Cross Media
Collaborator
and Co-Creator

An Idea Architect fills a new role in the publishing and media industry. While working with authors, editors, and agents, we are distinct from all three. While our skills and services often overlap these three traditional roles (including developmental editing, representation, proposal writing, and even collaborative authorship), our primary focus is to help authors realize their vision and to present their ideas most successfully to the world. Rather than taking a narrow view of an individual book manuscript or even book publishing alone, our goal is to help visionaries make their ideas most compelling, most persuasive, and most effective in the cultural marketplace, whether presented in books, workshops, lectures, websites, videos, or films.

Practically, we work with far fewer authors than a literary agent or book editor. In addition, our goal is not simply selling a book or books, as agents do, or buying a book or books, as editors do, but helping to shape the overall ideas and insights that our client has to offer our society. Along the way, we provide individual services, some of which are provided by other professionals in the publishing field but which are rarely all provided by a single individual. These include idea exploration, messaging and strategic positioning, book or media proposal writing, developmental editing, writing and revising, editorial coaching, editorial project management, and general professional consulting on the publishing and media industry. In some cases, where we have expertise, we also serve as literary agents, although we often choose to work collaboratively with other agents who have expertise in other fields and genres.

Another way to think of the role of an Idea Architect and how it differs from that of agents and editors is to use the metaphor of the real estate industry. An author has "intellectual property"—their ideas in general, and their book and media projects in particular. If they want to sell this property, they can turn to a literary agent.

Literary agents are in many ways like real estate agents. They will advise you on how to sell your (intellectual) property in book form and will sell it for you, trying to get the best price they can. Many agents will represent you for multiple books and some will even take a larger role in advising you on what book ideas sound most promising to them.

Book editors, on the other hand, are like real estate buyers. They will decide if they like your (intellectual) property and if they do, they will buy it. Increasingly in today’s publishing environment, however, they have little time to develop the property (in this case a book) for you. Most publishing and media houses are working with such tight deadlines and are so focused on trying to win corporate resources for their projects that they are looking for book and media projects that are ready to publish or broadcast immediately.

An Idea Architect, to continue with the real estate metaphor, is like an architect and general contractor. An Idea Architect will not only help you shape your intellectual property both for book publication and other media development but will also help you craft your core ideas and position them in the cultural marketplace. This often involves helping you refine your basic ideas and terminology, coauthoring or editing actual works, helping you shape or write proposals, and offering design, marketing, and professional advice and guidance for your book or other media project. As Idea Architects we will often work with you over many years and across many media to help you deliver your ideas as successfully and effectively as possible. We do this because we believe in your vision and its ability to build a wiser, healthier, and more just world.

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