The world of digital is engineering a new paradigm. Counterintuitively, disruptors are the new normal. Old ways of doing things are continually being upturned – as fresh, exciting challengers emerge, enabled by tech and powered by people.
And with the onset of digital, there is a perverse truth emerging: about the humanness of tech. Digital empowers relationships between companies and customers; opens up slicker, more effective operating systems and better, more connected conversations. It’s also facilitating an extraordinary new phenomenon which says reputation is the currency of value in today’s world. You have to be authentic. You have to be transparent. You have to stand for something, to have a point of view. To have a Mission.
Take Unbound, the publishers. They’ve developed a new way of supporting the artistic integrity of authors and enabling real, connected conversations between authors and their readers. And they’re doing it with digital.
They haven’t been going for long, but they’ve already had one novel on the Man Booker Prize longlist and a number of bestsellers… People as diverse as Stephen Fry, Katy Brand, Julie Burchill, Kate Mosse (who started the Orange – now Baileys – Prize for Fiction) Jonathan Meades, Tamasin Day-Lewis and Shaun Usher have all chosen to work with them. Authors still have to submit work and be commissioned as is the norm in the old world of publishing. But the difference is the process. Readers hold the power and decide whether a book should be published or not.
It’s digital disruption and it’s working. In fact, our own Director of Strategy, Kerensa Jennings, has had her novel ‘SEAS OF SNOW‘ selected for publication by Unbound. Her book is a psychological thriller that explores whether evil is born or made – and Unbound have launched it on their platform this week. You can track her progress here and see a digital disruptor in action…