Yesterday afternoon, we sat in on a talk by Seth Godin, one of our favorite business motivational writers, sponsored by the Digital Publishing Group, a network of publishing professionals who are interested in figuring out how to make a viable success of their industry in the 21st century. When it came time for questions, one of the first subjects that came up was how individuals can bring out change in corporate organizations that are predisposed to protecting the status quo…
Now, while Godin didn’t hesitate to tell his audience what the publishing industry was doing wrong—acting as if it was in the business of selling paper products rather than the business of findng and disseminating great ideas—his remarks weren’t a finger-pointing session so much as a call to action, an invitation to recognize an opportunity for momentous change. He spoke with great enthusiasm about a shift he believes is absolutely necessary: Publishers need to stop collecting a new set of readers for every new writer they sign and start building a congregation of readers for whom they can then acquire suitable writers. (It’s our understanding, and correct us if we’re wrong, that the new publishing venture from former Soft Skull chief Richard Nash is built on exactly this principle, with the added twist that sometimes you’ll find the writers already among the readers.)
While we had the video camera running, Godin fielded a question from Gretchen Rubin, author of the forthcoming The Happiness Project, about how authors just starting out in their careers could distribute free content to their advantage…
That conversation segued into a discussion of one potential strategy to achieve greater success for literary fiction—editors need to speak out publicly and “make a direct connection with the people who love literary fiction.”
“If you can just assemble these 30,000, 50,000, 100,000 people who love literary fiction, then you’ve earned the right to be the ringleader, the leader of that tribe—and you’ll never, ever again have trouble selling literary fiction,” Godin said. “What’s missing is you don’t know who those 100,000 people are, and you don’t have permission to talk to them. Once you do, the book sales will take care of themselves.”
After we put the camera down, we asked Godin: How can editors assume that role if they work in an environment where public statements are largely the domain of corporate spokespeople? His advice was blunt but encouraging—if you’re working for a company that isn’t prepared to let you excel in the areas in which you will need to excel to make publishing “work,” if all they want to do is cycle through the same listless routines hoping maybe this time they’ll get lucky, why are you still there?
Some people told us, later that day, his response sounded harsh, but we didn’t take it that way. Maybe that’s because the context in which we heard it was shaped by earlier conversations with Peter Walsh and David Allen, through which we absorbed three crucial questions: (1) What do you want to make of your life? (2) What’s the first thing you can to do make that happen? (3) What’s stopping you from doing it?