Blogonomics: When Blogs Become Books

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 doesn't 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.