Publish yourself (E)

0:00Should you write a book? I don't think that's a serious question. Of course you should write a book. The question is, should you publish your book? Hey, it's Kevin Beach, and this is a special archived episode of Akemba.

0:22If someone came up to you and said, you should make a major motion picture, you could laugh at them because that costs$100 million. dollars. If they said you should star in a popular sitcom, you could sneer at them because you know you don't get to decide that. The network has to hire you. And if someone said you should make a top 40 record album, well, that's sort of silly because you need a lot of talent. You got to play the guitar, sing in tune. You got to go to the recording studio and figure out that whole Spotify thing. But making a book is still a personal work, as personal a work as it was 20 or 50 or 100 years ago.

1:04Not only that, but books have never been a mass market phenomenon. They have changed pockets of the culture many times, but they are never the thing that everyone is reading or talking about. So they line up beautifully with the long tail world we are now living in. The magic of writing a book is that you're not trying to influence everyone. You're simply trying to influence someone. Of course you should write a book. You should write a book because you have something to share. You should write a book because your experiences are worth showing to other people. You should write a book because it's a generous way to turn on lights, to open doors, and to instruct others.

1:53You should write a book because writing a book will clarify your thoughts. And you should consider writing a book because if other people read that book, not only will you be doing a generous act by sharing your insight with them, but you will gain credibility and permission and trust with the people who engage with your book. So perhaps the answer is yes, you should publish a book. I've published more than 140 books in 35 languages in many formats. I've never carved one into a block of stone, but that's just because it hadn't occurred to me till just now. Publishing a book is a lot of fun. publishing a book is fraught with risk and anxiety.

2:42Publishing is not the same as printing, and I'd like to spend a few minutes talking to you about what it would involve for you to publish a book, because the world has changed dramatically. In 1983, when I first encountered the book business as a participant, I got in it as a byproduct of the software work I was doing at Spinnaker. We had a line of adventure games based on science fiction novels. Michael Crichton, Arthur C. Clarke. It was really exciting. But one of our games didn't have a novel attached to it. So it occurred to me that for consistency, I could get a novel made. Well, somehow I got Alan Dean Foster on the phone.

3:29He's the guy who did the alien movie novelization. And he said, sure, I will novelize a computer game. And there it was, the first time anyone had ever novelized a computer game, something that's gone on since then. And I shipped it out, a proposal to Warner Books, and they said, sure, we'll publish that book. It went on to sell 100 ,000 copies, which was pretty cool. And I thought, wow, this book publishing thing, you contact one of the 20 or 30 people in New York City who buy books, who don't have enough books to buy because they got to publish new books all the time. And maybe they'll send you money.

4:07So after I left Spinnaker, Chip Conley and I pitched a book back to Warner because I knew someone at Warner. And two days later, they bought it. They sent us$5 ,000. I was thrilled. I was newly unemployed. And here was a check for$5 ,000. Now I had to split it with Chip. So it was only 2 ,500 bucks. But still, I could do this. If I did, I don't know, 20 or 30 books a year, I could make a living at it. Over the next year, I got 800 rejection letters in a row. Every major publisher rejected me many times. It took me a year to figure out that my job was not to invent and sell books that readers wanted to buy and read.

4:56My job was to invent and sell books that editors wanted to publish. And for a long time, those have been two different things. So it's entirely possible my book, How to Hypnotize Your Friends and Get Them to Act Like Chickens, would have actually sold. But it didn't matter, because in 1986-87, no one in New York wanted to pay me money to write a book like that. The thing about book publishers is that they have been around for 500 years and book publishers have come to understand that their customer is the bookstore, not the reader. I can prove this by pointing out that none of them have a toll-free number in the back of their books, that none of them make it easy for you to reach them.

5:46Booksellers have an easy time of reaching the publisher. Book sellers are visited all the time by the publisher, but readers, not so much. So what's the shift? The shift that's in front of us that's going to affect your book? Well, the shift is this. Now, for many books, the kind of book you would write, the kind of book I would write, it's not unusual for Amazon to sell 30 times as many copies as Barnes & Noble. and for Barnes & Noble to sell 10 times as many copies as any other bookstore. So most of the books are getting sold at one bookseller. A bookseller, by the way, who pays almost no attention to what publishers want and what publishers do.

6:34Number two, more than half the revenue, in some cases way more than half the revenue of a book these days comes from the audio or the Kindle editions. And in both cases, the heavy lifting and the risk of chopping down trees, filling a warehouse with books, and shipping them when needed completely disappears. So it's worth noting here this special moment that we are in. It used to be that all the books looked like books. And one day, probably sooner than we think, There won't be much in the way of books other than rare souvenirs. But right now we're in this moment where some percentage of the people you seek to serve will read this magical hardcover or paperback artifact.

7:30And most of the people you reach will simply touch it on the Kindle or in the e-book form or listen to it in an audio book format. So what you get is the cultural weight of having a real book that looks and feels like a real book that was written by a real author, you, but you get to leverage it with the magic of digital. What does it mean? It means that the hard work of being a publisher, the financially difficult work of taking a risk to reach people who don't know about the book so that they will stock it, and then persisting so that after it is stocked, readers find out about it and buy it doesn't matter nearly as much as it used to.

8:26Think about Harry Potter. Harry Potter became the most successful book series of all time because one woman at Scholastic invested a lot of her career, a lot of her credibility in getting this book to the right booksellers. And those booksellers hand-sold that book. One by one, kids came in, the bookseller said, you look like the kind of kid that would like a book like this. There was no movie. There was no promotion. Instead, there were 500 booksellers taking 5 ,000 or 50 ,000 kids by the hand and hand-selling a book to make it succeed. This is the legend of bookselling. This is what you get if you are published properly.

9:14But it's getting harder and harder to be published properly because all the noise around the Kindle and the audiobook, all the noise about blogs and all the other ways we have to get ideas into the world means that it's harder than ever for a book publisher to publish the way they used to. A couple things went out the window. We're defenestrated, as a Yale grad might say. One was spending the time and money to carefully nurture and edit the newbie author to help him or her create a book that really works. Those days are gone. The second thing is persistent and consistent promotion over the course of months or years to develop an author and an author's following.

10:06There's just too much throughput. it. People aren't spending the time anymore. So with all that bad news, why are we even talking about making a book? Well, my argument is that books have 500 years of magic behind them. Even though 58 % of the adults in the United States will never pay for and read a book after they graduate from high school. 58%. The other 42 % are showing up and trusting what they see, that a book communicates something to us. I did a book called V is for Vulnerable that looks a lot like a kid's book. Why did I do that? Because when you hold it in your hands, you are reminded of your mom and dad reading you a bedtime story.

11:00when you hand it to someone, it comes with that patina, the patina of trust and nostalgia that a book means something. Books are also self-contained, non-battery operated, and reliable, which means you can hand a book to somebody and say, read this. It's harder to do that with a video, Harder to do that with a blog post. They're easier to spread, but they're not easier to consume. Not in the way that the author intends. It can take hours and hours to read a book, nine hours to listen to an audiobook. You're not going to be able to do that with a YouTube video. As a result, if you have something to say, something that will stand the test of time, putting it in this magical package and getting it into the hands of the right person can make all the difference in the world to them and to you.

12:01So where I'm leading with this is that for most of us, if you are not going to be a professional in the book industry, you have the opportunity right now, and I'm not sure how long the window will be open to publish your own book. Not to take enormous financial risk, but to do the emotional labor of bringing your book out in a format that people can touch, that will help you teach the thing you're trying to teach. So I want to share some of the basic principles here that a lot of people who are brave enough and generous enough to bring a book into the world sometimes overlook. The first basic principle is this.

12:45You're not doing this to please a New York publisher. I mean, I needed to in 1990 and 1995, because if I wanted to get paid to make books, the only people who were going to pay me to make books were New York book publishers, and they wanted something specific. And after the book came out, they wanted something specific, and they knew who their customers were. But none of those things are on your agenda. I mean, they might be, and if they are, you should embrace those ideas. But for most of us, maybe not so much. So if you're going to bring your book to the world, I will start with this. Making the decision to sell your book for money is fundamentally different than choosing to give your book away.

13:31If you have something that you want to say and you don't want to spend many months of your life turning it into a business, go ahead and make a PDF and email it to 100 people and ask them to share it if it resonates with them. Go ahead and write 250 blog posts, one a day for nine months. Drip, drip, drip. No money in, but also no money out. That the goal of this sort of project is simply to do the work of sharing your idea, but not adding commerce to it. Because let's be clear, The two reasons why we need to charge for books are, one, books on paper cost money to make, and two, the publisher who made them needs to make a return on their investment.

14:21But if your book is digital and there is no publisher involved, you can take money out of the equation. So yes, go ahead and do that and simply ship the work. Don't keep track of your bestseller status. It doesn't matter. Simply ship the work. But for the rest of this conversation, we're going to talk about selling it. And there are a bunch of reasons why you might want to do that. One is it's nice to make a living doing something you care about. Two is when someone buys your idea, they treat it with more respect. They focus more energy on it. It comes in a different sort of package. So if you're going to sell your idea, whether or not you use a New York publisher, this part's true, you need to start promoting it three years before it comes out.

15:13Not three weeks or three days, three years. You need to build up a permission asset, credibility, and trust so that when it's time to bring the book out, people are waiting for it. The next idea, we will judge you. We will judge the cover, despite what the cliche says. We love judging a book by its cover. What an opportunity. Just like buying a good pair of shoes makes people think you're better than you are, buying a good cover sends the same sort of message. Go buy a good cover. There are lots of ways to do that. You can check the show notes. And then once we've looked at the cover, on the inside, get rid of all the typos and the mistakes.

16:02In the show notes, I talk about the Editorial Freelancers Association. There are people there who, for less money than you think, will make your book sing and dance. As we covered in an earlier episode, please don't try to sell your book to everyone. It's not for everyone. The best-selling book in the United States in any given year reaches no more than 2 % of the population. 98 % of the people don't read it. 98 % of the people aren't aware of it. If you can hit 2 % of the population, it's a home run. I've never done that. I'm wishing you well. Which means that you should resist, resist like crazy the idea that you need mass market publicity.

16:54Mass market publicity is a waste because there is no mass market audience for your book and for the ideas you want to spread. It's a micro audience. And lucky for you, the internet is a micro medium. And so they line up. the idea that you can find the smallest viable audience of people and go to them with trust, with authority, with permission, and say, here, I made this, I wrote this. That's priceless. Then in terms of what it is they are consuming, it turns out that making a book is way easier than you think. And print on demand means that it's cheaper than ever to keep it in stock. The way it used to work is you would have to chop down a whole bunch of trees, make a bunch of paper, print the pages, and then they would move the pages to another building where they would be bound.

17:54And then they would take the covers, which were printed in another building, and wrap them around. And then they would go to a warehouse, and then to another warehouse, and then through distribution and eventually to the person who bought the book. Now, Ingram and other companies run this idea of print-on-demand. It's one giant looking Xerox machine. You put a PDF file in one end and a finished book comes out the other. And you can print them five at a time. Not 5 ,000 at a time or 50 ,000 at a time, but five. So suddenly you don't need a garage filled with books. But But it's worth noting that books that sell by the truckload are the books that sell by the caseload.

18:38What do I mean by that? I mean that if you're in the business world or in various pockets of our culture, your book is going to succeed because people buy it eight at a time or 20 at a time, because they hand it out at a conference, because they have all their co-workers read it, which means it helps a lot if you write the kind of book that will benefit your readers if they share it. What kind of book you write is up to you. You should write a book that you are proud of. But if you are keeping track of the impact that you are making in the world, choosing to write a book that people want to share is the first step in choosing to write a book that's actually going to sell.

19:31So I could go on and on with all these other principles, but the basic principles to summarize here are this. It's not for everyone, but it might be for someone. The format, it actually matters. We will judge you by how it looks. The bestseller list, which I didn't get into in too much detail, is a scam, and you should just ignore it. You should just walk away from it. And I could rant about the bestseller list for days, but I'll leave that for the show notes as well. What we're left with is this. If you're willing to do the work and show up and show up and show up with generosity for years at a time, people are going to read your book.

20:14And if people read your book and they don't like it, you should write another book. Because this act of putting it down in writing clearly for people who want to learn about you, who want to learn from you, is fun and generous and ultimately productive for everybody. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. Now, on to your questions. Hey Seth, it's Maria. Hey Seth, my name's Kyle. Greetings, Seth. This is Stephen out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. Hi Seth, this is Anupam. Hi, this is Caitlin. Hi Seth, warm greetings from Curacao. Hey, Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

20:58Hey, Seth. This is Rex. Hey, Seth. Hi, this is Vasilis from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is... And that completes my question. If you've got a question from this episode or anything that you've heard in the previous 50, please visit akimbo.link, that's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K, and press the appropriate button. We love to hear from you. Hi, Seth. This is El Samertano in Atlanta. And having just started my own blog, I've been devouring every inner view of you that I can find and touching on a few themes from recently, taxonomy and phasology and the way that ideas travel. Something I noticed that I really was impressed with is that in your responses to generic questions, you default to the pronoun she, whereas most people use he.

21:55I love this idea of voting with your words in the same way you could say consumers vote with their dollars. And I've also noticed recently, they is in use a lot more often for people who prefer a gender neutral identifier. So I just my question is, do you make a conscious choice to use she or is it just a natural part of the way that you speak? And along with that, if the message and the signal we want to send, whether it be in business just or in life, is that inclusion is important to me. is it better to use a variety of pronouns or better to champion the far more underrepresented she? I appreciate you.

22:47Thanks, Al. I've been doing this for more than 20 years, not so that people will consciously notice it, but so that they will unconsciously notice it. Clive Thompson in this week's New York Times posits a theory about why so few women are computer programmers. It turns out the very first computer programmer was a woman, that the computer programmers who made mainframes possible in the 50s were women. My aunt worked on the NASA space program in the 1960s as a programmer. Women are great at programming. So why is it then that so few of them have positions of authority in programming? Clive's theory is that it's Steve Wozniak's fault.

23:40Steve Wozniak and others in the early 1980s, I was even among them as a junior marketer at Spinnaker in 1983. When computers became popular in the home, they were largely bought by dads for sons. And that decision, exposing the 6 or 7 or 8 or 12-year-old kid to either computers if they were a boy or no computers if they weren't, set the stage for a cultural shift. Because it meant that the computer club in high school was largely filled with boys, whether it was an informal or a formal organization. It meant that when kids got to college, very few showed up saying, I'm good at biology or I'm good at chemistry.

24:28But tons of young men showed up saying, I'm good at programming. So I guess it's your mom's fault and your dad's fault that the whole thing begins with what are you taught to believe growing up? Of course, there are huge social and structural barriers in so many fields based on race and gender and age, and they have to be addressed. But it all begins with the story we tell ourselves. If you're 10 years old and you grow up thinking that you're not going to be a programmer, it's probably true that you're not going to be a programmer. If you're 12 years old and you grow up believing that the only chance you've got to make an impact in the world is to be a professional sports star, it's probable that you'll try to do that, and it's quite likely that you'll fail.

25:18What we need to do is to keep reminding people, young people, older people, that the story we tell ourselves matters. So in memory of my mom, I've been using the female pronoun anytime I'm describing an indeterminate human being of authority and good ethics. And by now it's second nature. I just default to it. And I understand that that rubs some people the wrong way because they think I'm somehow trivializing the English language. But I'll keep doing it because I've heard from enough people who said, thank you for setting an expectation. Because of our expectation is that people who don't necessarily look like us are capable and likely to have positions of authority where they're doing the right thing.

26:10It makes it more likely that that's going to happen. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.