Okay, so look. This is how publishing works:

1. You spend a lot of time, effort, and occasionally money on a project. You work your ass off getting it done, and then you work your ass off again polishing it and getting it really done.
2. Then you release it into the wilds of the world. You make it available as best you can, and offer it up for consumption.
3. Maybe some people will be impressed with it, buy it, use it. Maybe they’ll say nice things about it. Maybe they won’t.

As a publisher, you have control over steps 1 and 2. You have no control whatsoever over step 3. Ever.
Hopefully, by the time you’re done with step 1, you’ve got a project that you’re proud of. By the time you’re done with step 2, you’ve presented it in such a way that you’re proud of that. But because you have no control over step 3, you cannot take pride in the reception of your product. You didn’t do that. Your pride in your work comes from making a good product and presenting it well. The feel-good that you get from the good reception isn’t pride; it’s fame. Fame is never earned; it is not something to be proud of.
“But!” you might say, “surely the quality of the product has something to do with its reception! Surely a good book sells well!” To which the answer is, in all seriousness, “No.”
There is no correlation between any standard of quality and actual sales. Let me repeat that: there is no correlation between quality and sales. Sales are not derived from quality, they’re derived from utility. Utility is, roughly, how useful a given product is for a given customer. It comprises how well it fulfills that need, and at what cost — not only in terms of its price tag but also the time and energy it takes to find out about the product and purchase the product. As a publisher, you have feeble control over a lot of these factors, and seeing to them falls under step 2. You have absolutely no control over the needs of the consumer. You cannot control how well your product is received.
You can attempt to predict what the consumer wants. This is called market research. It’s very difficult; there are few reliable tools for this process, and the market can shift and slide much, much faster than your development and production schedules can compensate for. To put it another way, even if you figure out what a lot of customers want right now, it still takes you a couple months to make a product to fit that need, and by that time they may all want something else, or somebody else may have come out with a product to fill their needs before you got done. And just to clarify, talking to your friends on an internet forum is not market research. That’s talking to your friends on an internet forum.

So what is a publisher to do?

Isn’t the entire affair built around the idea that, at step 3, people will give you money and compliments for a job well done? If you can’t control that, what’s the point, anyway? Here’s how to cope:

• Take pride in the steps you have control over. Make a fantastic product. Present it magnificently. Don’t hitch your wagon to customer response.
• Don’t invest anything into the project that you’re not okay losing to the project. That goes for money, certainly — find ways to develop and produce your product without a lot of capital — but it also goes for time, effort, and emotional involvement. Consider any investment in the project the same way you’d think about investing into a vacation: is the investment worth the enjoyment you’ll get from it? If no, don’t do it. (The solution of the corporate world is a neat solution, here: use other people’s money to finance your project; use employees’ time and effort to develop and produce; pay the employees with the other people’s money; repeat.)
• Stop publishing like a consumer. If everybody’s ga-ga over new product X and you want to join in, get a copy of product X. Don’t publish a clone of product X. Publish what you can’t get elsewhere (and make it good). What you publish should not be the same thing as what you get elsewhere.
• Implement step 4, and don’t confuse it with step 3. This, with a smattering of the first three, is my preferred solution. What’s step 4, you might ask. It is:

4. Interact with the consumers who do use your product. Get to understand their needs and fulfill them: either with immediate, ‘free’ materials or in a supplement or the next edition.

The beauty of step 4 is that it is again under your control, and it is something that you can take pride in. Getting to know your customers as people, and not as wallets with human beings attached, means you get to make a real connection with people who share your interests. That’s awesome.
Now, one might be tempted to add in, “also, good customer service leads to more sales” but this is a trap. This is mistaking step 4 for step 3. Providing customer service is not making sales. If you think of it in terms of making more sales, or building a market, or whatever else, you’re going to kill it dead. Step 4 is about interacting with people, not drawing more wallets-with-people-attached closer to your bank account. Step 4 is only worthwhile as long as it’s genuine, and once it’s not, it’s just another chore — for both you and your consumers.
Step 4 is just as important as Steps 1, 2, and 3. For my money, if you’re not doing step 4, you’re not really publishing. If you can’t bring yourself to do step 4, you might reconsider publishing. These are the people that you’re publishing the product for — if you didn’t have any interest in these people, you can just develop the product and let it sit on your hard drive, or publish your very own copy through Lulu.
And that is, really, my end goal here in this article: publishing may not be a good idea for you. Publishing is a pretense for applying yourself to something you think is worthwhile and a means for allowing others to share in that thing. If you want to make and share what you like, publish. If you want people to tell you you’re clever, go somewhere else. Publishing is a terrible way to get people to notice you.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 at 11:32 am and is filed under Publishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.