Blacksmythe

Yesterday I wrote about a new initiative from Mat Johnson.  While thinking more about the idea of open source culture, I ran across this story.  Like I said yesterday, book publishers are in a bind…no pun intended.  Profit margins are shrinking as consumers are spending their money on other forms of pop culture, or increasingly not spending money at all.  I can get the entire Wheels of Time series on pdf from Bittorrent if I wanted.  And classics like The Art of War have long been available in various electronic formats.  One of the most efficient ways to make more profit from the book publisher’s standpoint, is to reduce risk.  How do you reduce risk?  By publishing known quantities.  This is one of the many reasons for the success of urban fiction–at least at the outset, many of the writers in the genre had already made their names doing the equivalent of selling mixtapes out of the back of the van.

So how does Simon and Schuster reduce risk?  By using the American Idol format, and an existing social network.  Brilliant actually.  Not only do they pretty much ensure that the winner will sell briskly (at least hir first work), but they build brand recognition, and depending can possibly aid the writer as well.  Now the details of the American Idol contract were pretty draconian–giving AI the right to even modify the winner’s LIFE STORY from what I recall.  I wonder what Matt, Tayari, Minister Faust, and Kenji Jasper, think of this one?

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