Comments on: Turning the Silo of Risk on Its Side

By: INDEX // mb - A Dating Service For Authors to Meet Publishers

INDEX // mb - A Dating Service For Authors to Meet Publishers — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 14:02:20 +0000

[...] couple of months back I posted about pairing editors and authors. Protagonize’s Nick Bouton pointed me to AdHack.com. “Similar concept in a different [...]

By: mb

mb — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 15:52:18 +0000

@Nick — Agreed. Having the platform take a cut is complicated. Better it stay out of the transaction altogether. Offer the ability to connect for free and then offer a complimentary service — like an analytics layer — for a fee. The ‘motherflippin’ stats party’ over at Bandcamp.com [http://bandcamp.com/] is one example that comes to mind.

By: Nick Bouton

Nick Bouton — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 23:10:29 +0000

Mark, definitely a novel idea (no pun intended.)

There are platforms out there for this kind of crowdsourced project collaboration in both the more general sense (for which a specific example escapes me right now, but I’ve seen before) and the more specific (check out AdHack.com, similar concept in a different vertical.)

It’s similar to the way you can go onto the various freelancer sites out there with an RFP and put a team together quickly based on bids from various freelance vendors, but focused into the publishing world. It seems to me the biggest challenge would be building up a user base and promoting enough to see a sustainable amount of volume passing through the site, mind you.

Monetizing the vehicle for this collaboration would be difficult, from my point of view. Would you suggest that the site in question takes a cut of the finished product in some way, or just a flat fee? It’d be hard to capture those percentages, especially in the case of royalties.

-nick / protagonize

By: Hugh McGuire

Hugh McGuire — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 18:21:51 +0000

Yes, right up the alley of what’s in the works at Book Oven. We’re not there yet, but hope to get there soon!

By: mb

mb — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 17:36:24 +0000

@John — I am starting with the premise that most (if not all) artists need someone to invest either time or attention in their career. That investment can be as simple as spreading the word. And that investment can be spread amongst a group of people or it can live — like in the old model — with a particular company or organization.

If you don’t agree with that principle then my thesis is indefensible.

But if you do then the idea of risk or downside on time or money spent (that currently is siloed with the publisher) doesn’t go away. It can be lessened and shared and parsed and ignored but whatever model is chosen it still needs to provide an incentive to create.

By: John Maxwell

John Maxwell — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 16:21:47 +0000

But aren’t notions like “the silo of risk” and the need to raise funding for a publishing project artifacts of the industrial/manufacturing paradigm that’s define publishing for the past 500 years (indeed, this was Gutenberg’s real innovation)? This is the model where publishing=financing: raising capital, then driving production/distribution economies of scale in order to recoup a profit. Seems to me the interesting trend is toward a world of culture and literature which isn’t capital intensive anymore; what the Internet potentially gives us. We may have major work to do re-organizing the filters, but I wonder if holding on to the industrial models isn’t missing the bigger point.