Landlords and Tenants
I’m in the very early stages of writing a book (I’m using the Tacklebox methodology to test out if anyone would actually want to read the thing before I write it — doing this ~5 hours a week). I’ve started doing customer interviews and expert interviews to learn more about writing and selling a book, and I’ve learned a few things that’ll tie back nicely.
First, I got smacked in the face by the business model. If you sign with a publisher, they’ll expect you to sell 10,000 copies before they lift a finger to promote your book. They’ll give you a $5 or $10k advance, but that money needs to be spent on marketing. If it works, they’ll put their machine to work for you. But they’ll take the majority of your profits the whole time (even from the first 10k books they didn’t help you sell). I asked a publisher why anyone would ever work with them to publish a business book with those awful economics and he gave two reasons:
To get legitimacy to sell other things — it helps the author get consulting or speaking gigs
To cut corners — the author should’ve been building an audience the past few years, but didn't or couldn't. This buys them that audience.
So, publishers don’t sell books — they sell credibility that maybe helps you sell some books that they’ll take all the profit on, but really just helps you possibly get speaking gigs. Good to know.
I ran some more interviews to try to find writers that actually made money on their first business book, and after a bunch of people who said variations of “it’s just so cool to have a published book, the money doesn't matter,” I found someone who actually had. The guy who wrote The Mom Test.
The Mom Test became part of the curriculum at entrepreneurship programs at colleges and business schools. It’s bought at the beginning of each semester at hundreds of schools by thousands of students. And it’s self published. It’s part of the electricity of these courses now.
So, I started running interviews with entrepreneurship professors at universities. What problems do they have? What do they dread teaching? What creates the most impact? What took the most time last week? How did they decide on this semester’s curriculum? What’s the last book they added to the curriculum?
I started learning all sorts of interesting problems. It’s been fun. And, the process surfaced some great reminders that'll hopefully be helpful:
Landlords and tenants — you’ll either be the landlord or the tenant. Publishers are landlords. Writers are tenants. It’s much better to be a landlord, but if you’re not set up for that, make sure you’re choosing the right landlord. Schools >>>>>>>> Publishers.
People buy status leaps — publishing a book, it appears, is just a status leap for 99% of business authors. It makes zero economic sense. Humans aren’t rational part 2,975,251.
People buy their way out of trouble — publishers help people buy an audience rather than build one. Help people cut the line and help people do things they know they should’ve done themselves.
You can't change the world — It's easy to get mad and say "Publishers don't do anything! They shouldn't exist!" - but they do exist and they do help (see 1 + 2). Great entrepreneurs understand the world they live in and work within it - they don't operate for a theoretical world.
Don’t start with a solution — I’ve been pitching a book. In my head, the idea is a book. That’s a solution. As soon as I started speaking with professors I realized that maybe what they need isn’t a book. I’ve continued with zero expectations of writing a book and lots of expectations of helping educators help their students prepare to build + build businesses.