I have reached a new low in neglecting this blog, I launched an entirely new venture and didn’t even get around to blogging it here. As you have probably already heard if you follow Rob’s blog or follow me on Twitter, Rob and I have launched a new service called TekPub. The purpose of TekPub is to provide high quality technical screencasts, we are focusing somewhat on the .NET space at the moment but will definitely branch out in the future.
Rob wrote a great post on his blog and over on the TekPub blog getting more into the details, so I won’t rehash it all here.
I have been trying to put something like TekPub together for a couple of years, but it always got pushed out of the way for work on The Lounge or contracts. Earlier this year I talked to Ayende about finally getting it off the ground since he was interested as well. Around August when Rob decided he was interested in doing the same thing he approached Ayende as well who told Rob to get in touch with me. Thankfully Rob and I found a way to work together on it and it has been going great so far.
To me the most interesting angle of TekPub is that we are independently producing content and giving more power (and a larger revenue share) to the authors than most (if not all) of the conventional publishers out there. Having written a number of books I know how much work goes into writing a book, and how little the direct monetary reward can be. We wanted to provide a way for experts to get content out faster (we can be live in days not months), provide more revenue (standard royalty rates on books can be as low as 8-10% of publisher revenue), and above all provide more up to date content to our viewers/readers.
I look forward to getting my first couple series out the door next week and joining the fray as an author. We also have a number of other authors working on content that I can’t wait to announce.
-James
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