I wanted to share with you the summer project I have been working on.
Today, O’Reilly released my new project Every Book is a Startup: The New Business of Publishing. The primary case I am making is that we need to bring back entrepreneurship back to book publishing. We need more experiments. We need to learn from the world of startups.
And we are taking the same advice I give in the book and changing how a book normally gets published.
The initial release of Every Book Is A Startup is priced at $4.99. The initial release of this project discusses two core ideas–“Black Swans and Long Tails” and “Help The Heroes.” You could look at this as our “minimum viable product”. The price will go up as we add more “features”. The cool part is that if you buy now, you get all of the updates for free.
If you have been following my writings on publishing here on the blog, you’ll like the book and I hope you’ll buy a copy.
Every Book Is a Startup is available exclusively on oreilly.com while we build the book.
There is a interview on O’Reilly Radar where I talk about how publishing can learn from tech startups.
I have also setup a site at GetSatisfaction to gather your thoughts and let you interact with the ideas of other readers. Your feedback is critical for the creation of the rest of the book.
I hope you’ll buy a copy of Every Book Is a Startup, read it, and share the project with others.
Thanks for your help in advance with my summer project and I hope your summer projects are going well too.
Congratulations Todd! I’ll be grabbing a copy soon. At $4.99, I’ve gotta get it, though I would have paid $20 for your insights (don’t tell O’Reilly, ok).
Bravo!
Todd – I am very interested in your project and your approach here. I’ll be an early $4.99 buyer here in a minute.
I’m in the middle of writing my second book through a traditional publisher right now. You nail it perfectly as a “waterfall” development process. There has got to be a better way and it seems the Lean Startup methodology has something to teach us here.
I like the idea of the variable pricing, where early buyers are getting a lower price because they are “investing” in the concept of the book, it seems.
Todd, I attended your O’Reilly TOC webinar on this topic and loved it. Got my mind churning enough to blog about it and send the link around to my Cal Writer’s Book club, the Redwood Writers. Thanks for your provocative thinking. http://amctigue.wordpress.com/
Amanda,
I am glad you liked the webinar and I liked how you connected it to a whole bunch of other ideas.
Very cool!