Publishing is hard (E)

0:00Making is easy, but publishing, publishing is hard. Hey, this is Emily in the Bronx, and you're listening to a special archived episode of Akimbo.

0:17That's a crazy statement. Making is really hard. Making a Broadway play, making a hit record album, making a book, making a pacemaker that doesn't break. This is hard, hard work. But you know it's harder? It's harder to reliably make those things successful. Here's a easy piece of math. Listen to 100 records in a row from any year you choose, 1970, 1990, 2019, in whatever genre you like. Listen to them without paying attention to how many copies they sold. I think what you'll find is that all of them are pretty good, and some of them are exceptional. And there isn't a lot of correlation between the exceptional ones and the ones that sold a lot of copies.

1:13For just as many copies as the Beatles sold of a classic song, they also sold copies of Oubla Di Oubla Da.

1:26Barrow in the marketplace. Molly is the singer in a band. Desmond says to Molly, girl, I like your face. And Molly says this as she takes in my band. Oh, bloody, oh, bloody, life goes on. My love and life goes on. It turns out that the Emerson String Quartet makes records that are awfully good. But pretty randomly, some sell more than others. What is publishing anyway? Publishing is the act of taking a financial risk to bring a new idea to people who haven't heard about it yet. So publishing and marketing are slightly allied, but publishing is a personality-driven business that when you are the creator of something, you go to find a publisher because you'd love to get, quote, back to work creating the next thing.

2:28That it shouldn't be Lin-Manuel Miranda's job to sell tickets to Hamilton. He should be busy writing the next thing. Creators have established this mythology for ourselves that the work is creating and that somebody else should be the publisher. I did 120 books when I was a book packager, a book a month for 10 years. I pitched more than a thousand different ideas. And yes, some of them were really stupid, like how to hypnotize your friends and get them to act like chickens. But many of the books that I pitched were great ideas that later other people went on with a very similar idea to sell a bunch of.

3:15The publishers had to pick between the ones they decided to publish and the ones they turned down. I still can't exactly figure out how they chose. In the words of the late screenwriter William Goldman, nobody knows anything. He wrote that about Hollywood, because in Hollywood, as in the book business, all bestsellers are surprise bestsellers. Sure, you know that the sequel is going to do 80 % as well as the original, maybe 50 % better, maybe half as well. But that's not a surprise. But everything else, everything else you bring to the market, if it works, it's stunningly surprising. If it fails, it's stunningly surprising because nobody knows anything.

4:01And as we've tried to quantify the selection process for creative work, we have relentlessly failed at it. There is no reliable algorithm. So you might ask, what about people like John Hammond? He had golden ears and great taste. Aretha Franklin, Bruce Springsteen, all the way back to Benny Goodman. One guy, one string of hits. except we forget all of his duds. It turns out that if you get lucky or loud early on in your publishing career, you get to play more often. And if you get to play more often, it's inevitable that you're going to have more hits, which will let you play more often. Sure, there's a normal distribution of batting averages.

4:54Some people are going to do better than others. That's just randomness. And yes, there is definitely skill involved in being better than average at publishing. But publishing is hard. And the reason it's hard is because we're not publishing to automatons, we're publishing to humans. And we get stuck on what is better. What is better, a$380 ,000 dollar Ferrari or a$19 ,000 20-year-old Mazda Miata. Which one is better? Which one would you buy? Well, they both sell. So people who could afford either one, some of them pick the Ferrari, some of them pick the Miata. If you ask those people which one is better, you will get two different answers.

5:51People make extraordinary choices every day about how to spend their time or their money. On Netflix, at any given moment, there are hundreds and hundreds of shows to watch, and they're all free. Once you've paid for Netflix, the next show you watch only costs you time. Which one is better? Which one should you watch next? As I covered four seasons ago, quality is different than luxury. Quality doesn't mean how perfect it is, how expensive it is. Quality means does it match the expectations of the person who is buying it? That a McDonald's hamburger has a quality to it that cannot be replaced by one that's made from ground sirloin on a handmade roll because the person who wanted a McDonald's hamburger wanted a McDonald's hamburger.

6:54So back to this idea of publishing. We have a significant cultural challenge here, which is that most of the things that are purchased by us, most of the intellectual property we engage with, we don't subscribe to. We make a new decision based on new information every single day. When Time Magazine had a lot of subscribers, the act of publishing Time Magazine only had two pieces, keep people from unsubscribing and get new people to subscribe. The rest was up to the huge editorial team that cranked that magazine out week after week after week. But as subscriptions faded, as people were clicking from one website to the other, what we saw was that publishing is actually hard.

7:48That if you're in the music business, it's super easy now to get Carriage, to get on Spotify, to get on iTunes, to get on Pandora and Kobuz and Tadal. Super straightforward. The long tail makes it easy. That's not publishing. That's delivering it to someone who could buy it if they want to buy it. Publishing is the act of getting someone to seek out that song, to buy that ticket to the theater. And too often what's going on here is that a publisher gets lucky and takes credit for being smart. The people who published Hamilton didn't publish it better than all the other plays they've ever published.

8:36It just turns out that in that moment in time, more people wanted to see that musical. Is it an act of genius? Without a doubt, one of the greatest musicals ever made. But it's not the only musical ever made. And many of the people, I would argue most of the people who pay all that money for tickets to Hamilton, are paying all that money for tickets to Hamilton because so many other people are paying all that money for tickets to Hamilton. That it has created its own sensation because people like us do things like this and the thing we do is go to this play. So back to this notion, creating is easy, publishing is hard.

9:19that what we have to figure out how to do as creators is maybe, just maybe, not give publishers so much credit for being brilliant and perhaps realize that the most famous of them has been persistent and lucky, not consistently brilliant. And that our job as creators might not be to completely reverse engineer the publishing process so that we can reliably deliver a home run every time. But maybe we just have to figure out how to be persistent and consistent to find the smallest viable audience, the people who want to hear what we want to make, our 1 ,000 true fans, as Kevin Kelly might say, and then show up for them and show up for them.

10:09Bob Dylan, as my friend Brian points out over and over again, is a genius for sure. But when was the last time he produced something that blew people's heads off? Not for a long time.

10:36Because Bob Dylan doesn't care about creating the sensation he created in 1967. He doesn't need to take that kind of swing. Instead, he's found his people, his people have found him, and he consistently and persistently creates. So I'm not minimizing by any stretch of the imagination how hard it is to create. It's what I wrestle with all day long, that creating from the heart with compassion, with passion for the people we seek to serve is a great calling. It's a life's work. It's something that so many of us would love to do, and I hope more people will. But publishing? Publishing is hard. I don't think we've figured out a reliable way to bring a new idea to people who don't know about it in advance.

11:28That without question, there are people who have more leverage, who can give us more of a head start, who can get a stack of books at the cash register at Barnes & Noble. Oh, that's right, no one goes to Barnes & Noble anymore. Who can say they know somebody at Amazon who will somehow wave a magic wand and make things work? Who can say they know the people at Netflix and will make sure you get a hearing? But nobody at Netflix knows anything. If they did, they wouldn't keep buying all those shows that don't work well enough to run forever. It's worth remembering that the first season of Seinfeld was an epic failure.

12:06on one of the three TV networks with a not trivial amount of promotion during prime time. Seinfeld, it didn't work. It was going to get canceled because it wasn't created well. Well, I don't think so. Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld didn't really change very much about who they were and what they wanted to make. So what changed? What changed is persistently showing up with a show in the right place in front of the right people. The American public began to get the joke. The word spread from person to person. that a publisher at NBC decided for once to believe in something that wasn't average and banal and stuck with it long enough for it to become the multi-multi-billion dollar culture-changing hit it became.

13:02Because publishing is hard. And publishers who seek the short term, who are acting like direct marketers, who are measuring everything, they're racing to the bottom. What we know is that if you A-B test a website enough times, it will turn into a porn site. Because when you A-B test, you will end up with clickbait. You will end up with prurient images that people sort of click on in the short run because that is no way to do the work that you care about. So given how hard publishing is, maybe instead of simply reverse engineer it, we could say, these people, the people I would like to serve, what would touch them?

13:47What would make magic for them? What would be worth creating that they wouldn't want to miss? Because yeah, creating is really, really hard. Go make your ruckus. And thanks for listening.

14:10This is Caitlin. Hi, Seth. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey, Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey, 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. Two really deep questions this week. Here we go. Hey, Seth. Justin calling from L.A., old NBA alum and longtime fan. This is with respect to your recent episode on spreading ideas and the idea virus. I love the idea about responsibility in spreading ideas that even if we could spread an idea because we know all the tricks, that we shouldn't spread it unless it's going to promote some sort of greater good.

15:03I'm a big fan of that idea. One issue that came to mind was that I'm pretty sure that people who do have the power to spread ideas and are spreading bad ideas, objectively bad ideas, I'm under the impression that they are under the impression that their idea is for the greater good. But it seems, looking back and even to people at the time, that it is objectively a bad idea. And so how do we deal with that issue? Thanks a lot. Bye. This is a super profound way to think about the problem. Because, of course, unless someone is fully broken, some sort of sociopath, then they are probably doing what they think is right when they do something.

15:55And so we can get into this giant circular conversation about what culture means to someone who doesn't see what we see, who doesn't want what we want. And for me, a good way to think about it is to imagine two axes. And one of the axes is short-term versus long-term thinking. And on the other axis is doing things for yourself because you get pleasure out of doing things for yourself versus doing things for others because you get pleasure out of doing things for others. So in one corner, we have the short-term selfish maximizer who doesn't care about the side effects of his or her actions. And opposite that is the long-term culture builder, somebody who plays for the long haul and also is measuring not how much joy are they getting directly, but instead is seeking to maximize indirect joy by helping other people.

16:54So if I'm going to use that way of looking at the problem, I think we can say that a supervillain like Magneto is seeking short-term selfish benefits. And what we need and what culture enforces, what culture encourages is long-term community benefit. And speaking out about it is how culture enforces it. So part of what we're trying to examine here in Akimbo is how we speak out about it, how we establish what the standards are. And one measure for me when I'm judging someone who has leverage with the culture is this. Do they say I'm just doing my job? Do they say I gave the clients what they want?

17:41Do they say, well, the stock market needed me to make that choice? Do they say things like, well, if we hadn't done it, we wouldn't be able to get to the point where we could help other people. Because those excuses, those are the excuses of someone who hasn't leaned as hard as they can into the long-term generous quadrant. Because over and over again, even in areas like companies that trade in the public markets, we see that it is possible. It is possible to do better, to do better, to make things better, to establish higher standards. Not for you, not because you're going to move up on some Forbes 400 list, but because you are going to benefit because you see that you have created long-term satisfaction for others.

18:30Hi, Seth. This is Tamsin from Plymouth in England. You've often written and spoken about the importance of not waiting for someone to pick you, but picking yourself. And I really resonate with that approach to having a life of your own choosing. Recently, my eight-year-old daughter was not picked to be in her school play. It's the second year she hasn't been picked, and it's possible that she will go all the way through primary school, never having been able to take part. I'm really worried that the environment that she's growing up in is teaching her that she has to wait for someone else to choose her.

19:13And if she isn't picked, she's somehow not good enough to participate. What can I say or what can I do that will help her to grow up into a person that picks themselves? Thank you. It sounds like your daughter is so lucky to have you in her corner. And there's a lot of pathos in this question. My answer is not to indulge the temptation of calling up the people at the school and accusing them of being absolutely crazy for dashing an eight-year-old's dreams. Why exactly are there tryouts for eight-year-olds in the theater? When I produced the musical for nine-year-olds at the local school, we did The Wizard of Oz, which I think is the greatest musical ever.

19:57I thought you said she was dead. That was her sister, the Wicked Witch of the East. This is the Wicked Witch of the West. She's worse than the other one was. Who killed my sister? Who killed the Witch of the East? Was it you? Particularly for kids. We had four tin men, four Dorothy, four Scarecrow, etc. There were 20 stars to the play. Because there's no meritocracy in theater when you're nine years old. But no, that's not what I wanted to say. What I wanted to say is, the gift you can give your daughter is you can teach her to organize her own play, put on her own puppet show, put up signs and have auditions for other kids to join her.

20:43I guess I shouldn't have shot my mouth off the way I did. It's all right. They understand. Oh, I hope so. I wouldn't want her dead for all the show business in the world. Oh, forget it. Certainly our time will come. You better. Listen, you kids. I think our time has come. What do you mean? All right. I'll tell you. We might as well face it. Our folks are up against it and up against it. Good. I've been doing a little snooping around. You know what I found out? What? There's a frame up in this town to get the actors and their kids out of it. Our houses are mortgaged unless the payments are up to date by July 1st.

21:11Why, out we go. Yeah, I know something else, too. Miss Steele, the head of the welfare society here, is trying to get a petition with enough names on it to send us all to a state work school. A work school? What, are you kidding? Can I go too, Ricky? Oh, quiet, will you, Bob? She thinks we ought to be learning a trade or something instead of what we pick up in the theater. She's dead against show business. That'd just be her chance to stick us away while the folks are on the road, wouldn't it? Oh, but we can't go on the road. No, we're too young. We're excess baggage. Listen, are you kids willing to stick together and pull yourselves out of a hole?

21:39You bet. I've got an idea. Our folks think we're babes in arms, huh? Well, we'll show them whether we're babes in arms or not. I'm going to write a show for us and put it on right here in Seaport. It might be the most up-to-date thing these hicks around here have ever seen. Only night we'll have Max Gordon, Sam Harris, Lee Schubert down to give us the once-over. How about it, kids? We'll get every kid in this town on our side, and we'll start right now. What do you say? Right now. Come on, kids. Let's go. She does not need the dominant power structure to pick her, even at the age of eight, in order to feel like she is doing something worthwhile and generous.

22:14And this lesson, the lesson of how to be an organizer, it's a lesson she'll have forever. Thank you for sharing this. Thanks to everybody for your questions. Thanks for listening. Go make your ruckus.