Tag: wiley
If you are interested in understanding the business implications of blockchain technology, William Mougayar‘s new book – The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology – is a must read.
I’ve known William for about five years. I almost invested in his company Engagio (there’s now a different company by that name) but decided not to. However, our friendship developed and he’s been an amazing host anytime I’ve been in Toronto.
Several years ago William became obsessed with Bitcoin and then the Blockchain. In January 2016 he launched his new book effort around the Blockchain on Kickstarter and I quickly backed him at the GENEROUS Supporter level.
GENEROUS Supporter
++ 50 E-BOOKs of The Business Blockchain.
++ 50 E-BOOKs of Centerless.
++ 50 Print copies of Centerless.
++ Your Name in the Acknowledgements for BOTH books, and on the website.
++ Invitation to Slack private channel
++ 45 mins Conference Call Discussion with your team to discuss your Blockchain strategy.
You will receive the digital copies of the first book in March 2016, and the second book in June 2016.
I love Kickstarter. I have such a delicious habit that allows me to exercise my poor impulse control whenever I feel like it, which if you think about it too hard, is a little contradictory.
William ended up getting a publishing deal with Wiley (through the same editor that I work with and had connected with William a while ago.) Wiley did a great job cranking things out extremely quickly, breaking all the normal publishing time frames, and the book comes out in a week (you can pre-order it on Amazon now.)
I read a draft a month or so ago and gave William a blurb for the book, something I rarely do anymore and only when I’ve read and commented on a draft. But when a friend asks and I’ve had a chance to read the draft, I’m game to do this, like I did for Steve Case’s recent excellent book The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur’s Vision of the Future.
On Sunday, after my two hour run, I laid on the couch and read the production copy of William’s book. He’d cleaned it up a lot since the draft version I’d read and it flowed quickly. While I know plenty about the blockchain – both technically and from a business perspective – I read it with beginners mind, assuming I knew nothing about Bitcoin and the blockchain, other than how to spell them.
It’s a quick read, but has a lot of depth. William is a good writer so it’s easy to read, especially for a book around a topic that is hard to get into. As a bonus, the footnotes and bibliography are solid, giving you lots of places to go if you want to explore more.
If you want to understand the blockchain from a business perspective, this is the book for you.
When the Second Edition of Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist came out, I was baffled that the books were listed as two separate Amazon items. The biggest impact was that all the reviews for the first edition did not sync with the second edition, so anyone coming across the second edition wouldn’t see all the first edition reviews. There was also a bunch of other content missing from the Second Edition page. In frustration, I wrote a post titled The Mess of a Second Edition Book.
For several weeks I dug into this with Wiley (my publisher) to no avail. I kept hearing back that the Second Edition is considered an entirely new book. I accepted that (it has a separate ISDN number), but I still wanted the two pages to be linked. The First Edition pointed to the Second Edition, but the Second Edition didn’t point to the first edition. And – none of the content on the pages was synchronized. I kept thinking some version of “c’mon guys – this is just meta-data – how hard could this really be?”
Dane McDonald, who works for me, eventually just took it on himself to figure this out. He went to the Amazon Author Central site, found, and followed the instructions.
- Login to your Amazon Author Page.
- Click on the “Help” button in the navigation Bar.
- Click on the “Contact Us” button in left hand sidebar of your screen.
- Under “Select an issue,” select My Books.
- Under “Select details,” select Update information about a book.
- In the field that appears, select Update something else.
- In the next field that appears, select I want to link one edition of my book to another edition.
- Make sure to include your email address as well as both ISBN #’s for the two editions of the book you would like to link.
- It takes 1-3 business days for the link to take effect.
Voila. Several days later what Wiley had said was impossible now worked. The two editions were linked and all was good in the world. Until the other day, when the books magically unlinked. Boo.
Yesterday, I followed the instructions again to relink the editions. This time I got a disappointing email from Amazon.
I understand you would like us to link ISBNs 978-1118443613 and 978-0470929827.
The books requested for linking, Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist ISBN 978-1118443613 and 978-0470929827 don’t meet the qualifications to be linked. Please accept my sincere apologies for this disappointment.
In order to be linked, books must have the same content. Linking books such as the hardcover and paperback edition is meant to allow customers to choose between different formats, but customers should be able to expect to read the same content. Newer editions of nonfiction books generally have additional primary content, and therefore aren’t considered materially the same.
Books that are different parts of a set, or derivations of one another can’t be linked, even though they may be similar.
Thank you for contacting Author Central. We hope to see you again soon.
Double boo. I guess I should be frustrated, but pretty much everything about the old school publishing process baffles and perplexes me. Almost none of it is from a reader or author’s perspective. The publishers and distributors have their own magic language, special rules, and byzantine processes. Everything is harder than it needs to be, doesn’t work quite as expected, and has a bunch of extra words around each step.
I’ve let go of my frustration. Now I’m just amused. And I’m glad stuff like Bookshout exists – hopefully it’ll stimulate another wave of reader-centric disruption.
As Amy and I continue to crank away on Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur, I learned a funny, perplexing, and strange thing. There apparently is an editorial standard, at least at Wiley, for the words “fuck” and “fucking”.
Fuck = F%^$
Fucking = F*&^%$#
Crazy. Hilarious. Fun. Bizarre.
I discovered this yesterday as I was going through and making all the changes to the feedback from our “publisher draft” submission which we got back on Friday. We’ve got plenty of dialogue with the words “fuck” and “shit” in them because (a) that’s how a lot of humans, including us, talk and (b) when there’s conflict, which we cover a lot in the book, the words “fuck” and “shit” tend to fly.
For some reason “shit” is ok. It made it through this particular edit pass. But “fuck” did not, except in a particular phrase, “fuck you money.” Let’s see if that one survives the next edit pass. And, when the final book comes out, we’ll see if shit did as well.
Back to working on the book. The final deadline is 10/22 so if you see me in the next nine days and you want to torture me, just ask “how’s the book going.” I expect you’ll hear some variant of f%^$ in my response.