Digigen & The TinMan

I’m doing research into modern publishing models and how they can affect the way magazine brands distribute content. Although there isn’t alot of exciting stuff apart from the standard – treat digital as its own publishing channel, I did find this interesting piece from Sourcebooks. They refer to what they are trying to do as The Agile Publishing Model and it is quite new, although actually I think Guy Kawasaki tried to do this with his recent books.

The Agile Publishing Model is based on Dominique Raccah’s theory that:

“building audience participation before the writing and publication of a book was a way to help readers discover new work, as well as leading to greater sales”

This seems to make sense and of course feels true. Build partcipation before you launch is smart and means when you hit activation stage, you already have a willing band of followers. This applies to most industries really, but the publishing industry does always seem slow to keep up.

Raccah told the audience: “We’re going to develop the book and build a community [around it] and the community is going to influence how the book is developed.”

I think it is smart, modern behaviour. So we shall see how it pans out.

You can also see Futurist David Houle talking about it below (poor sound quality but you get the idea)

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The legendary editor, founder and creative force behind some of the UK’s most influential magazines recently spoke out about the future of magazines. In an interview, with The Business of Fashion Jefferson Hack creates an interesting point of view on the future. Looking at how consumer’s interact with titles he says that

“The old media model is a frozen moment in time; a monthly magazine, a seasonal trend — it’s over. Digital culture is a constant stream. Either you adapt to it, or you are a dinosaur and you will die.”

This quote really reflects alot about how we think publishing models have to evolve to continue to grow, or at least not to whither and disappear. It shows a resounding truth with the relationships between the social model and the website model. The social model survives by being a slurry of content, but perhaps would do better in theming its content by month or perhaps even weeks, to create a “frozen moment in time”, whilst in between pushing out content related to that theme. We have regularly done this at The Brooklyn Brothers, theming content for brands across months enabling consumers of our content to know exactly what they are “buying” into, whilst providing smaller streams of other content.

I think its a great quote though. I shall use time and time again.