Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (57 page)

Are you publishing for your fans? If so, do you have enough to justify the effort? Do you have a way of reaching them? Is there a better vehicle than a book for reaching your goal?

Are you publishing so your fans will have something to recommend to their friends? Is it in a form that they’ll happily recommend? What’s the half-life of this cycle—will friends recommend to friends and to friends to infinity? If not, how big an audience do you imagine reaching?

Are you publishing for strangers? How will they discover you? Or are you playing the lottery, figuring that
someone
has to come out of nowhere with a big bestseller, so it might as well be you?

Or are you publishing to make a point, to wave your book in front of a particular audience like a red flag in front of a bull?

Are you publishing to win an award or become a critic’s darling? Good luck with that.

Are you publishing for your clients, with the intent of mailing the book directly to them? This is both easy and effective, but it isn’t publishing, it’s mailing them a book.

Are you publishing this book to make a living? Good luck with that. (Less than 3% of newly published authors make enough in royalties and advances to be happy to live on.)

What you write is directly related to whom you are writing for, and deciding to publish has nothing at all to do with deciding to write. Publishing is a business decision, a financial risk, and a marketing project. If your goal is to generate reach, to share your gifts and your point of view, you can skip all of those aspects of publishing and just give your work away.

There are people who should publish, who I hope will publish, and who will create books we can’t wait to read. And there are important books still unwritten, books that should be created and shared. Too often, though, we seek to follow a path where there isn’t a sensible business model, and all that happens is nothing. Go, write. But think twice (or three times or six) about publishing the traditional way.

A publisher can produce 1,500 different books, great books, important books, groundbreaking books that could change the world for what it cost to make the
Green Lantern
movie. The publisher could pay each author a $75,000 advance and produce the titles (enough to fill several bookshelves in thousands of homes) for the cost of one summertime clunker.

Some people are saying that the future of books is in the direction of apps, videos, and other multimedia productions, entire experiences that express an idea.

The problem: none of these can be created by a single individual.

The magic of a book is that it is largely the work of one person. Yes, she’ll need some help from editors and distributors, etc., but they sometimes come and go, while the author remains.

It’s entirely possible that a new art form (one that’s smaller than a movie and involves text) may come along, but I’m betting we’ll see more of a flourishing on the ebook side, a place where the individual voice remains the key building block.

For the last fifty years, the driving economic force of the book business has been the advance against royalties.

Virtually all books aimed at a mass audience earn precisely the same royalty per book. Stephen King, the unknown first-time author, and I get paid exactly the same royalty per book by Penguin.

What changes is the advance. This is a non-refundable earnest payment the publisher puts up to entice the author (and her agent) to sign on, to choose them. When everything else is equal (and it often is), the advance is the thing that gets looked for and reported on.

As you can imagine, the advance affects the rest of the process. The royalties earn out against the advance and in fact are rarely paid at all (if the advance is bigger than the royalties, the author gets no new money). Most publishers don’t associate an advance paid four years ago with a royalty statement that comes in today. (And if they do pay attention, they’re likely to make a non-economic decision—“let’s promote this book even though it’s not selling, because we have a big advance at stake.”)

If there are two publishers, one with a great marketing and publishing program, and the other with an advance that’s three times as big, guess who wins the author? A publisher with a big checkbook is able to land famous authors, a feat which excites the sales force, which gets more shelf space in the store, which, perhaps, leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Of course, for the last half-century, in a static publishing environment, all of this was very good news for authors. Not only did it remove risk for a profession that could ill afford to take risks, but big advances
focused the attention of the publisher. You (the author) were getting paid a lot and it bought you a better publishing experience at the same time.

(Dr. Seuss rejected this convention and refused to take an advance from his publisher. He wanted his publisher to have the same incentives he did.)

The advance makes it very clear who’s in charge. The publisher pays, so the publisher calls the shots. The author has a scarce asset and sells it to the publisher, who exploits it. The friction comes when the author/tribe leader/impresario believes that risks and new technologies can help get her work into the world, and the publisher demurs.

As the underpinnings of traditional publishing start to shift, the pressures to change the culture of the advance are sure to mount. Of course, as long as there are two publishers willing to spend freely, advances will stick around.

Having been paid advances for years, I’m not arguing that they should be abolished even if they could be. For those curious about the future of the book business, though, it’s impossible to talk about [digital, the long tail, free editions, and sub rights] without acknowledging that they drive the decisions in the heart of the industry.

The bookstore and the publisher keep more than 85% of what a reader pays for a book.

And that money is well earned. Why? Because book publishing is the act of taking a financial risk to bring an idea to an unknown reader.

The key word is “unknown.” Before the book is purchased, neither the bookstore nor the publisher knows the identity of the reader.

This is fundamentally different from the core readership of a magazine or a newspaper (they have subscribers).

Reaching strangers is a risky business. Penguin is left with $40 million in debt from Borders as they go bankrupt. Penguin had to advance them that money because otherwise, no bookstore would be able to take the risk of having all those books standing by, just hoping that the right stranger would find the right book on the right day.

Authors, then, have a choice. They can give up more and more freedom and cash to publishers in exchange for the publishers’ taking the risk of finding, alerting, and selling to strangers, or they can start to organize a tribe, to build permission, to engage with readers before the book exists, and to sell those friends on their work.

Selling to friends (people who know you, trust you, are aware of what you can offer) is orders of magnitude more efficient than seeking out strangers. Sure, it’s time consuming and frightening to earn those friendships, but they are the transformative element of the new publishing.

Once you have a base of friends, then, publishing is reduced to a much simpler set of tasks—the hard work of editing, designing, printing, and fulfilling. Hard, but not financially difficult. Not just that, but the speed, freedom, and control will transform the way you write as well as how you engage with your audience.

It’s very seductive for an author to believe that a fairy godmother will introduce her fabulous idea to legions of strangers. Seductive, yes, but rarely something that actually happens.

[There are dozens of businesses that, like book publishing, focus on strangers. What happens to your business when you switch gears and focus on your friends instead?]

Here’s the question:
Does pop culture change from the top down, or do people always get what they want/deserve?

Do car companies push a style upon the market, or does the market choose a style?

Can influencers (like Ellen or the
NYT
) make a book a mass sensation, or do they merely make a bunch of noise, and the market then reads and recommends and embraces what it wants?

The question matters because we hand over plenty of money and respect to those who say that they can push something onto the culture. The question matters because when it comes to taking responsibility, those very same people often claim that all they can do is make a small ruckus—it’s the market that gets what it deserves.

Is banal TV banal because viewers demand it or because it’s cheap to make and easy to sell?

Are powerful cars powerful because car guys like to make guzzlers, or does the market insist on them?

Do some newspapers misbehave and cross ethical lines because it’s the only way to survive in a world where consumers are hungry for a no-holds-barred race to the bottom, or … you get the idea.

Here’s my thought: both sides are right. Marketers get too much credit but also take too little responsibility.

A portion of the population is very responsive to the latest buzz, the latest big push. Part of the media (the part that wants to reach that market) is most likely to write about whatever is being hyped right now, and a fraction of the population is a sucker for what this part of the media is writing about.

But, and it’s a big but, much of the population isn’t even aware of this nonsense. They’re oblivious to the hype machine and the cycle of endless promo.

They are more likely to consume media because “everyone else” is already doing it. They’re following a trial or reading a book or watching a movie because it’s mainstream, safe, approved, the it moment, etc.

They are more likely to demand a big “American-style” car because they’ve been trained to fit in and to buy what the neighbors think they should buy.

It’s impossible to hype your product to this spot in the middle of the market. You can get it started, sure, but only some (a handful) of the things that are adopted by the early adopters actually move through the curve and reach the middle.

We love big cars because car guys loved them and loved making them, and early-adopter car guys liked to buy them, setting a century-long standard that the rest of the consumers in the market try to emulate.

Every once in a while, in the exception that proves the rule, an idea or product skips the early adopters and seems to magically entrance a different slice (witness the organic and largely hype-free start of
Harry Potter
). Or consider the very untraditional launch and growth of the
Prius. More often than not, though, the hype machine spends itself out and fails.

Authors worry too much about the hype part. We focus too much on the promo, on the article in the
Times
or the review in the
New Yorker
. I don’t think publishers are particularly good at helping authors reach those who aren’t looking for them, even if the book is really good.

The amount of luck in the voyage from launch to mass is huge. But it’s certainly true that a product or service that delights the early adopters—delights them enough to turn them into peer-focused salespeople—is the tried-and-true path to mass success.

Short version: make great stuff, stuff that’s easy or urgent to talk about and that matches a wide but vital worldview. Then share it with people who have given you permission to talk about it.

No one expects a Bugatti or Tesla to cost the same as a used Celica. After all, if you want a car that is silent, fast, and sexy, you will (and should) pay more for it.

No one expects that dinner at Alinea should cost the same as dinner at McDonald’s. After all, even though the calories are the same, the quality, attention to detail, and costs are not.

But for books and movies, there’s no correlation at all between quality and price.

A lousy movie costs precisely the same to see in the theater as
Memento
did. Even after we find out if the movie is good, the price doesn’t change—a DVD of
Toy Story
is the same as the new release of
The Smurfs.

Worse still, a used paperback copy of
Snow Crash
gives you precisely the same level of intellectual quality as the original hardcover did, at one-tenth the price.

Obviously, this lack of correlation occurs because the intellectual property rights, the ideas, are of a quality worth pursuing, while the letters on the page or the pixels on the screen cost precisely the same to deliver as they do for something lousy.

And the open door? Since the cost of quality is all up front, a digital
copy is just fine—better, in fact, because it’s convenient and easy to share. Can’t do that with a Tesla.

The producer realizes that he has a product with a marginal cost of zero. Even a nickel or dime is better than nothing, and when producers of lower-quality products start to lower their prices to gain market share, there’s pressure to keep up. (I remember when a VHS movie cost $90.)

The paradox here is that the cost of the stuff done up front, the risk and the guts and the hard work needed to make a great bit of content, is actually going up, while the price we’re willing to pay for a digital copy is plummeting and will continue to plummet. We don’t hesitate to pay $25 for a hardcover (yet), but there are almost no iPad apps that cost that much for similar content. Yet the original cost for the app is probably greater than it is for the book.

I think we’ll always be willing to pay extra for the benefits we get from getting something first, getting it curated, or getting it customized. But for most of what gets purchased in pop culture, none of those three factors are at work.

Prepare for a continuous erosion of what you pay for digital content, at the same time that you’ll see a sticky and upward trend for what you might be charged for the collectible stuff and the scarce or custom stuff. I think producers are going to fight mightily for a second (higher) tier of pricing for amazing work, but while this strategy might work for the front-list new stuff, I have a hard time seeing it sustained for the backlist titles.