OK, in case you missed my comments about this before, Lawrence Watt-Evans, seriously cool fantasy author, is in the middle of an experiment he calls The Spriggan Experiment. Spriggans are harmless semi-intelligent frog-like creatures that crawl out of an enchanted mirror located in the mountains of the small kingdoms - you see, when Tobas found the castle outside the world... well, I won't spoil it.
Anyway, Spriggans do more than chase wizards, look cute, and get underfoot. They also tell us something about copyright. Wait, what? It's true... You see, Lawrence is using Schneier's Street Perfomer Protocol to publish the book - and it's working, sort of. Because Lawrence is cool as hell, he agreed to answer a few of my questions about the experiment. I'm going to try to ping him again for some info once the experiment is done, but in the meantime, a quick paraphrase of his impressions (I didn't explicitly say I would quote him anywhere, so I'm not going to directly do so without his OK.) This is the first time that SPP has been used for an artistic work (please spare me the comments about how Blender was an artistic work) so it's pretty exciting. Security community suspicions confirmed:
- It will likely make quite a bit less money than the traditional publishing model (I think we all knew that would happen.) The experiment's not done yet, so hopefully he'll tell us more about that once everything is put to bed.
- There is some evidence that it is driving interest in his previously published books
Suspicions contradicted:
- Overhead from maintaining the distribution channel is minimal
- Not having an editorial staff does not have a deliterous impact on the timeline
Anyway, I continue to be really excited abut this experiment.
Posted by Ed at September 9, 2005 01:05 PM