This may be more than you might ever want to know about agile publishing:

1) Here are links to the slides from the Tools of Change (TOC) panel last week on Real World Agile Publishing with Brett Sandusky (@bsandusky), Joe Wikert (@jwikert) (http://slidesha.re/wxfriM) and myself (@draccah) (http://slidesha.re/zsqYxO).

2) This is a write-up from Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson) for all of Tools of Change. Our agile session is towards the bottom. The whole thing is worth reading: http://janefriedman.com/2012/02/16/writing-on-the-ether-25/

3) I really liked this end quote from Brett: http://pic.twitter.com/7Q2o9Lu4

(Here's what it says if you didn't check out the link: 'The consumer does not behave as they say, they do not say what they think and they do not think what they feel.').

It was a point Eric Ries (The Lean Startup) made well and you may want to check out this video of his TOC keynote: http://bit.ly/x4g8PN

4) And Lynn Neary also mentioned agile publishing in an NPR story this morning entitled "At Last, They See: E-Books 'Democratize' Publishing" which is about Tools of Change (http://n.pr/AD04Go).

5) You may also want to check out the Hippo In Ballet Shoes, Or Greyhound On The Track? Applying Agile Methodologies To Traditional Publishing presentation by Kristen McLean (Bookigee) which covers both thinking and terminology. http://bit.ly/wadjm6

At Digital Book World we announced our Agile Publishing Model (APM)  and partnership with futurist David Houle—and it looks like we’re on to so something exciting here.

From all of the comments and tweets following the announcement, the first big question has become clear: What exactly is the Agile Publishing Model and how does it work?

We’ve posted our thinking on our Agile Publishing Blog. We'd love to hear any feedback you might have as we launch this new and exciting initiative.

Thanks in advance for any discussion.

Dominique

A New Platform for Authors—Faster, More Flexible, and with Reader Feedback

Sourcebooks is excited to announce the creation of an Agile Publishing Model (APM) that will allow for the rapid and interactive development of books, ebooks, articles, videos, and other content by its authors, where the content evolves through a partnership between the author and their community. This framework allows for a more iterative publishing process—making content available faster, getting real-time customer feedback, and shaping the final product based on the collaboration between the author and customer.

“The traditional publishing model—long schedules, creating in a vacuum, lack of involvement with the readers of the end product—drives some authors crazy,” says Dominique Raccah, CEO and publisher of Sourcebooks. “This model is a great fit for experts who are highly immersed in their field and where the field is evolving rapidly.”

Entering the Shift Age, by futurist, advisor, and speaker David Houle, will be the first book published under this model in fall 2012. Sourcebooks will release several related ebooks and other materials from Houle as part of the APM over the upcoming months.

“The model came to our attention from work O’Reilly Media was doing, and what was really interesting to me was having a physical book come at the end of a community-building process,” says Raccah.

Houle is one of the featured keynote speakers at the Digital Book World Conference & Expo on January 25. Raccah will speak at the opening panel of the conference (“The CEO’s Perspective: Lessons Learned”; January 24), where she will discuss the Sourcebooks APM.

Attendees of the conference will receive an exclusive ebook, featuring an excerpt from Houle’s book The Shift Age and a compilation of his publishing-related columns, and will be invited to join the Entering the Shift Age blog that will serve not only as the community site for review and discussion of the book, but also as a platform for the development of the Sourcebooks APM.

“One of the reasons we are really excited to announce this new model at Digital Book World is that we will be able to test it with individuals who are interested in new, innovative ways to bring content to readers,” says Raccah. “We want this group to be the first to interact with David’s content, provide feedback, and think through various models within the project. What better way to launch than with a futurist.”

Working together, Houle and the blog community will shape and change the content as the book moves from its initial stages as an interactive, digital platform to a “traditionally published” product.

“I’m thrilled to be with Sourcebooks,” says Houle. “I have been searching for a publisher to partner with on inventive, inclusive, future-facing publishing models—Dominique and her team are doing just that, ahead of the curve in so many ways.”

The Sourcebooks APM will be used across a variety of subject matter and content with nonfiction, expert-based authors. Anyone interested in learning more about agile publishing, and joining the Entering the Shift Age community, can sign up at our Agile Publishing Blog. To learn more about Sourcebooks, its authors, or its manuscript submission process, visit www.sourcebooks.com.

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About David Houle

As a futurist and strategist, Houle has always been slightly ahead of the curve. He is often called the “CEOs’ futurist,” having spoken to or advised 2,000+ CEOs and business owners in the past four years. Houle spent more than 20 years in media and entertainment. He has worked at NBC, CBS, and was part of the senior executive team that launched MTV, Nickelodeon, VH1, and CNN Headline News. He won two Emmys, a Peabody, and was nominated for an Academy Award. David’s most recent book, The New Health Age: the Future of Health Care in America, coauthored with Jonathan Fleece, sets forth what health care and medicine will look like in the years ahead. He is the futurist in residence and a faculty member at The Ringling College of Art & Design. David writes the highly regarded futurist blog www.evolutionshift.com, and can be found on Twitter @evolutionshift, as well as YouTube. A free Shift Age Newsletter is available at www.davidhoule.com/shiftstore/index.asp.

About The Shift Age

The Shift Age is about humanity’s new era. As the Information Age gives way to the Shift Age, we are entering a time of transformation and change that offers both great risk and incredible opportunity. David Houle identifies and explains the dynamics and forces that already have reshaped and will continue to reshape our world for the next 20 years. He comments from the front lines of the Shift Age on issues and topics that affect our lives. We have entered the final, global stage of humanity’s cultural, social, and economic evolutionary journey: The Shift Age.

About Dominique Raccah and Sourcebooks

Dominique Raccah (@draccah) is the CEO and Publisher of Sourcebooks, where she is in charge of creating the future—not just a future for the company but for authors, readers, and the book itself. The classic example of a successful entrepreneur, Dominique has driven innovation and expansion by kicking her way out of boxes and creating possibility where none existed. The result has been double digit annual revenue growth over the past 10 years, twenty-five New York Times bestsellers, #1 category leaders that range from baby names books to college guides, and a publishing company that many consider on the leading edge of the digital transformation. Most recently, Dominique has managed the launch of the new cutting-edge education division, Sourcebooks EDU.

Dominique currently serves as co-chair of the Board of Directors of the Book Industry Study Group. For Sourcebooks news and announcements, visit the NEXT blog and follow us on Twitter @Sourcebooks.

I spend my days steeped in rights, royalties and the contracts that govern them, and this much is clear: publishers must plan new approaches to rights or risk future viability. Regardless of how the courts or the Justice Department treat the Google Book Settlement, the Book Rights Registry (BRR) will exist in some form; the industry needs it for the widest possible dissemination of content. A registry combined with clear and streamlined rights agreements would help publishers keep pace with content delivery innovations.

Following a BEA panel on the settlement that my company, MetaComet, hosted, my colleagues and I surveyed some industry leaders on the subject. "We've got to make it easy for people to find who is the appropriate rights holder.... Right now, that is a complexity that is unnecessary in our business," said Dominique Raccah, publisher and CEO of Sourcebooks Inc.

"We want to ensure that authors reach readers in the broadest possible way," via iPhone apps, music video, "or something we can't envision now." A registry and simplicity in rights agreements would help accomplish that.

One option to facilitate this: have authors give a publisher all rights to a work, but for a limited time, such as three years. "Because everything moves so fast, it ought to be quite clear in three years if a publisher exploited each right," Richard Nash, formerly publisher of Soft Skull Press and now a consultant, told me over coffee earlier this month. Nash hopes to implement this idea in a new publishing venture he is working on. He thinks this structure would facilitate business partnerships between authors and publishers, and would provide authors with one partner who orchestrates the entire campaign. It could also benefit agents, because they could spend less time shopping around smaller "chunks" of content.

Will authors and agents stand for such innovation and out-of-the-box thinking? Conversations with the Authors Guild made it clear the challenging environment has made authors more open to new ideas of partnerships. Giving up rights for a shorter duration is "interesting.... I wouldn't rule it out, but the devil is always in the details," Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, said to my COO recently.

At the very least, authors are much more open to the idea of a business partnership with publishers than in the past. "There used to be much more of an adversarial relationship between author and publisher than there is now," Aiken said, "probably because... these are challenging times economically, and with the changing technology, authors and publishers are in this together."

While Raccah loves Nash's idea, she recognizes implementation might be tough, but she has pushed the partnership angle. When a new idea arises-such as an iPhone app-she makes an addendum to the existing contract. Still, an innovation such as the trade-off of rights for duration would be good for publishers and authors, both because of the simplicity and because "it's incumbent on publishers to prove that they are actually" benefiting authors and their works.

Agents also might be open to such innovation, given the changing marketplace. In fact, they might have little choice, according to literary agent Richard Curtis, who owns the publishing company E-Reads. He first schooled me in rights and royalties nearly 10 years ago. "Right now, authors are so desperate that if a publisher asks for all rights, an author will give it," Curtis said. "Even with powerful agents, 99% of the time, they will just throw in the digital rights, because they have nowhere to go with them."

Publishers and authors must recognize that content has a limitless array of uses-uses as incalculable today as e-commerce was 15 years ago. There must be a very clear delineation of rights, and the simpler that delineation is, the better. If publishers, agents or authors start breaking out translation rights, serial rights, foreign rights, etc., they make it more difficult to make content accessible, and therefore monetizable, through an organization such as the BRR.

Publishers need to bring authors in on these discussions and educate them on the details, so that they realize the benefits of simplified contracts. In fact, it could be that the best way to accomplish this would be for publishers to work with authors to develop rights standards through an organization like the Book Industry Study Group.

The key to future publishing success will be a change in attitude that simplified contracts and the BRR represent: publishers and authors are business partners and must act as such.

Soapbox: The Rights Thing
Why the Book Rights Registry is necessary
by David Marlin -- Publishers Weekly, 6/22/2009
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6665983.html?q=Sourcebooks