Last week, author Seth Godin generated headlines around the world when he told GalleyCat: “I’ve decided not to publish any more books in the traditional way.”
This week mediabistro.com published a long interview with the bestselling author, entrepreneur, and marketing consultant. In the interview, GalleyCat correspondent Jeff Rivera discovered that the last book Godin read was Nothing Sacred by Douglas Rushkoff.
While sharing his thoughts about publishing, Godin also admitted to the guilty pleasure of “80 percent dark chocolate, the more handcrafted the better.” An excerpt follows below, but read the whole So What Do You Do, Seth Godin? interview.
You made headlines by giving away your book, Unleashing the Ideavirus, for free. Is the free model still effective today with so many choices now for free product?
Permission Marketing had already been a New York Times bestseller when I wrote Unleashing the Ideavirus, and as I was writing it, I was thinking,’Am I going be a hypocrite, or am I going to take my own advice?’ The book is about the fact that the ideas that spread win and the best way to get your ideas to spread is to make it easy to spread, and hardcover books are really hard to spread. So, I decided to take my own advice and publish it for free.
You have been very vocal about what the book publishing industry could do better. What are a few things you see them doing right?
The book industry does a great, fabulous, miraculous job of doing what they needed to do in 1965. Great jobs for good people. Ethics that matter. Good taste. Products to be proud of. In terms of responding to changes in the world, I’m at a loss to think of one thing the book industry does well in 2010 that it wasn’t already doing in 1990. Not one new thing done well.