June 2010
5 posts
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Richard Nash weighs in on publishing's identity,...
OK, so it wasn’t in fact tomorrow when I supplied my discussion of what a two-sided marketplace entails. As we all know, executing plans takes priority over talking about them, so some plans had to be executed, sorry for the hold-up!
It in fact proved to be a useful little gap, in that during the intervening time, two very interesting items appeared on the Internets. The first exemplifies the...
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Declaration of rights: The author lays his cards...
Publishing is the last genteel media business. How can you tell? It’s in the contracts.
Outside of adaptation sales, most authors will never see a half-inch thick set of the onerous, even punitive, terms that are the norm in film or music production. My first contract with a small Canadian press was three pages. One day, not long after signing, my dog literally ate it. The publisher gladly sent...
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Richard Nash weighs in on publishing's identity,...
Odd as it sounds, let’s perhaps avoid making this print vs digital conversation. Though the transition to digital methods of creation, transformation, distribution and consumption of media is not at all a red herring, it is also not always the best lens through which to look at the changes in producer and consumer behavior. For one, the digital transformation of publishing is now already...
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Publishng: Thoughts on Transparency,...
During the team’s last conference call, we were talking about transparency—about how much of the backstage business of our publishing venture should be carried out in public. Should the process of this book coming together be, in effect, a reality show? At some point I blurted out, “I mean, does anybody really give a shit about this stuff?”
This got a laugh, but I should...
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Is this a crisis of identity or an identity...
The three most significant conversations that I had during and/or leading up to BEA this year were:
First, about strategy. And, more specifically, about the gaming industry and how they’ve moved (or are in the process of shifting) from charging everyone for software to giving out software for free, then using their now wired consoles to glean data about usage. As people try out a new...
