suited to typical online or mobile devices. Reading a novel on a laptop browser or iPhone is a degraded experience.
Reference books, such as education, scientific/technical/medical, and business books. Historically, these have been squeezed into the book format because no better alternative existed. The online experience could be far better than print in this case. Online, you can search, link to related works, drill down into details, see and hear rich media, etc.

Thus, we expect the impact of digitization will be much bigger and more immediate on reference books than on narrative books. Both will be affected, but reference books may see a music industry-style wave of change, while the change to narrative books may be slower and more nuanced.

New or Established Author?

This is another huge factor. This quote from an excellent report by Gilbane on “Beyond E-Books” says a lot about the business from the author’s perspective:

“During the 2009 O’Reilly TOC Conference, Jason Fried of 37signals described the book that he and his colleagues had written based on lessons learned from creating and servicing their successful project management and collaboration product named Basecamp. They published their book with Lulu.com and report sales of almost $500,000 in the last several years. This enabled them to reach number three on the Lulu bestseller list at one point. Ideally, this story would have a happy ending, and they would publish their next book with Lulu.com. Alas, the success of their previous book motivated a traditional publisher to offer them a significant advance for their second book. The offer was too tempting to refuse. They now have to hope that the traditional economic model, with 10 to 20% royalties, will generate more than Lulu.com’s 80-20 split. In essence, they are wagering that the traditional publisher will be able to sell at least four times the number of books that Lulu.com would have sold.

“When asked about this, Young was nonplussed. He simply stated that his goal was to publish their third book and to make them loyal authors in the future. It is his number one goal to help his authors become successful.”

This will be music to the ears of traditional publishers. They can leave first-time authors to self-publish via print on demand (POD), because once the authors are established, they will want the kudos, branding, and distribution that only traditional publishers can deliver.

Well, perhaps. We are still in the very early stages of this wave of change.

Get Me Into the Book Store

Publication doesn’t feel real to an author until they see their book in a traditional bookstore. Seeing it on Amazon.com is nice, but everyone knows that shelf space is unlimited online. The real prize is occupying scarce shelf space at Barnes & Nobel and independent bookstores. What the author wants to know from their publisher is, “How are you going to get me into that bookstore?”

Pure online players will respond with something along the lines of, “Well, if a lot of readers find you online, then enough of them will buy your book for a traditional publisher to become interested in you, and then that publisher will get you into bookstores.” That is a relatively weak answer.

But the traditional model of stuffing shelves with “returnable” books, many of which end up getting shredded by the publisher, is clearly unsustainable, as we explored in Part 3.

How this will play out is far from clear. But one thing is clear: the landscape will look quite different.

And Do It NOW!

If you are writing a timeless classic, then the traditional three- to four-month lag between the completion of the manuscript and the book’s appearance in bookstores is fine. If you are writing about something timely, that just won’t cut it anymore. Bloggers and online writers will steal your thunder before your book hits the shelves. The immediacy of print on demand and e-books eliminates this time lag.

Write About What You Know

Writers do love to write, so it is not surprising that some are starting to document their experiences in the new world of POD and e-books. One that caught our eye is Literary Adventures in POD, but there are many more.

Literary Agent 2.0

In the old model, first-time authors usually had to find an agent, who then found a publisher. This site has good FAQs on the process and on deals.

These relationships — between author and agent, and agent and publisher — are often very personal. As such, they can be totally wonderful or totally awful, and there are plenty of tales of both. They are typical “Let’s do lunch” relationships. So, bringing Web technology to this match-making experience is logical; one venture that has done this is Creative Byline.

Four Big Changes for Authors

Fewer advances. The lack of an advance will be compensated for by…
A bigger share of the pie. We expect this to grow from 10% to 30% (or more) of the retail price. The retail price will likely drop, too, and so authors will have to…
Create the finished product themselves. Authors will have to pay for cover art and editing out of pocket, as well as…
Become savvier about online marketing. A lot of tools are out there: social media, affiliate networks, email lists, SEO/SEM, and so on. Some authors will leave this up to intermediaries (the next form of publishers), and some will do it themselves.

The future of authors can thus be summed up as: do more of the work, get a bigger percentage of the retail price (which will be lower), and hustle online.

If they say it's a $99 value, and they give it to you for free, the real value is $0. (via @jasonfried)

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:21:14 +1000

If they say it's a $99 value, and they give it to you for free, the real value is $0. (via @jasonfried):

Ross Hill

If they say it’s a $99 value, and they give it to you for free, the real value is $0. (via @jasonfried)

13 hours ago from Twitter - Comment -

Business Schools And Edupunks

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:35:50 +1000

Business Schools And Edupunks:

I am grateful to Janet Clarey, industry analyst at Brandon Hall, for distributing a link to this Fast Company article, How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education.

Photo: The Social Media Book Bubble

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 18:14:30 +1000

Photo: The Social Media Book Bubble:

I shot the photo above last weekend at my local bookstore. Barnes and Noble is featuring a special table of titles devoted to social media.

When I first spotted the table I did a…

"To survive in this market of courses and degrees, a supplier will have to package “the..."

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:04:57 +1000

“To survive in this market of courses and degrees, a supplier will have to package “the product” to fit in the traditional ways any product must fit, student-consumer lives. Competitive community dynamics will emerge—whose course lets you interact with the most useful, entertaining, and compatible, socially skilled and nice, community. The learning community may emerge as the ultimate competitive advantage to any course, not the “materials”. We will end up selling powerful communities against each other. Who can assemble, year in and year out such communities will win such competitions if that is the way this goes.”

- http://feeds.chronicle.com/~r/chronicle/wiredcampus/~3/D1YYcRIEpos/

The marginalized training function

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 17:54:26 +1000

The marginalized training function:

Tony Karrer clarifies his comments about traditional training becoming “marginalized”, which is worth a full read but I’d like to pick up on this comment:

If you look at what makes a good…

Litmos: Online Training Management That Needs Improvement

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:50:37 +1000

Litmos: Online Training Management That Needs Improvement:

Affiliated with both Rackspace and BizSpark and armed with an aggressive PR strategy, Litmos is an online training management app suite poised for a big splash in the startup pool.

…

Ten Leading Indicators of Organizational Success

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 18:12:08 +1000

Ten Leading Indicators of Organizational Success:

Many metrics exists to focus an organization on important organizational objectives and drive the company forward. Key organizational metrics are more controversial. Many organizations will…

What is the Edgeless University exactly?

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 14:34:50 +1000

What is the Edgeless University exactly?:

I blogged recently about the launch of Demos’ report The edgeless university: why higher education must embrace technology. At the launch, the author, Peter Bradwell, contended that UK…