Tag Archives: POD to Mainstream

The Publisher in the Value Chain 2009 Edition

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Eoin Purcell

This is what I said before
Back in 2006 I wrote a piece called The Publisher in the Value Chain. It was a response to a post by Rob Jones over at Snowbooks. The bones of the case I put forward was in the conclusion:

In publishing the price of writing a book was always low, but now the price of making a book is to all intents and purposes free too. Publishing it costs nothing now if you use a trick like lulu.com and very little if you use self-publishing services like Xlibris, Trafford.com or even Blurb.com. The Publisher will still be needed to absorb the risk because the risk has not going away, it is just changing, shifting and moving along the value chain from printing and design to marketing and distribution.

A few pieces recently have offered alternative interpretations and, times have also changed so I thought it was an apt time for thinking this through some more.

What has changed: Distribution
Well to begin on the digital and ebook side with we now have the models of distribution that we lacked in 2006. I’m not saying that this didn’t exist in 2006, because they did, rather than the last 2 and half years have seen the arrival of mass market type offerings in these areas.

Apple’s iPhone Apps (available from their App Store which is part of their iTunes service) have proved to be excellent platforms for throwing books at people and developers have mind the public domain for free (and paid for) content to supply to interested parties.

This market has only truly been made possible by the enormous success of the iPhone itself. In some senses too the ebook/iPhone Apps publishing market is an accidental creation unlike the music downloads and iTunes which was a deliberate strategy.

Amazon has launched the Kindle and just this past week bought Lexcycle makers of the Stanza App. They have previously launched their own iPhone app to try and capture some of the market that Apple sneakily and rather unexpectedly took from them (well I’m sure that is how they see it!)

There is also the very often overlooked Sony Reader that nonetheless seems to be doing alright and recently entered a partnership with Google to present 500,000 public books on the Reader.

And that brings us to Google itself whose Books Search project has reached an almost incredible position compared to its 2006 incarnation. With some 7 million books scanned and an agreement close to being locked in (though there are some problems with this deal from many viewpoints, lots of which elicit my sympathy) GBS is a beast that cannot be ignored, even if the two most successful distribution models to date are Apple’s and Amazon’s.

But leaving aside the questions it is pretty clear from this brief survey that a whole ecosystem for distribution is being created ebooks and digital content.

What has changed: Marketing
The change here is not as convincing I would suggest as it has been in distribution. Several very excellent sites have started to aggregate both information and readers. LibraryThing is my favourite bit other such as Goodreads, Shelfari and newer entrants like Book Army and FiledBy. Michael Cairns has a good post on this type of Curation as he calls it.

What hasn’t changed?
But the truth remains and is perhaps even more true that as I noted in 2006 by way of Mark Cuban:

Because in an ala carte world, the cost of reaching an audience is outrageous. And consumers arent ready to pay the freight to receive that programming.

As I have said before, the movie market is ala carte. Look at which content rises to the top in terms of revenues from consumers and visibility. The content from the biggest companies who have spent the most money to market .

In the book world, our products cost less than movies, but one movie visit (no including the extras) costs about the same as a decent book (though most paperback fiction is slightly cheaper). The revenue per title is considerably lower than most studio’s revenue per movie so our marketing budgets are commensurately lower, but our strategies are pretty much the same. Reach large audiences and spend money to get them to buy your books.

Visibility and discoverability are still the essential parts to the jigsaw. No-one, except perhaps Google who are indexing the content of all the books they scan, is in a position to change the game on this point. Certainly not the single author whose only hope is that a good blog and outreach will result in attention. For one in ten thousand of fewer it may well achieve that as Seth Godin eloquently points out, the 9,999 who miss out never even get heard of!

To market a book you still need money, you still need a distribution system that shuffles deadwood from warehouse to store (and back when necessary) yes in certain limited cases Print-on-Demand will float but for books that are selling by the thousands that is hardly a viable way forward. You need a sales force and you need know how. You need post release press attention that dedicated pr associates have drummed up and high profile editors have garnered by way of long term contacts.

In short you need someone who spreads risk across multiple authors so that taking a bath on three and losing a little on four can be offset by winning on one and breaking even on two.

Google might yet change the game, but that change will only be as random as internet popularity always is. What is more as Pete Waterman might explain in depth, Internet Stardom does not equal big paychecks!

And even if they do, authors will still need a partner to exploit the opportunities created by attention. They’ll need the ability and contacts I’ve just described or else the attention will go to waste. It may be that Amazon, Google and apple will step up to the plate but right now, that link is Traditional Trade Publishing.

Conclusions for 2009
And so, two and a half years on, where is the publisher in the publishing value chain? I think that Mark Coker has it partly right when he compares Publishers to VCs in his blog post over at Smashwords. We are the financiers of all the risk. That much has not changed.

Where he gets it wrong is in his follow up post about how the risk and the reward has shifted towards the author. The author cannot afford to absorb this risk and so he/she will fail to reap the reward.

The mantra of Cuban, remains accurate and doesn’t look like changing any time soon.

Clinging to the end of the value chain!
Eoin

SXSW – Far From The Madding Crowd

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Eoin Purcell

Twitter it up
There has been extensive coverage of the New Think For Old Publishers panel at SXSW on 14 March. By most accounts it was a complete and utter disaster for publishers. Here’s a sample of opinion more here, here and here

As per usual Kassia krozer @ Booksquare summed both sides up pretty well in my view:

Let me be clear. Absolutely clear. Not one word spoken in that session, either from the panelists or from the audience, was new or innovative. The panel, well, we’ve all heard job descriptions before. The audience? That was one very long line of people saying the same things we’ve been saying to the publishing industry for ten years. And yet the publishing people treated our comments as if they were items to be added to a list.

It got me thinking?
What do we as publishers actually want to change? Are we, like the frustrated audience members angry at things in the industry that we would see change? In an ideal world where we got to direct digital change what would we like that change to be? Would authors join us in this campaign?

What would publishers do?
I think most publishers would like a simple platform that allowed them to offer their content online and be paid up-front for it. That seems easy doesn’t it. Except our cousins in newspaper land have lost their lunch trying to monetize their content online and almost all of them have surrendered to free service with ads and most of them are failing even with that.

What’s more the book is pretty much the most simple platform there is right now and lots of people like it. So moving away from it seems a little wild for most publishers. On top of that authors don’t seem keen to hang round waiting for the digital world to start rewarding them either. Whenever a book deal presents itself, bloggers and journalists all take them.

Where does that leave us for digital distribution and selling? Well e-commerce is nice, except you get Amazon and its crazy glitches and its harsh terms. On the other hand, ebooks seem to be starting to break through but you still have to deal with Amazon for those too!

Of course you might take the perspective that if we were to drive digital change, we would drive it along a path that gave our books (content) more attention (such tools even exist). If we were to drive change we would use it to sell more books directly to our customers in order to learn about them at the customer level and so tailor our products to their taste and their pocket. If we could drive digital we would build communities about our content and aggregate content from other publishers to help support our own. But then I’m just talking crazy!

Maybe I am talking crazy but
The problem I have with the current penchant for beating publishers up is threefold:

1) Many publishers (not to mention authors) are doing some pretty amazing things. Tor is building a wonderful, engaged and exciting community of readers around SF&F, Osprey have already done so around Military History. Penguin have spent a small fortune on trying new tools for reading and writing fiction. Macmillan and Random and Harper have all embraced blogs and Facebook and twitter and the web in general seeking new audiences, fresh feedback and platforms for their authors.

2) Despite the urge for the new, it doesn’t yet pay for itself and it may never do so. Andrew Keen is right about that if nothing else. Without money, artists will not create and currently the system that rewards both the artistic and the serious (or not serious) non-fiction author is breaking (if not entirely broken) and the chances of fixing it anytime soon are slim. Unless we revert to older methods of financing art and journalism, campaign funding, endowments, patronage and subscription (all being tried in modest enough [and a few large scale] ways) we may lose something pretty valuable.

3) Radicals are not always right. Even if we might accept that in this case it seems like digital is the way forward, that doesn’t mean publishers will survive the shift. Its not unreasonable of them to be reluctant to leap when right now there is a damaged but viable system in place that delivers unspectacular but solid enough revenues and profit figures.

To wrap it up!
Which leads me to my final thought, despite my own leaning towards a digital future, it is still entirely possible that the paper book remains the preeminent (I note not only) form of publication well into the next century and beyond. It currently seems likely to remain the most profitable (not the only profitable form) form of publication too. If you are an exec at a leading paper book publisher, then it’s a big bet right now to put the house on digital. If you get it wrong you’ve cut open the golden egg laying goose to show her insides to the public and have only the guts to show for it, the public were not that impressed and have watched the show for free on youtube. If you get it right you might still loose the golden goose and the people who benefit are your authors.

So to the radicals I say, lay off the publishers, some of them don’t care, but others are actually succeeding in changing the system and many many more are trying to figure out a way to make it happen without going out of business or destroying their companies, a not inconsiderable consideration in the current environment!

Eoin
PS: None of which changes the fact that I want to be able to buy an ebook version of a novel even if it is only just released in the US and I live in Ireland!

Self publishing as a threat to niche

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And not so niche
I wrote a post some time ago now on how Blurb was a real threat to publishers of small to medium size. I wrote then:

Using the template it is a very simple task to construct and edit a book. The ease with which this can be done is unsettling for me. I work with a publisher of limited run titles. Few rate over 2000 on an initial print run. To date, the key benefits we could offer to authors of books published through our company were quality of design, access to distribution, access to retail and other sales channels and of course we take on the risk of publishing costs and pay royalties to the author removing the dangers that self published authors have of not receiving payment for the books other sell on their behalf.

Lulu.com took away the fear authors might have that they would be left holding the baby as it were with lots of stock and no buyers, it also resolved the payment problem (As have many other online selling and payments solutions). That left the problem of design, many self published titles suffer from poor design and lack of quality. Blurb resolves that quite easily.

I’ve since moved to Mercier where although we operate mostly in a solid niche (Irish history & Biography being our core market), I’ve not forgotten Blurb.com or Lulu.com> Blurb has expanded its offering and is even hosting a directory of professional designers to help authors layout and design their books; Blurbnation and is running a photography book competition. Lulu.com is offering publishing packages and community functions on its site.

I mention this today because I was guided to a CNN story about Lisa Genova who self published [with iUniverse] her way to a deal with Simon & Schuster and whose now traditionally published novel Still Alice is in The New York Times Bestsellers list for the twelfth week. A rather nice BookVideos clip beneath this graph, it’s worth watching.

Genova is hardly a trend on her own I hear yo say and you are correct, she is not. But she does show that the fracturing of the market is such that even self-publishers have huge potential wins coming their way By dint of the large numbers now engaged in self-publishing books, some of the books will be decent at least. Some will be far, far better than decent and those books may well evade the traditional publishing route, just as the hard-working software coders of 37Signals, yet another of my favourite, self publishing, examples have with their smash hit Getting Real.

Is this really a route to market?
For non-fiction I think there will be an increasing tendency for the market to fracture by niche enabling authors at the micro and more modest level to prosper. I don’t think this will necessarily mean that no project will warrant a publisher’s investment rather that the viable ground for traditional publishing will move increasingly up the chain towards a realm where print runs are of a minimum of 4000-5000 units. Small beer for some of the larger houses but a big deal for most publishers in Ireland and I suspect worldwide.

Perhaps like Mike Shatzkin preaches we can prevent this by aggregating a niche and serving its needs (that would in essence provide other services to compensate the author for the lost revenue from self publishing. Publishers would be spending time and money on audience creation and cultivation alongside their current role of content gathering and curation. In many respects that is what Osprey are doing with Military History.

The top down problem
Of course if bottom is moving upwards, I believe very soon the top rank will move down. Traditional publishers will lose authors to outfits that are prepared to service their careers in every fashion, from events to books, to online exploitation. Andrew Keen made a point at a conference in London that I attended last year. He said that the bulk of his money came from speaking, not writing. When that is the case, why does it make sense for a top-level author to stay with a house that is primarily focused on creating and selling books?

Surely it will be in a top ranked author, the kind who can pull a crowd in any city in the world to move to a talent agency that manages everything like Livenation have started to do with musicians.

Leaving publishers either dead, the middle or adapted
I’m not a big fan of dead, so I think for now we can swim towards the middle and try and move a little bit more into the 4-10,000 unit range of publishing*. There are problems in this area and the main problem is that retailers are pushing the front list much more aggressively and the midlist is suffering. The bulk of those 4-10,000 unit books are smack bang in the midlist as far as retailers are concerned.

Adapted like Osprey then seems an attractive option but presents challenges for a diverse list without a single focus. Even if one can identify a niche where a publisher has a competitive advantage, is that niche a sustainable market likely to support the company for the future, or like newspapers will there be a period of re-adjustment which see staff loses, restructuring and deep unease within the industry?

I’m not sure anyone has the answers to this questions, and it may well be that the premise they are based on is a flawed one. Perhaps self-publishing will not successfully undermine the smaller publishers. One way or the other, any independent publisher needs to, at the very least, be thinking about what that would mean for them if it did happen! I shudder to think of what will happen to the larger trade publishers when top ranking authors start to move away from publishers in large numbers.

Let’s hope it never gets as bad as we fear it might, let’s hope the centre can hold because by my estimation that us where the market for publishers exists.
Eoin

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
William Butler Yates

*I remind you that all opinions expressed on this site are my own, see my disclaimers. Also bear in mind that in discussing numbers and trends I am focused on the Irish Market which is not, by any stretch if the imagination, a large one!

Snowbooks pull a genius one

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Eoin Purcell

I like Snowbooks, so I’m biased
But the post today announcing that they are making proof copies of some of their books available for download and print via Lulu is really very very smart:

In what I shall call An Interesting Experiment, we are making available some books and samplers waaay before publication via Lulu.

What I find even more interesting is what you get if you take this alongside what the equally interesting Michael Cairns at Personanondata was saying in a recent post:

as a publisher, you should be comfortable with enabling the consumer to – in effect – make his or her own product. As an example, a publisher can make content available to consumers during what historically may have been considered the production process: Consumers can comment, add their own notes and links, perhaps add their own content and, at the point the consumer is satisfied they have a product they want, they can ‘publish’ it. That point of publishing may or may not coincide with the publishers’ date and, in fact, the publisher may not ever ‘complete’ their books in a traditional sense but allow them to live and breath and enable any future consumer to decide when they want to ‘publish’.

Snowbooks are starting this process. No there is no feedback mechanism per say (though Emma’s e-mail and phone number are pretty freely available so feedback could flow) but this is surely a step in the direction of the kind of access and openness that Michael describes.

Good luck to Snowbooks on this one, a fine experiment.
Eoin

Publishers and the tangled Web: Guest Blog

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** Update**
I’ve frozen comments because I think it’s getting a bit heated and I’m fairly sure that is not warranted. I’m also a little concerned about what is being said in some of them, so if they disappear over the next day or so, it will have been me removing them, feel free to e-mail me concerns if you have them.
Eoin

Alexander McNabb*

Given the discussion around the web about Authonomy, I decided to invite Alexander McNabb to guest blog about his experiences and the ideal slushpile online! I was impressed by how forcefully he put his view across, I might not always agree, but I think you will find his views interesting at the very least. His bio is below and you can read some of his own material here!

Analogue in a digital world
The publishing industry is famously crusty, but when I first submitted an MS to the UK’s literary agencies five years ago, I was stunned to find them being quite so resolutely analogue. While the rest of the world was starting to experiment with Web 2.0, agents were insisting on printed MSs and SAEs or, in my case, international postal coupons. Not only would they not consent to respond by email, many sent quaint notes on compliment slips or photocopied rejections. One specimen arrived in a delightful copperplate hand on exquisite cream laid Conqueror.

Having found that most agents in the UK disagreed with my own assessment of my genius, I wandered off and wrote a second book. And so, two years later, I sent off another round of three chapters, slidebound, double spaced 12 point Times, indented paras; synopsis, covering letter, international postal coupon and self addressed envelope. This time around, a few agents accepted email queries, a couple even accepted the MS by email and a good handful had websites. This, then, was progress.

After that book went nowhere, I hung up my pen. I didn’t have the energy to sit down and write another one. Last year, I finally heaved my overweight carcass back into the chair and started to write again. I was 25k words in when a post on Boing Boing led me to Authonomy.

Discovering the internet
The publishing industry had discovered the Internet while I’d been away. Sites like You Write On had sprung up, literary agents and even publishing people actually had blogs. They might still be wearing tank tops and smoking pipes, but they were doing it online. I was, as they say, sore amazed.

And Authonomy appeared to be a piece of transformational thinking. The site, from mega-publisher Harper Collins, allowed writers to upload part or all of their manuscripts and then provided a forum for them to not only discuss writing and publishing, but also to promote (‘plug’) their books. Why? Because every member of Authonomy got five ‘bookshelf’ spaces in which to put books they liked. Very quickly, most people using the site appeared to reach a consensus that the standard they would apply would be whether they would buy the book in the real world. The more bookshelves you got, the higher up the rankings your book went. At the top lay the prize to end all prizes. A read and critique from a Harper Collins editor. At the end of each month, at midnight, the top five manuscripts (those on ‘The Editor’s Desk’) would be skimmed off to be sent to HC editors.

The rewards of Authonomy?
Now most writers know how hard it is to get feedback. After over 150 agent submissions, I had gained a few positive comments and encouraging words along with an awful lot of rejection slips. It’s lonely out there. And eny fule no that getting in front of a Harper Collins editor is nigh on impossible: HC doesn’t accept unagented submissions, for a start. Most would give at least a sizeable chunk of their left leg to put their book up for review. With its original taglines, ‘publishing contract anyone?’ and ‘Beat the slush’, Authonomy seemed to be a piece of brilliant thinking, disintermediating the gatekeeper agents and providing a peer-review website (you can never be sure, but I think I ‘coined’ that positioning) that helped to hone and select work for HC’s editors to review.

In Authonomy’s early days (I was one of the first few people on there after it went ‘public’, it had been through testing with a ‘beta’ community for a few months before) there were some pretty bad glitches. The first of these was the discovery that people would not only get friends and family to vote (something HC’s original FAQ for the site suggested people do) but that they’d actually rope in everyone they knew. The result was that books of questionable merit shot up to the top of the rankings. One example was virtually unreadable. The shame of this was that there were some good books up there too, at the time.

Power laws
HC moved quickly to deal with this and writers were assigned a ‘talent spotter’ ranking as well as a ranking for their books. This was increased if you ‘backed’ a book that subsequently rose up the ranks. Now the site was weighted – your mum only gave you a tiny little vote, while a top talent spotter could launch you up the ranks from wilderness to the top couple of hundred books. As for the rest, you had to convince people to read your book. And that was the fun bit.

The art of plugging a book on Authonomy was conceived as everyone realised that the only way you were going to get people to read your book was to promote the hell out of it. By now there were way over 1,000 books up there and competition to get to the top was getting fierce. Being active on the forums, thinking up new ways to drive readers over to your book, reading other people’s books and editing your work as feedback came in from readers was a frenetic round of activity, consuming considerable time. By the way, reading books onscreen is not easy. In fact, it’s a real pain in the eyes.

But I cannot for one second pretend it wasn’t incredible fun.

Much of the content on the forums came from writers wondering what Authonomy was all about: what HC’s intention was for the site. A number of us were of the view that it was a perfect talent spotting vehicle – a beauty contest that not only evaluated the quality of the work on offer, but that also selected the most talented and committed promoters and marketers. Writers that knew how to ‘do a Pratchett’, that would survive in the competitive, egalitarian world of the Internet and its communities.

There was great speculation about HC’s intentions and goals, but we all knew one thing. The entire rationale of the site was to provide a vote-based selection process for new talent. That’s all you could do on the site, all it offered. So it stood to reason that getting onto that desk, getting in front of that editor, was what the site was all about.

Trouble in paradise
It wasn’t. When HC announced, responding to a tide of criticism of the published editorial critiques, that its editors were scanning the site regardless of book rankings, many realised that there was something wrong in Eden. The next round of critiques (which included my book) sparked a furious reaction from a number of people on the site and was followed by speculation on the forums that twelve writers had been picked by HC for a ‘special project’. A wave of optimism followed this, even surviving the eventual realisation from those populating the site (we’re looking at about 2500 books uploaded by this time) that the ‘special project’ was sharing the book pitches with other publishers and agents to promote Authonomy.

By now, a number of the earlier adopters of the site had become less enthusiastic about it. And it’s hardly a wonder, either. A pattern had emerged that runs up to the present day, with HC’s announcement that Authonomy will support a ‘POD button’ through a tie-up with POD company Blurb.

The entire process of communication with the Authonomy ‘community’ has been one-way. HC has consistently either announced new features or responded to criticism. It has allowed constant speculation about the nature of the site, presumably not realising that this is actually a negative thing. That speculation existed because Harper Collins was not clear about its intentions and purpose in the first place and chose to manage Authonomy using ‘old world’ corporate thinking.

Many respected business analysts are now pointing to a new type of thinking in business, neatly encapsulated in the (sorry, it’s rather ‘fashionable’) book Wikinomics. That thinking is built around the idea that companies in the Internet age can’t afford to continue operating as silos. That research and development, for instance, is better off shared among a wider community of intelligences. That thinking also recognises that we are heading for a world where people are rewarded in different ways.

Take bloggers Perez Hilton or Arianna Huffington. They have never charged a penny for people to access their blogs, thinking that would be anathema to a newspaper proprietor, for instance, who has been used to charging for content. But both bloggers are now influential figures in their fields who can command a wide range of fees for other activities. Take Linux. IBM (my client, sorry) put $10 billion into Linux, an operating system that it does not own. Linux has been developed by a global community of committed ‘geeks’ based on an ‘open source’ license. Not one of those geeks is paid for working on Linux, which is free to the user.

Why would IBM put $10bn behind that software? Because it can make more money on providing the hardware, software and services around the software. And by being an active and sincere member of the Linux community, it carved a position of respect from that community and leadership in the technologies that the community develops. You see my point here? These companies have found new ways to use communities to drive their businesses in new directions. I’m restricted here by time and space and your attention span, but believe me there are thousands more examples out there. The Internet is changing the way we look at revenue streams in business forever because of communities.

Suggestions?
So what has that got to do with Authonomy? Because Eoin asked me to write what I thought my perfect publisher’s submission/slushpile website would be. And I would answer today, Authonomy. The Authonomy I first went to was a great slushpile site, but I do not believe Authonomy was ever intended to be a slushpile site.

Authonomy had so much to offer. I loved the idea of a website that allowed readers, people like me, to have an influence on the types of books we’d like to see in the shops. I found more good books on Authonomy than I found in any bookshop over the three months I was active on the site. Quirky, different, challenging, dark, beautiful books. Many other members of the community agreed: there’s more good up there in that stack of 3500 (my, how it’s grown!) books than you’ll find browsing many a bookshelf. They’re not all rom-com chic-lit or uplifting novels of human fortitude. But I happen to honestly believe that if publishing is really coming down to that, then it needs to keep a very careful eye out for fat ladies.

The model that I suspect informed Authonomy is there and plain for all to see. The music industry was tired, flaccid and fat. Formulaic music churned out by cynical executives to an audience of listless kids. Knapster and Kazaa didn’t just provide free music, they provided diversity and choice.

Suddenly I can get music, loads of music, online. New music, challenging music, music I like to hear. The principal of payment was never under debate – iTunes is a phenomenon. Record stores are closing down by the day because we’re all off buying our music online. Brilliant online services such as Pandora are springing up, introducing people to new music from a new world of choice. YouTube is breaking new acts and revitalising careers: the Arctic Monkeys were discovered online, Alannis Morrissette’s flagging career was transformed by a single video. Suddenly music is alive, vibrant, diverse and exciting again. And we’re buying it. Only not from record shops. And possibly not from record companies.

The idea of combining a collection of pretty much every new writer in the UK (and beyond) with the BookArmy readers’ website is a smart one. You can see now how adding that POD button means that readers on Book Army will be encouraged to take a look at some of that new writing. How that could possibly make Authonomy the ‘iTunes of literature’.

That is why I believe Authonomy is a platform play from Harper Collins. But I think it will fail. I think it will fail because you can’t be insincere with a community and treat people whose content your platform depends upon with disrespect. I think it will fail because it doesn’t provide a rich enough platform to transform reader interaction with the writers and their worlds – integration to other social media vehicles, supporting blogging and other social features designed for readers, not submitters, to use. And I think it will fail because people will drift away from it as they realise that Authonomy is not what it said on the box (BTW, the title of my original blog post, put up in anger after I had received an email offering me ‘early adopter’ benefits for the POD scheme and asking me not to reveal this to other community members).

A site like that needs the active participation in the community of the organisation behind it. With sincerity that wins the trust of the community. You cannot run online communities, you have to be part of them. You have to accept the principle that you give up ownership in favour of participation. Putting up a patronising blog post every week or so from an editor, or the occasional forum intervention from an unnamed contributor in response to critical threads is not really what Web 2.0 is about, is it? Even the critiques on Authonomy are from unnamed editors. But then my argument is that it was never about critiques.

I suspect many of the people who have used Authonomy would have bought the idea of the platform play if it was laid out in front of them. I suspect many won’t now. And I believe that is purely and simply because a publisher failed to understand the new models of communication and participation that are being driven by the turbulent and marvellous revolution that is the Internet.

* Alexander’s Bio
Alexander McNabb is group account director at Spot On Public Relations, based in the agency’s Dubai headquarters. As a co-founder, editor and then publishing director of the Middle East’s leading technology media house (ITP Ltd), Alexander launched more than 20 publications into that market over a ten-year period and was editor and publisher of leading regional titles such as Arabian Computer News and Comms MEA.
He is a regular commentator on marketing and communications issues as well as emerging technology and communications trends and is a regular contributor to radio, television, print and web-based media. A columnist for Campaign Middle East, Alexander also writes for online media such as Arabianbusiness.com as well as his own blog.