acknowledgments

I began with a confession, so let me end with one, too.

I confess that, as a writer, I remain a bit of an amateur. This is my first book, and I’m still learning the craft of this complex business. It has been my great fortune, however, to have received a first-rate literary education from a remarkable group of professional agents, editors, publishers, and marketers.

This education began in New York City one morning in late 2005. I was walking down Broadway toward Times Square. Tucked under my arm were the first 100 pages of a “book” that I’d been working on since FOO Camp 2004. Part anti-Web 2.0 polemic, part Silicon Valley dystopia, part paean to Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Vertigo, part autobiography, this muddled first draft was classic amateur self-indulgence—100 percent unreadable and 100 percent unpublishable.

I found myself in Steve Hanselman’s garret of an office on Forty-second Street, just off Broadway. Steve and his partner, Cathy Hemming—both ex–HarperCollins senior executives—had just opened a literary agency called LevelFive Media. With over twenty-five years of experience in the publishing business, Steve instinctively knew what I wanted to say better than I did.

“An anti-Web 2.0 polemic,” Steve said. “That’s what you are really trying to write.”

Exactly. So, with Cathy’s and Steve’s expert guidance, and under the editorial tutelage of LevelFive’s Julia Serebrinsky, I deleted those original 100 pages and started again. Cathy introduced me to Jonathan Last, the online editor of the Weekly Standard magazine. Jonathan graciously agreed to look at an article comparing Web 2.0 ideology to Marxism. That article, expertly edited by Jonathan, got published in February 2006 and became an instant hit, getting syndicated on CBS News and transforming me into the bête noire of the digital utopian crowd.

I remained an amateur. But now, at least, I was a controversial one.

When, in the spring of 2006, Steve sold my book to Roger Scholl’s Currency imprint at Doubleday, I assumed that I’d made it into the exalted ranks of professional authors. How wrong I was. This is when my serious learning began.

“Any advice on how to write a first book?” I asked Roger when we first met.

“Just have fun,” he replied.

I’ve had fun. But it’s been the Puritan version—the sweaty fun of learning a craft, the Sisyphean fun of turning myself into a professional writer. Working with Roger and ever-responsive assistant editor Talia Krohn has been an intensely educative six months. They taught me the importance of focus, economy, organization, sticking to the preexisting plan—above all, writing one book at a time. The most lucid bits of The Cult of the Amateur were squeezed out of me and then polished up by Roger and Talia. Please blame me for any amateurish digressions that even their eagle editorial eyes missed.

There would be no Cult of the Amateur without Steve, Roger, Talia, Cathy, Jonathan, or Julia. As agents, publishers, and editors, each represents a paragon of the mainstream media ecosystem. I’m just the symbolic tip of a very large iceberg—what in Silicon Valley we call the “front end” of a business enterprise.

Nor would there be a book without the noble efforts of the marketing and sales team at Doubleday. The only bigger fallacy than anyone being able to write a book is that anyone can market and sell one. Web 2.0 book publishing start-ups like Lulu and iUniverse seduce amateur writers with the false promise of instant mass distribution. But, as even Chris Anderson reminds us, the vast majority of books sell fewer than 100 copies. What distinguishes a mainstream publisher like Doubleday are the incredibly rich sales and marketing resources that they offer their writers. I’ve been particularly lucky to work with Doubleday’s deputy publisher, Michael Palgon, as well as David Drake and Liz Hazelton in publicity, and Meredith McGinnis in marketing, Rebecca Gardener in foreign rights, and Louis Quayle in domestic rights. I would also like to thank my own small but highly professional marketing, research, and technology team of Catrin Betts, Sabine Elser, and Peter Rowland, who have contributed significantly to this project, from before the beginning till after the end. Finally, I would like to thank Nicholas Carr, whose richly insightful “The Amorality of Web 2.0” essay (2005) about the cult of the amateur helped define and refine my own arguments in this book.

Thanks to all of you for an unforgettable education. I only hope that this little book does some justice to your splendid job of finding, polishing, and selling talent.

—Berkeley, December 27, 2006