The book publishing word doesn’t make sense to me. It apparently doesn’t make sense to a lot of writers, either. Check out Jessica Park, whose blog post was actually on the front page of Amazon today.
Even Chris Guillbeau, in his new book, The $100 startup, talks about the cutthroat world of publishing.
Today, the Internet gives more people the opportunity to self publish their work, and not only that, but authors get to keep all of the money, and the rights to their book. Of course, it’s not a cake walk to sell lots of copies of your book, but you get the point.
Here is one thing I don’t understand about the publishing world. Seth Godin just released the idea of his new book, The Icarus Deception, to the world. To those of you who are unfamiliar with Seth’s work, basically he is a bestselling author of over a dozen books translated in over thirty languages, and his blog is the best marketing blog in the world. Anything he recommends basically turns to gold. He is one of my biggest inspirations.
However, publishers rejected the idea for his newest book. Kind of. This quote comes directly from Seth’s Blog:
The publisher (my key to the bookstore) is only willing to go ahead with the rest of the plan if my Kickstarter works. No Kickstarter, no distribution, the stakes are high.
So Seth appealed to his fans (hundreds of thousands of them, me included) to help him raise enough money though Kickstarter. According to his negotiations with his publisher, if he could raise $40,000 for the book, then his publisher would go ahead and publish it. It is scheduled to come out in early 2013.
Guess what? In less than 3 hours, he reached his goal of $40,000. At the time on this writing, he has raised almost $210,000 for his new book! You can still pledge money to preorder the book and get some other gifts as well.
There are a few takeaways from this post I want to you realize:
- What publisher in their right mind would say no to Seth Godin?!?! He has hundreds of thousands of fans who are willing to pay for what he has to say, and he just proved it again. But he shouldn’t have had to do that.
- Kickstarter is a great idea and interesting concept and platform. I just found out about them through his blog, and I thought I would share it with you.
- Seth Godin is awesome.
- I preordered 4 copies of The Icarus Dececption, so when they are published, I will give away 3 copies to my readers at some point.
- Seth Godin is awesome.
- If you want to get the book (or a few copies), click here to check it out.
So this was just a really short post I was inspired to write today. I wasn’t planning on publishing a post today, but I am baffled at the logic of big publishing companies. I mean, even The 4 Hour Workweek was rejected by over two dozen publishers. They have no idea what people are interested in or what people want to read.
Thanks for reading, and I’m sure I’ll do a book review on the Icarus Deception as soon as I read it in the new year.
* The Amazon links are affiliate links, but both are amazing books.
