September 1, 2009
Publishers, please get a clue.
My friend, Dave Gray, reflects on his hilariously depressing interaction with Penguin Publishing:
Recently I was contacted by an Art Director at Penguin Publishing. They are publishing a book about Twitter and wanted to use one of my sketches on the cover. They found it by doing a search on Flickr. Fantastic! The social web works!
The cover was beautifully designed and the sketch looked great. They didn’t have much money but that was fine with me. An email exchange ensued:
“Just credit my web address, davegray.info and that’ll be fine,” I wrote.
“Sorry, it’s policy not to print the web address,” she replied.
I insisted and she replied that the web policy on this was solid.
“Given that it’s a twitter book, what about my twitter address?” I asked. “It’s really simple, @davegray. Very little ink required, and I have thousands of people following me on twitter; I could help you promote the book.”
She declined and so did I. Funny how that works, isn’t it? I can’t see how having my twitter name on their book could possibly hurt anything. But publishers are often stupid that way. It’s the dogma of an industry.
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