Timothy's Thoughts

T hree heavy hitters in the marketing community went at it this week. It began with Chris Anderson's book, Free . The second heavy hitter, Malcolm Gladwell, wrote a review for The New Yorker titled Priced To Sell: Is free the future? . His review disagreed with much of what Chris Anderson said in his book. Gradwell's claim being that no matter how cheap individual units of something become, the infrastructure of producing the whole will be too large to truly make them free. On Tuesday, Seth Godin came to Anderson's defense with his post, Malcolm is Wrong . So, who is right? Are Chris Anderson and Seth Godin correct that we will reach the point where information is so cheap that we might as well give it away? Have we reached the point? Or is Malcolm Gladwell correct that the cost of generating and delivering the information will prevent us from offering it for free? What was it your mother told you? There is no free lunch. I definitely am going to have to side with Malc...

N ovelists spend a lot of time writing. When treating it like a full-time job, it can take a month to write a novel. Sporadic writers may take a year or more. The whole time, the writer is wondering if it is a waste of time. We wonder if anyone will want to read what we have written. That leads us into the next question from Andy Stanley’s pod cast . We want other people to believe that what we have written is worthwhile. Why do they need to know it? We talked yesterday about the theme of our novels, or to use Andy Stanley’s term, the one thing . We don’t usually sell novels by telling people we’re going to teach them something, and yet, stories have a higher purpose than entertainment. Stories have always been the most efficient way to convey information that people will remember. Stories must be entertaining, or people won’t read them, but we must never forget their higher purpose and as such, we must write in such a way that people see what we are telling them as relevant. If you ...