HarperStudio floated a link on Twitter today pointing to a post on their blog. The post, titled Freedom’s Just Another Word For Nothing Left To Lose and written by Bob, reflects on a recent panel discussion of publishing bigwigs which was moderated by Chris “Long Tail” Anderson.
After detailing Anderson’s recent experiment of giving away e-versions of his most recent book (which Bob does a poor job of relating: see comments for Chris’s corrections and Bob’s apology), Bob says this:
“The problem is when authors want to have their cakes and eat them, too…getting a large advance but wanting to experiment with free content models, or getting a large advance and then deciding that what they really want is more marketing.”
It’s hard to respond to this sort of thing, in the way that it’s always hard to talk to someone who has an entirely different reality base. [ Read more ]