We live in a post-industrial age where information is the coin of the realm. Knowledge is the most valuable asset that a business owns. For most businesses, that knowledge exists primarily in the heads of the people who work there. For entrepreneurs and sole practitioners, what’s in their head usually is the business. That’s both limiting and dangerous.

Let’s take the example of a successful management consultant. Drawing on her knowledge and experience, she’s able to hire herself out at a substantial hourly rate. The trouble is, every time she wants to make some money she has to trade away some of her time.

What happens when she goes on vacation and is no longer putting in time? Her income goes on vacation too. What happens when she’s sleeping, or when she gets sick, or when she wants to retire? As soon as she stops putting in time, she stops getting money.

Even if she could work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, there is still a limit to how much money she can make simply because she can’t create more time. When you trade time for money, you put an automatic cap on your income potential.

Something else also starts happening to our consultant. The more successful she is, the more her services are in demand, the harder she works. Did you go into business to work long, hard hours for limited reward? I didn’t think so.

Knowledge products create passive streams of revenue, that is, money that flows to you whether you’re working or not. How? You create the products once and then sell them over and over again. You make an initial investment of time and money and then reap the benefits in multiples. You can’t do that with time; you can’t sell the same hour twice.

What Exactly is a Knowledge Product?
Quite simply, an knowledge product is any chunk of information that has been recorded in some fashion — whether that be print, audio, video or multimedia — so that it can now be passed on to others. There are dozens of ways to package and sell information. These are just a few:

• Print books and e-books
• Booklets and special reports
• Manuals and workbooks
• MP3s and podcasts
• Teleclasses
• Subscription-based web sites

The key is taking something intangible — the knowledge in your head — and turning it into something that others can enjoy and use even when you’re not around.

Every process you employ to serve your clients, every opinion you have on the news in your industry, every past experience you carry with you can be recorded and shared. What’s stopping you?

The third annual Tools of Change for Publishing conference from O’Reilly took place in New York City last week. More than a thousand people drawn from all corners of the globe and the industry — from publishers and authors to programmers and bloggers — convened to discuss and debate the future of the book.

Over three days of keynotes, tutorials, and sessions, several themes began to emerge and repeat; top among them were conversation, collaboration, and community. These themes are important for authors to understand because they signal a fundamental shift in how you will write and publish your work in coming years.

Conversation, Collaboration, and Community
The notion of “book” is evolving. In the last 500 years, “book” has meant a static collection of words, printed and bound between covers. Now, the e-book and Internet have changed all that.

The way it used to be:

• A book as an object, fixed in time and place
• The author as the sole authority
• A silent readership

What is emerging:

• A book as a process
• The author as one of many voices, the leader of a conversation
• A vocal and participating readership

Writing a book is becoming an increasingly public and collaborative process, one that involves readers from the start and encourages their input into the product. Readers are enthusiastic about being involved in the development of a book. Several conference keynoters made observations along these lines:

• Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do?, described how he had blogged about some ideas that had come up for him during his research for the book. His readers disagreed with his post and told him so. Their feedback reshaped the chapter that Jeff ultimately wrote and published in the book.

• Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media, discussed O’Reilly’s Rough Cuts program. Through Rough Cuts, readers have access to some of the company’s books in draft form and are able to chip in with their comments. After these books are published, sales of the titles outpace titles that weren’t put through Rough Cuts by 2 1/2 times.

The theme of community and conversation also applies, not just to the development leading up to the book, but to the ongoing process of consumption that occurs after the book is published. Networks of readers connect through blogs and social media to review, critique, and advance the content.

Bob Stein from the Institute for the Future of the Book may have said it best when he proposed a new definition of “book”: a place where readers (and sometimes authors) congregate. Non-fiction authors become leaders of communities of inquiry, and publishers serve to help build and nurture these communities.

Here’s my visual interpretation of the book-as-process idea:

How are you working conversation, collaboration, and community into your authoring process? Leave a comment and let us know.

I’ll admit it. I’m something of a contradiction.

In my work for clients, I am constantly exploring the newest ideas in publishing, looking for ways to innovate and adapt. I find that exciting.

At the same time, I thrill to everything old. I love old books, old paper, the old models. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are especially intriguing to me.

So when I came across this Printer’s Dictionary and Guide Book, published in 1892, I just had to snap it up for my collection. Issued by Kelsey Press out of Meriden, Connecticut and priced at 25 cents a copy, the guide is a small, hard cover volume of advice for the would-be printing press operator.

Click thumbnails to enlarge.

The sub-title sums it up:

Containing Webster’s spelling and division of the most used words of the English language and chapters on job work, punctuation, useful receipts, etc. Not complete treatises, but a brief, handy guide for every day use, for professional and amateur.

It just so happens that the front and back contain ads for printing services and equipment from Kelsey Press. It’s a clever little piece of marketing, an early information product.

Click thumbnail to enlarge.

While most of the advice it contains is now antiquated, some of it is strangely timeless, including these tips on how to start and conduct a small paper:

Arrange a definite plan, to begin with. Give your paper some distinguishing feature, and not follow in the old ruts. If you are personally interested in some particular art, science or sport, you can, if you have energy, make your journal popular among others interested in the same subject. Or a paper can be made popular by making the leading matter village news, wit and humor, puzzles, rebuses, and the like. Church papers help the work much. Subjects are plenty. Choose one to your taste or ability, and make it your specialty. Make your paper alive with that subject, and fill the space not occupied therewith by pleasant miscellany. In a small sheet long, prosy articles appear out of place. It is seldom that a single article occupy more than a page of paper, and a column and a half article should be considered long.

Having perfected your plan for conducting a paper, you choose a name for it, which requires considerable thought. You want one appropriate to your leading subject. Let it be as short and striking as possible. There is much in a name. Whether you propose to circulate the paper free, as an advertisement or otherwise, or to make money out of it, it is best to fix upon it a subscription price; it gives it an apparent value even if given away…

So there you have it. Your “paper” — book, blog, articles — should have a focus that you’re passionate about. Make it your specialty and others with the same passion will be drawn to you. Keep your content and your name short and punchy. Value your work, even if it’s given away for free.

Maybe my love of new and old aren’t such a contradiction after all. A look at where we’ve been can sometimes provide guidance on the road to where we’re going.

A recent article in Publisher’s Weekly made reference to print books as “slow media”. Given the never-ending proliferation of technologies that facilitate constant and instantaneous communication, the term — and the article — intrigued me.

Slow media, as I understand it, is about appreciating the time that goes into producing and consuming a piece of information. It reminded me of the Slow Food movement, which touts the leisurely enjoyment of an organically grown and naturally prepared meal.

I decided to do some digging, and sure enough, I wasn’t the only one to draw parallels between slow media and slow food. Blogger Matt Shepherd wonders if anyone is actively forming a slow media movement to underscore the value of printed books and handwritten letters.

While Matt acknowledges that “fast media” has its place, this blogger from the Rocky Mountain News sees slow media as an either/or proposition. In his or her opinion, choosing slow media is a conscious rejection of fast media — because you’re tired of fast media, overwhelmed by it, or simply unconvinced of its usefulness. You choose slow media because your “inner Luddite” is screaming to be free.

I disagree. I don’t think one delivery has to be valued over the other. Each has its place, its benefits, and its pleasures. Perhaps books in the form that we know them aren’t doomed for the dustbin of history after all. We just need to acknowledge that both the tortoise AND the hare have their place in the world.

Canada Post has recently announced upcoming mail classification changes that will make it twice as expensive for publishers and media sellers to ship books, CDs and DVDs.

Effective January 1, 2009, the oversize letter mail category will split into two categories: Regular and Irregular items.

The Irregular category is to include any envelope that is:

• 1-2 cm thick
• Rigid
• And/or that has box-like edges

By these definitions, any envelopes containing CDs, DVDs, or slim books—whether soft cover or hard cover—would be charged at new Irregular rates, which are to be twice the rates of Regular oversized letter mail. For example, a 150g Irregular package will cost $3.92 to mail versus $1.96 for a Regular package.

Canada Post also snuck into a “background document” the announcement that Irregular letter mail items will be transitioned to Parcel rates over the next three years. With current book-sized parcels averaging a cost of $8 to $11 to ship within the country, Canadian media publishers can expect huge cost jumps to mail their items in the next few years.

Publishers whose books already ship at Parcel rates (those over 500g or thicker than 2cm) are not affected by the new rules.