Scott Adams, the multimillionaire creator of the Dilbert comic strip, doesn’t
like doing anything which doesn’t make him money. This conflicted with his blogging,
the income from which was very small. Fortunately, he was famous enough that
a publisher offered
him "a six-figure advance" (my guess is that it was closer to
$1 million than to $100,000) for a book version of those blogs. Seemingly powerless
to negotiate with the publisher, Adams simply did what he was told:
As part of the book deal, my publisher asked me to delete the parts of my
blog archive that would be included in the book.
The thing is, as Adams admits, the book was a collaborative effort. And when
people have put their wit and intelligence and work into something, even if
it’s only by leaving a comment on a blog entry, they hate seeing that work unilaterally
erased by someone else. (Greg Mankiw, are you listening?) So now Adams has to
offset his six-figure advance against the ill-will of people who "were
personally offended that I would remove material from the Internet that had
once been free".
I’m guessing that Adams’s publisher was being rather short-sighted, and that
similar terms are going to become increasingly uncommon in future book contracts.
The continued existence of Chris Anderson’s excellent long
tail blog, for instance, only helps to boost sales of his book.
Meanwhile, Bill Walsh surely doesn’t sell much more of his book
just because he’s taken its content down from his website.
But in any case, as Mark
Thoma notes, the readers of Adams’s blog had a decent moral case to actually
be paid for their work, rather than seeing it obliterated by a short-sighted
publishing contract. "Scott Adams seems puzzled that those who helped to
make the bread might want a piece of it when it’s done," he writes. "Perhaps
his ‘legion of accidental collaborators’ feels a degree of ownership in the
book – they participated in its creation – and they object to his taking their
work for himself without having told them in advance that would happen."
"Free is more complicated than you’d think," says Adams. But really,
it isn’t. Free is only complicated if you try to mess with it and start making
it expensive. People didn’t want to pay for Slate subscriptions after they got
used to reading the website for free, and they were even more upset when they
discovered that the blog posts they had contributed to were now unavailable
at any price. Having a popular blog really does help sell books (although it
always work). And there’s no doubt at all that needlessly annoying your
blog’s readers is extremely unlikely to be a good business decision.