Guess what. The gatekeepers are seriously poked.
I’m trying to think of situations where it would be advantageous for a creative person to sign with a record label, take VC money, or do a book deal in a world of cheap computers and the internet.
To produce and sell music you need a computer, a network connection, some friends to jam with, and 7 milk crates full of guitar pedals. Only no-talent pop tarts need labels to run the old school marketing machine.
To start a software company you need the same things as a musician; the only difference is that your milk crates are full of outmoded video cards and SCSI cables. You certainly don’t need VC money. If you have a bootstrappable business model you’ll grow organically and eventually VCs will be knocking on your door.
In theory book publishers pay for editors, marketing, shelf space, and book tours, but in reality it all comes out of the author’s cut while the publisher gets the tax write offs. Even authors with advances find that book deals are bad news. Consider the software company 37signals: their first book published the traditional way earned them about $11,000. They self published their second book as a paid PDF and as a paperback from lulu.com. When the second book winds down it probably will outperform their previous book by at least a factor of 20.
Authors may object to that story with, “but 37signals were able to do this because they had a huge blog audience.” That’s true, but guess what authors? You should be doing the same: writing every day, blogging, interacting with readers, building equity. I can’t think of anything more terrifying than spending months or years writing a book without knowing if real readers are even interested. Software and music singles should be released early and often for the same reason.
This post was inspired by some of my comments on the ZenHabits post about open sourcing blog content.
See also: Print is Dead on bad book deals, 37signals on self publishing, David Byrne interviewing Thom Yorke, and my earlier post on VC funding.
One of my favorite quotes on gatekeepers is by Barry Diller, who is a successful gatekeeper himself: “How can you trust a gatekeeper when you know the purpose of a gate is to open and close?“