Posts Tagged ‘podcasting’


The Honesty Edition

on March 24, 2010 in Uncategorized Comments Off

For the last eight months I have been working quietly on a project born from a simple idea:

If a writer has more to fear from obscurity than theft in the world of bits, why is that not true in the physical world too?

This is an experiment in honesty and in publishing. As large corporations fight over the shifting business of art and entertainment, artists look on and wonder what it means for their work. DRM is bad – DRM is vital. Big Business is evil -  Big Business will save us from ourselves.

I do not know how things will develop. No-one does. But I do believe that musicians and writers, music lovers and readers, need to take an active role in shaping their future. A compelling argument has it that publishers need to trust their readers. I want this to be true. But when your life and work is at risk, when so much is at stake beyond the individual, we are short on real facts and people are terrified to let go.

I’ve decided to take a stand.

I love the thought of trusting people; it plays to my sense of optimism and my observation that most people are flawed but good. While it’s nice to play with ideas, it’s another thing to take a crazy notion and to follow it through to the world of consequences. Common sense tells us to lock our doors, but if keeping a thousand books out of the hands of thieves costs the price of five thousand books, how does that make sense for the author?

And so The Honesty Edition is born.

In the next few weeks, I will take £80,000 (approx $120K) worth of stock – trade paperbacks specifically designed for the task – put them on the streets of towns and cities around the country, walk away and trust that enough people will pay for them to successfully launch the next in the series.

I genuinely have no idea what is about to happen. I have borrowed, sold shares in my work and battered my credit card to destruction. Everything I have and have not is now on the line.

If you want to know more, visit my site at dreamwords.com and sign up for the newsletter. I will try to post here regularly but occasional insights and significant results will have a preferred route to the newsletter.

Watch this space.