[Bf-education] Need feedback on publisher strategy

[Ben Hodges]

Hello,

Looks like a good proposal to me.  One stumbling point, however, may be 
in the selection of
the three people to act as a first "quality check" or initial review.   
There are certainly plenty of
people out there for this but you would want to make sure they didn't 
have any conflicts of
interest or involvement in the book. 

Just a thought,
Ben

Ton Roosendaal wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Recently I've been contacted by Elsevier and Wiley (again) about deals  
> they want to make to get official endorsements for their book.
>
> I am still trying to get feedback on what fair deals we can make with  
> our Blender brand and official endorsements. To prevent arbitrary  
> ruling we should have a standard offering for every publisher, for at  
> least the next few years. Here's a proposal:
>
> 1) First goal is to get Blender authors professionally involved, and  
> stimulate having good Blender books published. For that we can set up a  
> quality check.
>
> - The publisher or author finds three people in the Blender artist  
> community, acknowledged by the Blender Foundation and not being the  
> author(s), who will endorse the book. They've each had a preview copy  
> of the book for review.
>
> 2) A second goal can be to make the books available with a discount to  
> the official blender.org shop. This discount should allow a substantial  
> amount - minimum 50% - of sales to go to Blender support.
>
> - The publisher offers us 60% discount on the official retail price.  
> (50% discount of the retail price is a standard retail offering, note  
> that Amazon gives 35-40% discount to its clients already).
> - We can purchase books in small batches (but minimum 100 copies), and  
> have right of return.
> - If publisher wants, can agree on minimum eshop sales price of 80% of  
> retail price.
>
> 3) If the above can be achieved, we can provide the publisher with:
>
> - The right to put the Blender logo (small, as secondary item) on the  
> cover.
> - The right to publish the statement "Official Blender Foundation  
> Approved" (on cover, etc).
> - My cooperation on joint press releases or other PR (which can be done  
> via email).
>
> Note: Unless the book was co-produced or written by myself, I won't  
> write forewords anymore!
>
> What do you think, fair?
>
> -Ton-
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
> --
> Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation ton at blender.org  
> http://www.blender.org
>
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