The Domino Project is a new way to think about publishing. Founded by Seth Godin and powered by Amazon, we're trying to change the way books are built, sold and spread. Find out more about our mission here.

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June 2011

“I Miss the Mob”

“Are you happy? Are you profitable? Isn’t that enough?” For the launch of Anything You Want, Derek is creating ten animated videos to accompany the chapters in the book. They’ll be released here over the next two weeks. Here’s one of our favorites, “I Miss the Mob,” which captures Derek’s perspective on happiness, profitability and [...]

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Now look what you’ve done

Shopify, as part of the hoopla and support you’ve helped create around Poke the Box, has just announced a donation of $100,000.00 to the Acumen Fund. Traditional media is all about interrupting strangers. Modern media (including modern bookselling) is focused on building a tribe, earning permission and then creating products and services for that audience. [...]

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‘Anything You Want’ — Not Your Typical Business Book

This is your one chance at life, you can have anything you want, what is worth doing? Today we’re thrilled to announce the launch of Derek Sivers’ book, Anything You Want. It’s an autobiographical tale of starting a little hobby, accidentally growing it into a big business, and then selling it for $22 million. Anything You [...]

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Your face on our cover?

Twice before, I’ve invited readers to nominate themselves or a friend to be on the inside jacket of one of my books (you can still see the mosaics that were created inside the hardcovers of Tribes and Linchpin.) This time, we’re brainstorming about using a picture on the outside, on the front cover of an [...]

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A spreadsheet for the self-published

Jenny Blake, an author and Googler, came by to share the secrets of her publishing success. After her talk, she graciously agreed to share her spreadsheet with our beloved Domino Project readers. You can find it here in Google docs format and here in Excel (as a download). Here’s her description: Thousands of books are [...]

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1500:1

A publisher can produce 1500 different books, great books, important books, groundbreaking books that could change the world  for what it cost to make the Green Lantern movie. The publisher could pay each author a $75,000 advance and produce the titles (enough to fill several bookshelves in thousands of homes) for the cost of one [...]

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Books are dead (long live books)

Here’s an insightful, stick-with-you essay about what happens to books in a digital world. For me, there are two key insights: There are three stages–pre-artifact (there is no book yet), artifact (here it is) and post-artifact (what happens now? not much). Craig argues that all three stages are changing, and quite dramatically. The second insight [...]

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On the radio, in the store

Here’s the unedited version of a radio interview I did about Domino, permission marketing and a new era of book publishing. Airs this weekend on the CBC for our Canadian readers… One fact to share: I just got the reports for the sales of our first three titles. Since March, we have shipped more than [...]

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Dr. Seuss never took an advance

For the last fifty years, the driving economic force of the book business has been the advance against royalties. Virtually all books aimed a mass audience earn precisely the same royalty per book. Stephen King, the unknown first time author and I get paid exactly the same royalty per book by Penguin. What changes is [...]

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