Michael Stelzner at Social Media Examiner has an interesting (and very long) interview with Seth Godin, the marketing guru whose book Unleashing the Ideavirus was an early paean to the power of viral marketing—and who more recently declared he would never again publish another book through a traditional publisher.
So Godin has started The Domino Project, his own self-publishing imprint powered by Amazon. Godin explains:
The Domino Project is trying to make ideas easier to spread. I think books are important and book publishers are basically trying to kill books. They’re making them too expensive, too long, too slow, too hard to spread and too hard to find. So the public is just ignoring them and moving on to the next thing.
I wanted to make it easy for someone, if they’re moved by the idea in a book, to hand it to someone else or to hand it to five other people or 50 other people, and say, “This is the way we’re going to do things around here from now on.” That’s what books are great at, and I want to optimize for that kind of conversation.
That’s basically much the same thing he did with Ideavirus—he gave the e-book away free, making it easy for people to pass it on to their friends. So you can’t say that his message has really changed that much over the years, even if this time he’s selling the e-book for $4.99. This book, entitled Poke The Box, is about convincing people to take the initiative in their lives—which is certainly what Godin is doing with this new publishing project.
Godin talks about challenging the pre-existing conventions of publishing, examining each one anew and deciding whether to change it or throw it out. For example, he explains that his new book Poke the Box doesn’t have any words on the cover—title or author—because it’s being sold primarily through Amazon where those words would be redundant. They’re right up there next to the book, after all. And the cover illustration with no text is attention-getting enough that if someone sees the book in person, they’ll pick it up and start reading out of curiosity.
He also talks about what he thinks is wrong with traditional publishing:
It’s filled with really smart people whom I like, who don’t get paid enough and do good work. The problem is that they think their customer is the bookstore.
The other problem is that bookstores demand a very slow cycle of a year to bring a book out, demand books that meet a certain expectation and demand full return privileges on those books. At the same time, that industry is stuck paying big advances to big-name authors, most of which lose money.
As a result, Godin explains, the industry has become too inflexible, and has lost track of the focus that it ought to have—of spreading ideas to people who want to hear them. He doesn’t expect to be able to change the industry all by himself, but hopes that some of his self-publishing experiments will catch on with other people.
One of those things involves releasing simultaneous e-book, paper book, audio book, and “collectible” book formats at the same time, worldwide—not at all unlike what Cory Doctorow has done with A Little Help. The collectible for Poke the Box will cost $75, and be hand-signed with a bookplate, with a cover hand-printed on a letterpress. He made 400 of them, and says they are “on their way to selling out.”
It’s interesting to note how some of Godin’s points resonate with some of the things I’ve been writing lately. When Godin says “they think their customer is the bookstore,” it brings to mind the problem publishers are having with losing the hearts and minds of consumers because they just aren’t paying them enough attention. This creates opportunities for Godin (and other self-publishers) to fill the gap.
It will be interesting to see how successful Godin’s efforts are.
