Monday, December 8, 2008

Dan Menaker Knows The Book Score!

Q&A with former Random House EIC Dan Menaker

I really hate linking to anything HarperCollins, but this interview is with someone so sharp, so bright, it'd be criminal of me not to.

It's his closing reply that is Killer:
Can you envision a future in which people would simply self-publish online without the help of an editor or publisher?

No, but I can and do see something closer to this than the model we have now, which appears at the moment to be breaking up like Arctic ice. I see consortiums of writers or single, bankable writers selling their books, e-books, directly--especially if the techies can come up with non-print-outable and non-forwardable texts--and paying editors and publicists and marketers to help them with editing and marketing. No more 15% royalties--each sale, at, say, $9.95, might well mean $8 or $9 revenues for the author. Probably can't happen exactly that way, though: bootlegging and all.

Emphasis added by me.

Exactly!

This guy is brilliant. He knows of Ted Nelson and Nassim Taleb!

Go run over there and read!

No comments: