Publishing Perspectives posted a fascinating interview with Seth Godin about The Domino Project, the company Godin started after announcing he would no longer issue his books through a traditional publisher. The first book that Domino released was Godin’s Poke The Box.

The complete interview is well worth a read. Below, I’ve highlighted a couple of choice excerpts that might get you thinking about how you write your book.

“So what I’m thinking about when I write a book like Poke the Box is not “How do I write this for the person who will be easy for me to sell it to?” but “How do I write it so once that person reads it, they’re likely to give it to someone else?” And that second order sale, that idea that books are actually manifestos organized to spread, really changes the way you think about writing a book.”

“…my chapters are now down to 2-pages long, or 3-pages long, and the reason is that’s the way we have trained people to think. We think clearly at a different rate than we did 80 or 90 years ago.

No one buys a book anymore if they don’t know what the book is about, if they don’t know what the idea in the book is before they even got it. And so what that requires authors to do is figure how to make their ideas spread so that they get a chance to hammer those ideas home in book form.”

Godin takes a lot of flak for producing books that others don’t consider worthy of the name — books that are small and short, with miniscule chapters or no chapters at all. And yet his sales are through the roof, outstripping, as Godin notes in the interview, even New York Times bestsellers.

Godin focuses on making his ideas sharable: succinct, easily explained, easily accessible. If you started with sharing as your focus, what might you do with your information?

Seth Godin just released his new book, Poke the Box. As he announced he would several months ago, Seth has broken away from his traditional publisher and issued the book on his own.

The 96-page book was launched in 3 formats:

• A Kindle book for $7.99
• A hard cover book for $9.99
• A limited edition, signed by Seth, with letterpress cover and poster for $75

You may recognize this 3-format model as one I blogged about last June. Seth’s new project only confirms the future that I see for the publishing industry:

• E-books for primary consumption
• Everyday print books to mark up, mess up, or trade around
• Specialty editions at premium prices for collecting, not reading

How does your book project fit into this future?

Helienne Lindvall, a columnist for guardian.co.uk (who also happens to be a musician), recently wrote about people who advocate for free content but charge high fees to share their expertise. In her view, this practice is “ironic” and she decries the fees such speakers earn “peddling a utopian, and some would say fictional, business model to increasingly desperate music and media companies.”

Lindvall has entirely missed the point. The speakers she targets — Cory Doctorow, Seth Godin, and Chris Anderson, among others — aren’t suggesting everyone give everything away at no charge. They’re not saying people don’t deserve to get paid for their creative efforts. What they’re offering is the idea that giving something away for free can lead to making money on something else.

Take Seth Godin for example. His book, Unleashing the Ideavirus, is the most downloaded e-book in the history of the internet. Let me repeat: in the history of the internet. It’s a free download and always has been. The visibility and reach that the free e-book has given him has generated far more for him than selling the e-book for $10 a pop ever could. In this instance, free works for him. But he also sells print copies that he does charge for. Is this irony? Hardly. Godin simply recognizes that free can work wonders.

Authors can choose to give books or other content away for free and often they do so precisely because there’s some other sort of payoff: exposure, reputation, the ability to charge more for consulting, an increased demand for consulting, or even — gasp! — paid speaking engagements.

In fact, Doctorow, himself a guardian.co.uk columnist, wrote that while giving content away for free may not always help the bottom line, it certainly can’t hurt. (Read Doctorow’s thorough and articulate rebuttal to Lindvall’s article here.)

Have you tried giving away content for free? What were the results?

A new article in Publisher’s Weekly points out yet another potential casualty of the high price of gas: author readings. Bookstore owners are concerned that crowds won’t come out to hear authors speak if the price of gas goes much higher.

Already the publishing industry has been feeling pinches over gasoline shortages. Most notably, the price of paper has shot up this year, and the cost to ship books from printer to warehouse to customer is climbing also.

Yet a solution does exist, and smart authors are using it already: technology. A whole universe of media — from podcasts and viral video to live chats, blogs and Twitter — can be used to promote books and interact with readers far and wide. It’s low-cost and easy on the environment, too.

For marketing, virtual seems like a no-brainer. But how about on the production side?

The New York Times reports that among publishers at Book Expo America a couple of weeks ago, the feeling about e-books was “unease.” Seth Godin points out that publishers are missing the forest for the trees:

“The fastest-growing, lowest cost segment of the business, the one that offers the most promise, the best possible outcome and has the best results… is causing unease!”

Sales of electronic books are rising, thanks in part to the emerging popularity of Amazon’s Kindle reader. After just 8 months on the market, Kindle sales account for 6% of Amazon’s volume in books where electronic and print versions are both available.

So are we seeing the final days of print books? Not quite yet.

Many people still say they far prefer reading a print book over an e-book. Even among kids under 17 — the one group who you think would embrace a digital book — nearly two-thirds still prefer print versions.

So what’s a publisher to do? Know your market and what they want. Be open to changing tactics where it makes sense and can save you money. And keep your eye on the oil. Maybe the decline in fossil fuels will be the tipping point that pushes reading into the digital realm.