American entrepreneur, author and public speaker Seth Godin (photo by Joi Ito, Wikimedia Commons)

But Godin has misapprehended a few things. The interview in Media Bistro, which got this whole ball rolling when GalleyCat teased the final paragraph last week, contains the most helpful statement for understanding why:

I like the people [in publishing], but I can’t abide the long wait, the filters, the big push at launch, the nudging to get people to go to a store they don’t usually visit to buy something they don’t usually buy, to get them to pay for an idea in a form that’s hard to spread. . . . I really don’t think the process is worth the effort that it now takes to make it work.

My jaw dropped. Godin may not like the wait, filters, and push, but those things have served many an author. The process has its challenges, as all do, but it also has its payoffs. A well coordinated launch with a major push has helped more authors succeed than I can count. But the real shocker was this: “nudging to get people to go to a store they don’t usually visit to buy something they don’t usually buy, to get them to pay for an idea in a form that’s hard to spread.”

If I’m Dante, I just landed in the wrong poem. Godin’s describing Inferno. Trying to sell books to people who don’t like them is hopeless—it’s like hawking lentils the day after Easter. But that’s not what traditional publishing is about. We sell books to people who love them, to people who crave them, who love bookstores, who love reading. Sounds like Paradise.

Reality is of course somewhere in between. There are a lot of uncertainties and inefficiencies in the system, and we’re constantly trying to work through and around them, but Godin’s basic misapprehension is that people don’t like books. There are billions of dollars exchanged every year that say differently. If you’re a reader, your own habits probably say differently. Mine do.

The second misapprehension is that books are a clunky way to deliver and spread ideas. Yes, the white pages are an inelegant way to spread phone numbers. A multivolume set on a bowed shelf is an inefficient way to access encyclopedia entries. But imagine reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian one blog post at a time, or accessing Eric Metaxas’ successful biography Bonhoeffer through podcasts. Unthinkable. For people who love them, there are few things more elegant or efficient than books.

Literature is like running. It’s not for everyone, but for people who love it stopping after four blocks fails to satisfy. There are miles to go. It’s immersive. It’s also time consuming, but real readers are like real runners; you settle into a good pace and time evaporates. People whose primary reading is Facebook and street signs might not get that. Fine. Selling books to them is a waste of time and effort. Thank God that’s not the task before publishers.

A third misapprehension is not Godin’s fault. It’s our own. Godin’s personal business model is perhaps set up for him to succeed with this independent adventure. Good for him. Most authors, however, are not set up to go it alone. Likewise, most publishers are not set up to translate many of Godin’s ideas into their models. As authors and publishers, we should spend more time trying to please our customers than trying to justify ourselves to, or square our practices with, Seth Godin.

Detail from Pietà by Carlo Crivelli (The Yorck Project, Wikimedia Commons)

By “books” I do not mean a bunch of printed pages between covers, what is technically known as a codex. That format has been in wide use for the last nineteen hundred years or so. Before that the format of choice was the scroll. Today we have more format options—primarily audio and ebook—but the essence of what we do, regardless of format, is publish (to be necessarily redundant) books.

By books I mean sustained discussions or stories. The delivery mechanism is minimally relevant to what a book is. Tom Wolfe published Ambush at Fort Bragg as an audio book three years before it made its way to print, but it was still a book. In whatever format it comes, a book engages the mind and emotions in a rewarding and thoroughly unique way. God only knows why, but people in the publishing business seem increasingly intent on ignoring or dismissing this fact.

I sat through a recent trade event that featured several engaging speakers, one of whom said that traditional ebooks will be gone in two years. Apologies, but this is nonsense. We’ll still be printing books in twenty-four months, and there will be plenty of simple, unenhanced ebooks sold then too. Why? Because readers want books—sustained discussions and stories that immerse their hearts and minds in ways that only books can. Fragmented texts with splotches of audiovisual enhancement may make headway in the marketplace, but they will never replace books, nor will they provide the foundation for success in the future of publishing. But the speaker nonetheless advised us to move forward and innovate relentlessly.

In what direction? To what end?

What worries me is that publishers are losing touch with what God put them on earth to do. I have actually heard people say that we are no longer book publishers; we are “content providers.” I’ve heard this hundreds of times and spoken with all of the self-authenticating assurance of gospel. I recognize that statements like this come from the need to make sense of the tremendous change happening around us, but this language is unhelpful in the extreme.

Think about this: A company has a strategy to focus its efforts. Calling ourselves content providers is an unstrategy. It’s like Patton’s Third Army saying they’re about munitions instead of Berlin. It generalizes our efforts. Content is generic. Books are specific. Content is meaningless. Books have meaning. Content is data. Books are prose and poetry. As my wife likes to say, talking about content is like talking about ingredients. Any cook knows that cooking comes down to garlic, tomatoes, and onions. “Ingredients” is too vague to be useful. But that’s where we are headed.

Let me state the obvious. Bell South is content provider. So is Comcast, Wikipedia, Rick Warren, Sony Pictures, EMI, the San Diego Union Tribune, and Facebook. That’s a wide field. Can publishers compete with Jerry Bruckheimer, Xbox, Jimmy Wales, and Twitter? Forget about it. It’s a stupid question. But it’s the question we have to start asking if we insist on seeing ourselves as content providers instead of publishers.

It’s about books. Forget all the other crap and focus on books. Print, audio, electronic? Yes, sure, definitely—but don’t forget what it is that we are doing. We talk about the need to know our customers. We have it easy. They’re readers. We know that much. And we know something else. Readers don’t want content. They want books.

In conversations about this subject, the analogy of the music business is brought up time and again. The music business went through comparable disruptions, and publishers like to think of these colleagues as the first frog to cross the street. The comparisons are mostly unhelpful (there is, for instance, nothing truly comparable about listening to a song and a reading a book). But here’s one that actually means something: books are like symphonies or concertos—lengthy compositions, usually highly integrated with repeating themes and ideas, designed to carry the listener aloft by creating tensions that mount and release and intensify as the piece develops and grows. They represent sustained concepts, elaborate trains of thought that require attention and focus—attention and focus that are rewarded for their use.

Analogizing books to pop songs is wrong. Ditto for comparisons involving YouTube, video games, blogs, and magazines. They are not mutually exclusive, but the audience for one is not the same as the audience for the other.

We live in an age when data is abundant and content is free. Synthesis and analysis are not. A book provides a reader what they cannot get for free. It provides a symphony of words. The composer/author arranges an argument or story in way that is engaging, pleasing, infuriating, fascinating, and in a way that can only be truly or effectively delivered as a book. Various enhancements might supplement this experience, but they will not supplant it.

Fragmented information is everywhere. Elaborate, composed, immersive information is not. It’s in books. As publishers, we are about books.

The great Maxwell Perkins, patron saint of editors (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Wikimedia Commons)

But most authors whose books bomb don’t see it that way. If a book bombs, a common author complaint is that the marketing was off: not enough of it, not enough money spent, etc. I don’t think that’s always the case.

Lots of books with incredible marketing campaigns sputter and fail. Lots of books with poor marketing campaigns take off and thrive. There’s no direct link between marketing and successful publishing.

Marketing can announce a book. It can draw attention to it. It can connect it to readers. In these things, it is essential and helpful. What it can’t do is make a book move when it doesn’t already have the potential to do so.

Max Perkins, the famed editor of such luminaries as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Wolfe, addressed this in his letters from time to time. Here’s one to Arthur Train:

Authors generally have a completely unjustifiable faith in what book-advertising can do, and they get it generally from knowing what advertising in general can do. . . . The fact is, as all publishers believe, that advertising will greatly help a selling book, but that it will have no effect . . . on the sale of a book which lacks the mysterious selling qualities. This has been proved over and over. In one case an author of ours . . . insisted on spending three thousand dollars, on top of about two thousand of ours, because he was certain that his book would sell if advertised enough. It had already sold some four or five thousand copies by the time he put in his money, and it never sold more than three or four hundred beyond that.

And here’s one to Sherwood Anderson:

As to the advertising, publishers all think the same way about it. It is like getting a stationary automobile into motion. The advertising is like a man pushing it. If he can get it to move, the more he pushes the faster it will move and the more easily. But if he cannot get it to move, he can push till he drops dead and it will stand still.

These letters were written in 1938 and 1940, respectively. Nothing’s changed. If a book doesn’t have what readers want–those “mysterious selling qualities”–then it won’t work no matter how much time and money a publisher pours into marketing.

Photo by Matt Seppings, Flickr

But that’s not the case everywhere. From its lofty seat in the lap of America’s publishing culture, the New York Times recently reported that things are different in Europe, where book sales are actually up. Not that everyone’s celebrating. Despite growth in sales, publishers there are cautious. Even nervous. They’re looking back to events unfolding after 1929. Several French publishers failed during the Great Depression. Perhaps America’s slump portends what’s to come.

“Now we are asking ourselves, will it be like that again?” said one French editor quoted in the story. “There is still a sense of fragility.”

She says what we all know, what we all fear. There is little certainty about the future. No one has visibility. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Listen to what economist Israel M. Kirzner says in Competition and Entrepreneurship:

Because the participants in this market are less than omniscient, there are likely to exist, at any given time, a multitude of opportunities that have not yet been taken advantage of.

Uncertainty means opportunity. Anyone can take the available knowledge and arrange his options A, B, and C. That’s what happens now when we conduct business as usual or spend our moments worried about what’s going to happen next. The entrepreneurial function is to put aside A, B, and C and discover D, G, and Q instead.

The Times mentions just such as case:

Penguin was founded in 1935, during the Great Depression, by the publisher Allen Lane, who wanted to sell quality books for roughly the price of a pack of cigarettes.

It worked. In less than a year the company had already printed over a million books. Penguin’s success was as then unpredictable as it is now legendary. While his colleagues were failing, Allen Lane figured out one way to serve his customers and grow a business.

Thomas Nelson, the company for which I work, has a similar history of finding D, G, and Q. It’s founder and namesake not only published affordable editions of popular books like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, but he also serialized the Scriptures so people could buy the Bible in pieces rather the invest in what was then a relatively expensive product. He hired traveling salesmen to field orders for his books, a first in 1829. Then in 1850 Thomas Nelson Jr. created the rotary press, a development that more than doubled the efficiency of printing and revolutionized the business. These innovations changed publishing and brought Nelson growth. And no one saw them coming.

Omniscience sounds great. Certainty would be wonderful. But maybe not. The unequal dispersion of knowledge creates opportunity and space for growth. Allen Lane had an edge. So did Thomas Nelson. Working in uncertainty means using it to our advantage.

I think the message of Penguin and Nelson is that while our environment has an impact on us we are not utterly dependent upon its externalities. We have unique internal energies that can be directed outward to serve customers in creative, as-yet-unforeseen ways and thereby overcome the environment. Put another way, it is because we don’t know what will happen in the future that we have power to steer the present.

What are some of the ways you think publishers can innovate in the current environment?

The intrepid William Jovanovich

Wise minds in the industry have addressed this problem in the past. “Editors try to please authors and so tend to accept dubious books,” writes famed publisher William Jovanovich in his book Now, Barabbas. “It is an unfortunate attitude, and now a common one, that because a publishing house hires editors its management perforce consists of financiers whose job is to make money and to prevent editors from losing it.”

This distinction between the finance people and the editorial people is relatively new in publishing. It only happened as publishing firms grew in the last century, and the sheer size and scope forced specialization and division. It used to be that the publisher was the editor and the bookkeeper. In small boutique houses, that’s sometimes still the case. At a major house like Thomas Nelson, where I work, the division is so great and sharp that we don’t even work in the same buildings together.

Jovanovich had something to say about this divide: “[I]n the best publishing houses, whatever their size, there is no clear distinction between editorial judgment and managerial judgment.” This is smart thinking (regardless of how true the statement is). If the editor’s judgment is primarily a function of his relationship with the author and the literary quality of the book, then it is easy to miss the business concerns. Similarly, if the sultans of spreadsheets determine what’s published, then literature will suffer and authors will be among all people the most pitiable.

What we need, a la Jovanovich, is a unity of labor. Editors need managerial judgement; managers need editorial judgement. This is why in Purple Cow Seth Godin tells marketers to “take a design course.” More than that: “Send your designers to a marketing course. And both of you should spend a week in the factory.” The idea is to create a business culture of empathy, one where the needs and desires of different sectors are understood by all, where someone wearing the financial hat can appreciate (even if not fully understand) where the editor is coming from, and vice versa. This isn’t to suggest that the financial analysts should edit manuscripts, the designers should acquire new authors, and the marketing department should coordinate print runs. But it does suggest that each knowing a bit of what goes into the other can help, and each being able to speak into the experience of the other may have real value. An empathetic culture bridges a lot of divisions and can have serious payoff related to creativity and innovation.

Good business is in some sense just the efficient coordination of disparate knowledge for profit. Working in silos makes coordination difficult. Jumping out of those silos is the quickest way to shake loose all of that knowledge and make new connections. That’s why Eric Hoffer’s observation about misplaced people in business worth considering:

It was not conventional businessmen but misplaced poets and philosophers who gave American business its Promethean sweep and drive. To a potential philosopher turned businessman all action is of one kind, and he combines steel mills, mines, factories and so on the way a philosopher collates and generalizes ideas. . . . Misplacement induces a tendency toward overstepping, initiating and innovating. . . .

In a market such as ours, overstepping, initiating, and innovating are crucial to success. And it will often come from unpredicted sources. Just think of what’s happening with digital developments: IT departments are going from tech support to product creators, from expense lines to profit makers. Given the divisions in publishing, the cool thing for us is that we don’t always have to reach outside of our industry for those misplaced dreamers. They’re sometimes sitting in the very next cubicle.

We have the know-how. We just need to get better at appreciating and sharing it — coordinating all that specialized knowledge for the general use of our companies.

The sagacious Alfred Harcourt

And we therefore pray you to publish this little book, appending what you think right, that our opinions may be known to others, and that these persons may have a fair chance of being freed from erroneous notions and ignorance of good. . . .

It’s a query letter, a book proposal. It’s all there: the request and the rationale for publishing, the note of urgency about the topic, even the petition for help with the editing. For the sake of perspective, remember that this book proposal is over eighteen hundred years old. Justin Martyr died in A.D. 165. You know how it is: the more things change. . . .

I think I’ve got a book in me

A few years ago I spoke with a colleague who had just left the publishing industry. “What is it everybody always says?” he asked, then answered: “‘I think I’ve got a book in me.’” According to one survey in 2006, nearly 70 percent of Americans think their lives warrant a book. And it’s not just memoir and biography. The same survey also revealed that a big chunk of respondents desire to share advice, especially, it seemed from the survey, about sex tips. Everybody’s got a story (even if it’s kinky), and everybody wants to tell it. Everybody, in other words, wants to be published.

The good news is that getting published is easier than ever before. Technology has lowered many hurdles for aspiring authors. Everybody has an internet connection and a word processor. Plenty of other affordable tools make it possible to write and publish. And Web 2.0 social developments have even bridged some of the troubled water around marketing and distribution. As Clay Shirky puts it in Here Comes Everybody, “The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from ‘Why publish this?’ to ‘Why not?’” But bad news marbles the good. The easier it is to publish, the more people will do so—the more people are doing so. This poses problems for publishers and authors because of the relationship between scarcity and value:

Plentiful = cheap, worthless
Rare = valuable, prized

Think of it this way: A glut in books equates to a glut in dollars, and there’s a reason why the word “inflation” strikes fear in the hearts of economists. The more plentiful something is the less value it has and the less people are willing to pay for it. If you are an author, that could have a direct and ugly impact on your royalty statement. And if authors aren’t making money, neither are publishers. We’re literary lichen.

Thus a few questions: How to thrive in an environment where everybody wants to be published and virtually can be, where there are far more books than customers? How to distinguish yourself amid the deluge? How to make yourself rare, unique, valuable? I think the answers have a lot to do with how an author approaches his craft and how he envisions his work as it fits in the business of publishing.

Every book is a product

If you are, say, Maytag or Ford, you only roll out a small number of new products each year or every several years. Not so in publishing. I like how Alfred Harcourt presented the situation. He compared his troubles with those of a cosmetics maker.

The publisher’s problem, and the toothpaste manufacturer’s problem are quite different. During the course of a year some publishers issue several hundred new books, and many issue at least one hundred—that is, one every three business days. And besides there are already on their lists from several hundred to several thousand older titles, each requiring cataloguing and detailed attention.

One thing I like about this statement is that Harcourt said it in 1943, and he was describing a longstanding situation. Old problems are at least familiar ones. It’s more complicated today, but the upshot is the same.

“The cosmetic manufacturer,” said Harcourt, “would throw up his hands at the idea of a new product every three days.” Of course publishers can’t afford to throw up their hands. We have to get busy and release more books to make our sales projections for the month. And if publishers aren’t making money, neither are authors—that whole literary lichen thing again.

Not just authors, business partners too

Given the problem described by Harcourt, a quality in authors that I value equally with their smarts, skills, and diligence is the knack for seeing themselves as entrepreneurs. Historians, reporters, educators, experts, memoirists, gurus, pastors, pundits—authors can be any and all of these. But alongside these they are enterprisers and hopefully see themselves as such.

In Antipolitics, novelist György Konrád writes very romantically about “creative intellectuals,” people who “don’t want to be bosses; they want to be able to tinker, to invent, to create what they have imagined.” Konrád describes the creative intellectual as “all right if he can offer his abilities on his own terms, not on the buyer’s.” It’s a beautiful concept, but one he also describes as utopian. In a market setting such as ours the buyer always shadows the artist, the creator, the intellectual—even if the cast is diffused and distorted. You can dislike it, but the reality stands (for now).

There is no doubt that books contain the stories that capture our imaginations, philosophies that shape our lives, doctrines that impel our actions, humor that brightens our moods, and poetry that quickens our souls. Yet in addition to being vessels of instruction, entertainment, and enlightenment, books are also products, just as Harcourt said. (Recall that whole jugs-of-olive-oil spat in You’ve Got Mail.) So when authors partner with a publisher they are partners in more than a literary endeavor; they are partners in a business venture.

Even Konrád sees this pretty plainly. “The writer has to deal at times with a publishing executive,” he writes, “but it is not his goal to become a publishing executive himself. The writer’s goal is to have the publisher issue his book without changes in as many copies as possible, pay him the largest possible royalty for it, and try to sell as many copies as he can.” In an ideal world, there may be room for authors to operate with no concern for the desires of buyers, but as long as books are marketable goods they will have trouble achieving their goals east of Eden.

Tasks of the entrepreneur

So books are products and authors are entrepreneurs. Then what? The first task of every entrepreneur, in the words of economist Faustino Ballvé,

is to decide on the kind of thing he is going to trade in. . . . To come to such a decision, he must study the market. . . . He has to take into account what is already in abundant supply in the market and what therefore it is not advisable to offer for sale . . . and finally, what the future prospects of the market are, i.e., what will prove profitable, not now, but when he enters the market and even after that.

It’s a tall order, but it’s the closest thing to wisdom in publishing, an industry famously lacking anything bordering on the virtue.

For those of us in publishing, it boils down to several basic considerations: What do you want to publish? Who’s your audience? What are its needs, interests, and concerns? What does the competition look like? (You may have a great idea, but there might already be other books meeting the needs, feeding the interests, and matching the concerns that you address in your book. Can you do those things better or more uniquely than the competition?) How do you reach your audience? How effective are you at reaching it? Is your audience still going to need or care about your book when it’s finally made available?

If publishers desire success, we must keep Ballvé’s considerations in mind. The same is true for authors, and one of the most important tools for exploring these considerations is the book proposal.

Function of a book proposal

Fundamentally, a book proposal is a business plan. As with Justin Martyr’s, sometimes it is poor or incomplete, but it is a business plan nonetheless. It’s a description of what a product is and why there can be confidence regarding its success in the market—why it will make money for both the author and the publisher.

Think about it this way: The publisher is going to advance money for the book. That advance is an investment, like a business loan. Investors want a return on their money, and they’re not going to do so without a plan, something detailing how the money will be recouped and how the enterprise will fare. And this means an explicit, realistic, compelling, defensible, and self-critical explanation about a book’s potential in the marketplace.

Here’s another comparison: In a literary venture, the publisher serves as something of an insurance broker, a Lloyds of Libris. The proposal factors heavily into the risk evaluation made by the publisher. In comes a proposal, up fly the questions: Do I really want to back this ship? Based on the structural integrity of this vessel and the success of other ships heading into these waters, is backing this particular boat really prudent? The proposal helps answer the questions. It helps paint the risk-reward picture. It helps answer whether the investment will recoup.

Something important to bear in mind: Konrád may be exaggerating things a bit when he says that “the least” creative intellectuals “want is recognition that we are the shamans,” but some authors strike a similar pose and assume all the corollaries, that for instance their work has intrinsic value that the reading public should recognize and appreciate. Maybe it should, but markets are full of people misbehaving.

In a market setting, there is little validity to the idea of intrinsic value. Often it’s just a mask for sentimentality. As such, the commercial concerns covered above do not always neatly overlap with concerns about whether a book is important, useful, or interesting, or whether the author fervently believes in the value and truth of the work. Unless we’re discussing a collection of Finnish ethnic jokes, most authors believe strongly in their work, which they undoubtedly consider, like Justin Martyr before them, important, useful, or interesting. Taking it back to the concept of scarcity, it’s not enough to be a passionate author with an important, useful, or interesting subject. Shaman or not, everybody—almost literally today—is doing it, and consequently we need better gauges to evaluate the worth of a potential product.

6 key book-proposal criteria

There are several things to consider here, but return to the qualities of a good proposal—that it is explicit, realistic, compelling, defensible, and self-critical—and take those qualities in turn. To these I will add one more, that the plan is implementable.

1. Explicit. There can be no doubt about the nature, function, and value of the book or the author’s understanding about its potential. Without clarity of purpose and expectation, the publisher and the author will end up at odds, and the book will flounder as surely as their relationship.

2. Realistic. More than merely explicit, the goals have to be realistic and realizable. Knowing what is truly realistic in publishing is no easy chore, but when an author suggests that his book will sell a million copies or will leave Oprah in fits of breathlessness, red flags ought begin their ascent.

3. Compelling. The proposal has to be as convincing as it is clear and realistic. If the literary enterprise is to be undertaken with all its costs and risks there must be a solid, credible rationale for doing so.

4. Defensible. The argument for publishing and the plan explaining how success will come must bear up under scrutiny. Dreams are great, but they need a superstructure of facts, and as in any other area of life claims require data to back them up. If the proposal cannot stand scrutiny, then hopes for the book’s success are likely misplaced.

5. Self-critical. Being aware of all the weaknesses in the plan is the only way to ensure they can be properly addressed, remedied, or otherwise mitigated. It is always better for the author to demonstrate a knowledge of the weaknesses rather than to hope the publisher catches them—or, worse for all involved, be aware but hope that the publisher fails to detect them before the book is signed, believing that if the book is at least signed then the problems can be ironed out later.

6. Implementable. Assuming the foregoing is sewed up and nailed down, can you pull it off? If there is not a clear sense of how the plan will be put to action, then the warehouse might as well start making room for the returns.

Winning the lottery

Justin Martyr had no clear business plan, only a hope that his “little book” would be published and make a difference in the world. Considering that we can read it nearly two millennia after it was penned indicates that sometimes hope and a good message is enough. But not usually. “Publishing is a gross lottery,” writes book reviewer John Derbyshire, explaining that “Much gold sinks, much dung floats.”

In an environment with more books being published than ever before, that lottery is extra tricky, and there’s a lot of dung floating around out there. But such an environment also holds a lot of promise for authors and publishers because as more voices find avenues to readers, the amount of gold increases as well.

To get the better of Derbyshire’s gross lottery, I think that best chance for authors is to think more entrepreneurially about their work, and the discipline of examining a book’s potential market value and then validating that potential in a thorough and vigorous book proposal is one very important step toward thriving amid the glut.