Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (2 page)

One of my favorite conversations goes like this.

“Oh, by the way, I read your book,
Purple Cow
. I liked it a lot. I even underlined some paragraphs.”

“Thanks!” I say. Underlining is the goal of people in my line of work.

“I can imagine that it’s really helpful to a lot of people. Unfortunately, in my [business/organization/line of work], most of what you write about doesn’t really work.”

The reason it’s such a good conversation is that people in every possible line of work have managed to tell me that the ideas don’t apply to them, and that gives me a chance to ask them more details about what they do—and within a minute or two, we’re both jumping up and down, excited with the possibilities of how it
does
work in their line of work. Ministers, freelance photographers, real estate agents, middle managers, website marketers—doesn’t matter, it always seems to come down to one thing:

Say “no” to being average.

This morning, Bradley was explaining to me that it couldn’t work in his profession as a freelance writer. It seems that almost all the clients want average stuff. Which is no surprise, since average is, by definition, the stuff most people want. I asked, “Are there any writers in your field who you hate because they get paid way too much compared to your perception of the effort they put in and the talent they have?”

“Sure,” he said, feeling a little sheepish about being annoyed by their success.

“And how do they get those gigs?”

It’s because they stand for something. Because they are at the edges. Because if an editor wants a “Bob-Jones-type” article, she has to call Bob Jones for it … and pay Bob’s fees. Bob would fail if he did average work for average editors just to make a living. But by turning down the average stuff and insisting on standing for something on the edge, he profits. By challenging his clients to run stuff that makes them nervous (and then having them discover that it’s great), he profits.

This is scary. It’s really scary to turn down most (the average) of what comes your way and hold out for the remarkable opportunities. Scary to quit your job at an average company doing average work just because you know that if you stay, you’ll end up just like them. Scary to go way out on an edge and intentionally make what you do unattractive to some.

Which is why it’s such a great opportunity.

What happens when your inbox is empty?

What happens when all the agenda items and all the incoming emails are cleared?

Time to go home.

A job well done. Congratulations, you earned your paycheck.

This is the factory mindset that has been drilled into us since kindergarten. You get assignments, you do your best, and you finish them.

It is at this point that we draw the line between workers and entrepreneurs, between people who work in marketing and marketers.

The challenge is NOT to empty your inbox. The challenge is not to get your boss to tell you what to do.

The challenge is to ask a two-part question:

What next? What now?

Asking is the hard part.

Let’s say you’ve got a really good idea. And you’ve had good ideas before.

You show it to your colleagues. They analyze it. They tell you why it’s
not
a good idea.

Hmmm.

Do you go with your instinct? Is your gut reaction to be trusted? After all, you’ve been right before. After all, you’ve been wrong before.

The analysis, based on past events, certainly seems sound. But following your instincts is the only way you’re going to do something
unsound.

And unsound things become hits. Sound ones never do.

Who Moved My Cheese?
was unsound. So was publishing a book two years after you started blogging every chapter. So was an expensive, unfitted, almost untailored suit from Milan. So was running against Joe Lieberman.

The challenge is not to somehow persuade those in search of soundness to change their minds. The challenge is to do enough of a gut check to decide whether you should defend your instinct. And then do it.

It happened again. There I was, meeting with someone who I thought had nothing to do with books or publishing, and it turns out his new book just came out.

With more than 75,000 books published every year (not counting ebooks or blogs), the odds are actually pretty good that you’ve either written a book, are writing a book, or want to write one.

Hence this short list:

1. Lower your expectations. The happiest authors are the ones that don’t expect much.
   
2. The best time to start promoting your book is three years before it comes out. Three years to build a reputation, build a permission asset, build a blog, build a following, build credibility, and build the connections you’ll need later.
   
3. Pay for an editor. Not just to fix the typos, but to actually make your ramblings into something that people will choose to read. I found someone I like working with at the EFA (Editorial Freelancers Association). One of the things traditional publishers used to do is provide really insightful, even brilliant editors (people like Fred Hills and Megan Casey), but alas, that doesn’t happen very often. And hiring your own editor means you’ll value the process more.
   
4. Understand that a nonfiction book is a souvenir, just a vessel for the ideas themselves. You don’t want the ideas to get stuck in the book; you want them to spread. Which means that you shouldn’t hoard the idea! The more you give away, the better you will do.
   
5. Don’t try to sell your book to everyone. First, consider this statistic from Dan Poynter: “58% of the U.S. adult population never reads another book after high school.” Then, consider the fact that among people even willing to buy a book, yours is just a tiny little needle in a very big haystack. Far better to obsess about a little subset of the market—that subset that you have permission to talk with, that subset where you have credibility, and most important, that subset where people just can’t live without your book.
   
6. Resist with all your might the temptation to hire a publicist to get you on
   Oprah
   . First, you won’t get on
   Oprah
   (if you do, drop me a note and I’ll mention you as the exception). Second, it’s expensive. You’re way better off spending the time and money to do #5 instead, going after the little micro-markets. There are some very talented publicists out there (thanks, Allison), but in general, see #1.
   
7. Think really hard before you spend a year trying to please one person in New York to get your book published by a “real” publisher. You give up a lot of time. You give up a lot of the upside. You give up control over what your book reads like and feels like and how it’s promoted. Of course, a contract from Knopf and a seat on Jon Stewart’s couch are great things, but so is being the Queen of England. That doesn’t mean it’s going to happen to you. Far more likely is that you discover how to efficiently publish (either electronically or using POD or a small-run press) a brilliant book that spreads like wildfire among a select group of people.
   
8. Your cover matters. Way more than you think. If it didn’t, you wouldn’t need a book; you could just email people the text.
   
9. If you have a “real” publisher (#7), it’s worth investing in a few things to help them do a better job for you. Like editing the book before you submit it. Like putting the right to work on the cover with them in the contract. And most of all, getting the ability to buy hundreds of books at cost that you can use as samples and promotional pieces.
   
10. In case you skipped it, please check #2 again. That’s the most important one, by far.
    
11. Blurbs are overrated, IMHO.
    
12. Blog mentions, on the other hand, matter a lot.
    
13. If you’ve got the patience, bookstore signings and talking to book clubs by phone are the two lowest-paid but most-guaranteed-to-work methods you have for promoting a really, really good book. If you do it 200 times a year, it will pay.
    
14. Consider the free PDF alternative. Some PDFs have gotten millions of downloads. No hassles, no time wasted, no trying to make a living on it. All the joy, in other words, without debating whether you should quit your day job (you shouldn’t!).
    
15. If you want to reach people who don’t normally buy books, show up in places where people who don’t usually buy books are. Media places, virtual places, and real places, too.
    
16. Most books that sell by the truckload sell by the caseload. In other words, sell to organizations that buy on behalf of their members/employees.
    
17. Publishing a book is not the same as printing a book. Publishing is about marketing and sales and distribution and risk. If you don’t want to be in that business, don’t be! Printing a book is trivially easy. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s not. You’ll find plenty of printers who can match the look and feel of the bestselling book of your choice for just a few dollars a copy. That’s not the hard part.
    
18. Bookstores, in general, are run by absolutely terrific people. Bookstores, in general, are really lousy businesses. They are often where books go to die. While some readers will discover your book in a store, it’s way more likely they will discover the book before they get to the store, and the store is just there hoping to have the right book for the right person at the time she wants it. If the match isn’t made, no sale.
    
19. Writing a book is a tremendous experience. It pays off intellectually. It clarifies your thinking. It builds credibility. It is a living engine of marketing and idea spreading, working every day to deliver your message with authority. You should write one.
    

So, just about everything that can be improved,
is
being improved. If you define “improved” to mean more features, more buttons, more choices, more power, more cost.

The washing machine I used this morning had more than 125 different combinations of ways to do the wash … don’t get me started about the dryer. Clearly, an arms race is a good way to encourage people to upgrade.

I wonder, though, if “good enough” might be the next big idea. Audio players, cars, dryers, accounting … not the best ever made, not the most
complicated, and certainly not the most energy consuming. Just good enough.

For some people, a clean towel is a clean towel.

What’s the point of talking to a group?

I’m serious. We spend a lot of time in presentations, or at the United Nations, or sending our kids to school. We have orientation sessions and keynote speeches and long-winded oratory on the floor of the Senate. Why?

One reason: to incite. To share emotion. To sell. And that’s never going to go out of fashion, as far as I can tell.

But most of the speeches I’m talking about don’t incite. I heard an excerpt on the radio the other day … someone at the EU going on at length about admitting Romania and Bulgaria to the EU. There was even a mention of food safety issues. Thousands of people listening to one person drone on about food safety. This wasn’t an emotional speech designed to sell us on an idea. Instead, it was designed to teach us.

To teach us the way a schoolteacher I heard recently teaches: by reading a text. She stands up at the front of the room and, along with showing a few Web images, reads a text to the class.

Here’s my point: In our scan-and-skip world, in a world where technology makes it obvious that we can treat different people differently, how can we possibly justify teaching via a speech?

Speech is both linear and unpaceable. You can’t skip around and you can’t speed it up. When the speaker covers something you know, you are bored. When he quickly covers something you don’t understand, you are lost.

If marketing is the art of spreading ideas, then teaching is a kind of marketing. And live teaching to groups is broken, perhaps beyond repair. Consumers of information won’t stand for it. We’re learning less every time we are confronted with this technique, because we’ve been spoiled by the remote control and the Web.

If you teach—teach anything—I think you need to start by acknowledging that there’s a need to sell your ideas emotionally. So you need to
use whatever tools are available to you—an evocative PowerPoint image, say, or a truly impassioned speech.

Then, and this is the hard part, if you’re teaching to a group of more than three people, you need to find a way to engage that is nonlinear. Q&A doesn’t work for a large group, because only the questioner is engaged at any given moment (if you’re lucky, the questioner represents more than a few, but she rarely represents all).

If it’s worth teaching, it’s worth teaching well. If it’s worth investing the time of 30 or 230 or 3,330 people, then it’s worth investing the effort to actually figure out how to get the message across. School is broken. Legislative politics are broken. Linear is broken. YouTube and Bloglines, on the other hand, are new platforms, platforms that enable the education of millions of people every day, quickly and for free.

If you could do tomorrow over again, would you?

Most of us live programmed lives. Tomorrow is set, finished, done, and you haven’t even started it yet.

And we accept that as part of the deal in setting goals and reaching them.

But what about the tomorrow thirty days from now? Or a year?

If you could do those over, would you? How?

Ninety-nine percent of the time, in my experience, the hard part about creativity isn’t coming up with something no one has ever thought of before. The hard part is actually executing the thing you’ve thought of.

The devil doesn’t need an advocate. The brave need supporters, not critics.

I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a brain-dead job and enough fear to keep them in line.

You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking.

The TSA “screener” who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A “customer service” rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars’ worth of TV time even though she knows it’s not working—she does it because her boss told her to.