Sunday, June 10, 2007

New Forest (1)

It’s been a while since the previous post, but that doesn’t mean nothing’s been happening. For commercial reasons it’s difficult to go into the details at the moment but I prepared a proposal for a second book, provisionally entitled “The Mobile Internet”. I discussed this with the publisher (Auerbach) and received the go-ahead. So what’s the issue?

In a word - time. There is a reason academics take a sabbatical to write a book - it’s very, very time-consuming. For a consultant, there are three reasons to write a book:
  1. It is a useful marketing tool.
  2. It can be an excellent way to get out more and network.
  3. It can be done in conjunction with some paid consultancy work.
It's not a useful way to get revenues by way of royalties. Technical books do not sell massive volumes and several weeks consultancy would earn more than a year’s worth of book sales.

How this relates to me is that I can’t get to the contractual stage with Auerbach until some other business matters are sorted out. Watch this space.

We were camping in the New Forest in southern England this weekend, as the weather was pretty good. We were amused by the way the free-roaming horses and cows of the forest are totally unintimidated by cars, naturally assuming they have right of way (which they do). Watch the video, which was taken in Brockenhurst.