Dave Gray Likes Iteration. With Both Books and Book Publishers
Yesterday I posted about Joshua Porter — the new archetype for self-published author. Porter has a contract with a legacy publisher but has enough followers on his blog that he can confidently publish on his own. Today I want to point to Dave Gray. Gray’s story is somewhat the opposite of Porter’s. Gray is the pioneer behind the ‘Unbook‘ or the book the author never finishes writing but publishes anyway. Last year Gray published version zero of a book called Marks and Meaning in unbook form.
He has now signed with O’Reilly to write The Visual Thinking Playbook with co-author Sunni Brown. I caught up with Gray here in Toronto as he unveiled the concepts behind an additional book called Knowledge Games. I asked Gray two questions 1) why he chose to publish the unbook in the first place and 2) and why books two and three went to legacy houses (i.e., seemingly not getting the unbook treatment). See his answers in the embedded video below.
P.S. Gray is a popular guy. I interviewed him outside the lecture hall at OCAD to avoid the crowd. The crowd then decided to follow us outside and stand right beside us as I captured this video.
P.P.S. Incidentally Gray’s lecture and his concepts for Knowledge Games are relevant to legacy book publishers. Particularly he talked about Robert MacArthur’s r/K selection theory and applied it to business. In a nutshell stable ecosystems tend be dominated by slow, large organisms with long life expectancy. Unstable ecosystems tend to reward different characteristics in a diverse population. Book publishers are clearly the incumbent species in the information economy and so on. Hopefully Dave will post on these parallels sometime soon.
shortish url for this post: http://indexmb.com/?p=2624
No Comments Yet