Lately, private equity has gotten a lot more attention than it probably wants.  That’s because most of the attention has been negative as reporters and political pundits have gone all out to expose their lack of knowledge on the subject including confusing venture capital with private equity and making wildly unsubstantiated claims about the “vulture” nature of private equity.

Let’s set the record straight about what private equity is and what it does.  In private equity firms, equity capital (cash) comes from institutional investors like pension funds and wealthy investors and is invested conservatively in private companies for a variety of reasons: to grow a company, to restructure a failing company and  make it an operational success, or to buy a company outright.  Whatever the goal, the bottom line is PE firms are putting their money at significant risk in hopes of making the return they need  to satisfy the investors in their fund.  This investment is not liquid like public equity (the stock markets) so the PE firm typically maintains a relatively long relationship with the company.  Clearly, they don’t get their hoped for return unless the company does well.  No surprise here.

I've been a full-time professional writer and author for about 15 years now. When I started out in the business, if you wanted to get published, you had to convince an established publisher to take on your book. In return for giving them the rights to publish your book for as long as they wanted, they agreed to pay you an advance and royalties. Aside from some marginal vanity publishers who you would pay to get your book published, this was the way the game was played.

Today, this old publishing model is in disarray. Publishers are taking fewer chances on authors who don't bring a large built-in audience of potential book buyers along with them, and they are paying smaller advances. At the same time, it has become easier than ever to self-publish -- creating ebooks that can quickly and easily be sold on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or iTunes.

But there's a new publishing model that I just ran across, and this one has me interested.

As you may recall from some of my previous posts, I am a fan of the groupsourced business startup funding website Kickstarter.com. As a quick reminder, anyone with an idea for a new product can post their idea on Kickstarter, and ask site visitors to help fund production. Okay, fine. So what's that got to do with publishing? Well, a woman by the name of Kio Stark in Brooklyn, NY came up with the idea of funding his new book -- Don't Go Back to School -- using Kickstarter.

Now, why didn't I think of that?

According to the item description, Stark's book is a handbook for independent learning that shows you how to learn almost anything without school. Her original goal was to raise $14,500 to fund the publication of Don't Go Back to School, however, Kio has exceeded that by a large margin -- raising almost $39,000 to date. In these days of tight publishing agreements, that's a pretty healthy advance.

So if you've ever considered writing a book, and you would prefer not to go the usual publishing route, then consider giving Kickstarter a shot. And don't be surprised if you see MY next book over there.

Start your engines all those of you who have hopes of becoming top-level domain name registrars, which seems to be the opportunity du jour. On Thursday this week ICANN, the non-profit organization that oversees the Internet domain name world so that it’s not completely chaotic, will begin accepting applications to manage a whole new set of top-level domains that could include just about any word.  Think dot-electronics or dot-snowboardingsafaris.   Opening up a vast array of potential top-level domains will no doubt have the domain-name speculators out in force.

Those speculators, like Kentucky entrepreneur Jeffrey Smith, have been waiting for this day for a long time.  If you become the “overseer” for a top-level domain (a registry holder), you can sell your names to registrars such as GoDaddy.com LLC, who then sell the secondary names (those left of the dot) to people who want to own a particular Web address.  But, it’s not as simple as selling the name.  The holder has to “determine who will be eligible to use it and has to provide the technology that will enable the domain to function.” For example, dot-jobs is reserved for the human resource management community (sponsored by Employ Media LLC) and dot-cat is reserved for the Catalan Linguistic and cultural community (sponsored by Fundacio puntCat.) And you thought dot-cat was for cat lovers.  According to Sarah Needleman’s great article in the WSJ today, Smith and his partners, who started their business in 2000, want to be the registrars for the dot-shop domain.  They believe that in a few years dot-shop will be as common as dot-com.