The Guy Who Would Only Publish Bestsellers

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Profit & Loss, Crystal Balls

One of my publishing mentors, the late Jack Bruggeman, loved to share fond memories of a meeting he had when he was an editor at a small family-owned medical publisher that had just been acquired by a large international conglomerate.

The new overlords sent their business analysts to grill the editorial department on how they pick the books that the company would publish. There were spreadsheets, charts, and P&Ls going back years to compare against actual costs and revenue. At a pivotal moment in the meeting, one of the analysts asked the obvious question. “Going forward, why don’t you only publish the successful books?”

To any publisher who’s been around for a while it’s a laughable question. Our crystal balls are just for show. Unless you’re buying books from Stephen King or Michelle Obama.

Publishers take a financial risk on every single book.

For some—university presses and some smaller presses—the goal is usually to do as well as possible on each book, but to be risk averse, losing as little as possible or breaking even on the ones that don’t become hits. That means modest advances, if any, and carefully controlled print runs.

At the “Big 5” and other commercial publishers, they’ll take big risks on advances and print runs. Then each season just a few will hit it so big that they can pay for all the thousands of commercial flops, many of which will result in piles of books getting pulped (ground up and dissolved into goo to make more paper).

As publishers we do our best to predict the sales a book can expect. We fine-tune the manuscripts and our marketing, publicity, and promotion efforts try to make the sales projections into reality. We look at comparable books and what they’ve sold. We try to figure out who is most likely to buy them.

Publishers don’t do much direct-to-consumer sales. Most readers buy through Amazon, or another intermediary. Not only that—each book is also a completely different product from the ones that came before. Unless it’s a series that has people desperate for the third installment (I’m not not thinking about Patrick Rothfuss, here), it’s hit-or-miss whether last season’s customer will be interested in what we’ve got this season. 

Most books (something like 93%) will sell fewer than 1,000 copies. I heard not too long ago that any nonfiction book that sells 4,000 copies will be in the top 5% of books for that year. But a bestseller will have to do about 4x that number every week to stay on the list.

Truffles or Almonds?

I’ve heard stories about the truffle season in France, when adventurous foragers take to the countryside with their dogs and their pigs. If they’re lucky, they’ll follow their noses and find the pungent fungus of their dreams. The one who succeeds might be the one who guesses best, or the one who stumbles onto the best find.

On the other hand, almond growers plant their trees in neat rows on ground as level as they can make it. They irrigate and sometimes even heat the groves if the temperature dips too low. It’s expensive and painstaking, but cultivating almonds can be lucrative if done well. Success here comes from doing the right things, based on a knowledge of the process and adjustments for day-to-day conditions.

Believe it or not, those agrarian scenes were metaphors for book publishing.

When Seth Godin started his publishing experiment, The Domino Project, about ten years ago, with the goal to publish only bestsellers, I was intrigued. They did a limited number of books, and over the next few years, all of them (if I remember correctly) did become bestsellers. 

How did he do it? In his words, the parlance of the time, he didn’t publish anything without first “building a tribe” around it. To do this, the author would start to write, speak, and otherwise create in public. They would draw people into conversation around their idea. Then when the book was published, there would be thousands of people who were not only ready to buy it, but ready to tell other people about it.

There’s something that publishers and authors can learn from this. Both models are necessary, I think. However, especially for nonfiction books, there’s something to be learned from The Domino Project and the almond groves. Maybe a bestseller can be grown deliberately by engaging with readers in advance.

If you’re working on a big idea—the kind of book you hope will change the world, it makes sense to create a community like that for yourself. Maybe by doing something as basic as starting a newsletter. 

To this day, Seth Godin emails a daily note to his followers. Usually no more than a couple of paragraphs on something he finds interesting, but he does it every single day. Who knows how many thousands of people would buy his next book the moment he lets them know about it. Could he uncork another bestseller tomorrow? Probably. I’d say Seth Godin is an almond farmer.

The chance that any given book will be a New York Times bestseller is vanishingly small. But yours should have the chance to succeed to the maximum of its potential.

You can read more about The Domino Project in the archive of Godin’s blog, here https://seths.blog/domino-project-archives/