Giving Thanks for the Best Job on the Planet

One of my last posts, It’s all about Fit,” garnered a very compelling response by a curious reader named Adam Giovane. Adam said that as a young person he had a dream of “soaking up knowledge and being paid to dispense it.” What a wonderful way of looking at the life of an editor. And his timing could not have been better, coming just a few days before Thanksgiving. In asking the question below, Adam has given me a terrific opportunity to give thanks for having one of the greatest jobs I could imagine.

* So do tell why your job is the best?

There were other questions posed by this reader (you can see all, but this was the one that caught my eye and my imagination on this day, just a few before Thanksgiving (you can see his comments under the posting called It’s all about Fit).

My job is the best on the planet for many reasons—and Adam touched on an important one in his comments. First, my job immerses me in the world of new ideas everyday. I am like a lifelong student, but unlike even the best student, I get to play a major role in deciding what gets published and what doesn’t (along with other key players on my publishing team). Which brings me to another reason my job is so fulfilling—it’s all about the team. Portfolio—which is part of Penguin, the second largest trade publisher in the world—is a very special place to work. We are one cohesive and smart team, all in the same boat, rowing in the same direction. I work in a satellite office, but don’t need to be there all the time to know that we are not an organization weighed down by bureaucracy, office politics, pettiness, and all of the other things that kill organizations of all shapes and sizes.

Our cohesiveness and absence of office turf wars are due to our leadership team. Adrian Zackheim, our President, and Will Weisser, our Vice President, are the Walt Disney and Roy Disney of the publishing world. Adrian is the visionary— while Will also brings great ideas and balance while making sure that all of the trains run on time. These two—and all of the people they inspire every day—account in large measure for the success of our division. And success in today’s truly terrifying economy is indeed nothing to sneeze at. Finally, both of these talented people understand that in these times—or in any times—we cannot afford to leave a single soul on the bench. We use the intellect of the entire company every day, welcoming new ideas from every part of the organization, regardless of the “stripes on their shoulders.” In meetings there is no rank, just intellect, and harnessing the collective intellect of the organization is today’s greatest managerial challenge facing every organization. They both are secure in the knowledge that if you give people a chance to shine they will rise to the occasion. And our people prove it every day—by getting better every day.

Lastly, I think we have the greatest authors in the industry. There are way too many to mention here, but we get a chance to select the types of authors that we would invite into our own living rooms or to our dining room tables. They are a gifted and talented bunch, and work harder than any team of authors I have ever had the pleasure to work with.

So you see, when it comes to my work, I have much to be thankful for this year. Oh yes, and Adam, I hope that answers your question!

November 26, 2008 · Filed Under Book News, Business Books, Inside Publishing, Management

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“A Rose by any other Name…”

A recent reader of this blog asked a terrific question: can a great title alone attached to a proposal attract a publisher? The answer is a definite yes—which belies a famous passage from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet:

“What’s in a name? that which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet;

So Romeo world, were he not Romeo call’d,

Retain that dear perfection which he owes

Without that title…” [Romeo and Juliet, 1594]

It’s a good thing Shakespeare never had to write a business book in a terribly challenging business environment like the one we have now. In the business book world, the title is one of the most vital parts of what we call “the package,” and the package is one of the key determinants of success. Without giving too much away, I can say that I have acquired books throughout my career because they had clever, timely and compelling titles. Of course, there is almost always more to it than just the title. A great title usually means that the author has hit upon something else that is also important—such as an untapped need or market niche, a terribly interesting concept, a great counterintuitive concept, etc. In other words, titles do not live in a vacuum, they are a part of something larger.

Last week in a blog post called ”The Titling Process: Unlocking Some of the Mystery,” I explained to what degrees a publisher goes to in order to come up with what we would deem a great title for a book. We spend days, weeks, and in a select few cases even months trying to come up with an ideal title that is simultaneously intriguing and informative. A good title does both: it captures the imagination of the target audience while also telling the reader exactly what the book hopes to accomplish. Often the latter is accomplished in the subtitle, and not the primary title.

Let me give you an example of a book in which we agonized over the subtitle for many weeks. The final title and subtitle of this book turned out to be:

It’s Not about the Coffee: Leadership Principles from a Life at Starbucks, by Howard Behar with Janet Goldstein

We came up with the primary title for this book (It’s Not about the Coffee) almost immediately, but the subtitle took many weeks before we all agreed to it (Publisher, marketing, and author). The subtitle seems straight forward enough, but it was a huge challenge getting everyone to agree that this was the best subtitle for the book. Every word was scrutinized, weighed, and debated. The issue was that the lead author, Howard Behar, was on the board of directors and for many years a senior executive with the company. We, the publisher, wanted to convey that this book was being written by a real Starbucks insider, yet the author was so humble that he did not want to advertise that fact. Also, it’s not the Starbucks way to brag about one’s level on the company’s org. chart. That’s why this subtitle turned out to be the perfect compromise. “…A life at Starbucks” conveyed a few things, not the least of which was that the author spent part of his life at Starbucks, at least planting the suggestion that the author spent many years at the company, which suggests that he may have been someone quite prominent there (he was the executive that built Starbucks international stores and operations outside of the U.S.).

And the book did indeed have a happy ending, selling tens of thousands of copies, garnering several positive notices, and being translated into more than half a dozen languages. With those kinds of results, all of the Sturm and Drang associated with the titling process was indeed worth it.

November 24, 2008 · Filed Under Book News, Business Books, Inside Publishing, Management

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It’s All about Fit

Most people would be shocked by the number of book proposals and manuscripts publishers are bombarded with each year. It is safe to say that all large publishers receive hundreds, perhaps thousands of business book proposals each year. Many are rejected for reasons that are different than what most people think.

One of the chief reasons has to do with the concept of fit. One of the key reasons publishers reject manuscripts is not due to the quality of the work, but because the concept is not a good fit for that particular publisher.

For example, at our imprint we would not look to publish a book on global investing. And certainly not in this environment. Which raises another important issue: fit is not a static variable, it can, and does, change with the times.

Today, with a sinking economy and a plummeting stock market, we would be less likely to acquire many types of investing books. Are we still acquiring books on investing? Absolutely, because the stock market is not going away. However, we have to be far more picky about what we decide to publish in that category, and we are already a very selective publisher. A prominent example is real estate. For about five or six years before the housing crisis hit, every just about every business book publisher signed and published scores of real estate books. When the market came crashing down, the market for real estate books disappeared pretty much overnight. So publishers must of course alter their acquisition strategy. This is obviously not rocket science, but to this day we still continue to receive book proposals from authors and agents on real estate books.

Lastly, on the issue of publishing and fit, I will quote the great hockey player, Wayne Gretzky. He said: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” That holds true for publishing as well. We have a saying with similar meaning, “if it’s in, it’s out.” This alludes to one of the most difficult parts of the job of a good editor and publisher. Since they still have to be written and produced, books that are signed up today may not be published until say, late 2009 or even 2010. Since we have no crystal balls, we must do the best we can using everything we know about the business as well as what is happening in the world and what might happen in the future. One of the books that we predicted beautifully is entitled:

The World is Curved: Hidden Dangers to the Global Economy, with a reading line on the cover “The Mortgage Crisis Was Only the Beginning, by David Smick.

That was a book that we decided to publish well over a year ago and one we got right. But there will always be books that all publishers do not get right. The market zigs when somebody expected it to zag. That’s just the price of admission in publishing. However, publishing books is still the greatest job on the planet!

November 21, 2008 · Filed Under Book News, Business Books, Inside Publishing, Management

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The Titling Process: Unlocking Some of the Mystery

One of the things that publishers spend a significant portion of their time on is titles. Titling books is an art form, and the significance of it is usually underestimated by authors. Perhaps the most surprising part of the titling process is coming to grips with just how difficult it is to come up with the right title for each book. And the bigger the book (meaning the greater its potential), the harder it is to come up with the right, big-book title—one that will stand out from the other 10,000+ business books that are published each year.

Here are some things that help: titling is usually best done in the morning, when people are the freshest. And as one of the most creative parts of the process, it is best to be as inclusive as possible. That is, bring everyone to the table, regardless of what former GE chairman Jack Welch calls “the stripes on the shoulders” of people. In other words, bring every marketing and editorial assistant and even your interns, for you never know who will come up with a breakthrough title. But the reality is that when it comes to titling—especially the big book—experience matters. Correction: experience matters a great deal. That’s why publishers and senior editorial people usually come up with the right title before the author does.

I know that may be counter-intuitive. Doesn’t the author know more about his or her book than anyone? Yes, of course, but that is part of the problem. The author may be too close to it to come up with a great title for her own book.

Also there are many moving parts to a title: there’s the main title, the subtitle, and a possible third element referred to as a reading line which explains the book in even greater detail than the title and subtitle. Only a small percentage of business books have a reading line, but most have the title and subtitle. The title should really attract attention while the subtitle should describe as specifically as possible what is in the book.

The other thing that makes it harder for authors to come up with the right title is that while titling a book is is an art form, there is some science to it as well. That’s why experience is so important, and I mean on the publisher’s side of the ledger, not the author’s. Another problem is that even when the publisher comes up with what they regard as a kick-ass title, the author sometimes does not agree. This is why this is one of the areas that can cause real friction between a publisher and the author. Ultimately, the publisher and author have to agree on the book title. That’s because the last thing a publisher wants is an unhappy author. That would poison everything. So even when the publisher comes up with what they regard as the perfect title, we won’t go with it if we cannot get the author to see our side of the argument (even though almost all publishing contracts allows the publisher to choose the final title from a legal perspective).

As an aside to the discussion, one thing that has always perplexed me is how is it that authors think they have the same ability as a publisher to choose the right title. Most don’t. Among the top people at our imprint, we have published many hundreds of books, if not a few thousand. And we have seen how these scores of titles have sold (or didn’t sell). And that is one of the things that helps publishers to be so good at the titling process—it’s not only the titling—it’s the titling and then seeing what happens to the book that makes experience so valuable.

So, if you are an author and your publisher suggests a title that you think is really off the wall, give it a chance. Think about it, sleep on it, and ask the publishing team why they are so convinced that is the right title. You may be surprised by how much you come around.

November 17, 2008 · Filed Under Book News, Business Books, Inside Publishing, Management

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A Nation of Scorekeepers (and depressed ones to boot)

With the Dow losing hundreds of points a day (yesterday’s 550 point gain notwithstanding), I have been doing some soul searching. It is difficult to watch this happen, to see great companies turn into hobbled organizations at the mercy of a panicky global market and the whims of Washington. The saying “What’s good for GM is good for the country” has been made irrelevant, as GM faces its bleakest future since the last time it faced bankruptcy almost a century ago (after being founded precisely 100 years ago it faced bankruptcy a dozen years after its founding).

But I want to talk about the market meltdown on a more personal note. Thanks to the Internet, we now have the ability to check out 401k’s and personal stock market accounts weekly, daily, hourly, or God forbid, from minute to minute. And I am convinced there are millions of people who are transfixed by their accounts, watching their money far more often than they would ever admit. It’s like having a gambling addiction without taking any action. Of course, this phenomenon would have been impossible in the last extended bad bear market of the 1970s. Then, when I bought my first stock with my Bar Mitzvah money in 1974 (200 shares of Gulf Resources at $14 per share), there were only two ways to find out the share price of any stock on any given day.

The most common way was the newspaper, which would give you the previous day’s closing price. Back then I delivered the New York Post in my Bronx neighborhood, so I checked there. Or you could call your broker—mine was a friend of the family who worked for the old E.F. Hutton (the people everyone listened to), who could give you a “live quote.” Obviously we have come a long way since then, but I am afraid that we have come three steps forward and four back. Here’s why.

We have become a nation of scorekeepers, with stocks being one of the worst parts of the phenomenon. Scorekeeping naturally started with sports, and there was certainly nothing wrong with that. Numbers and statistics lend themselves beautifully to sports. Without them, we would not have known that Ted Williams had a batting average of 400 or that Roger Maris edged out Babe Ruth’s home run record in 1961 with 61 home runs (Ruth hit 60 in 1927).

But over the years we have become a nation obsessed with numbers. Now we pay attention to dozens of numbers, some more ridiculous than others. On Monday mornings most every news show tells you which movie was #1 at the box office that weekend, and precisely how many millions it brought in.

We also follow scores and stats on a whole host of diverse topics, such as: how much money rich former wives receive as payments in divorce settlements, how much money a presidential candidate raises in a single month, which actors are in the $20-million-per-movie club, how much money Oprah Winfrey is worth, and how much former big time CEOs get in books deals. And the list goes on.

But more important numbers escape us. Does any of us remember exactly how many electoral votes Barack Obama received—or John McCain?

But back to our fading 401k plans and other stock market accounts. The financial and cable networks, which of course did not exist until the 1990s, certainly do not help the situation. They make us all froth at the mouth while hanging and analyzing ad nauseum every number and tick of the Dow. When that is combined that with millions of on-line trading accounts and Internet-access to millions of others, you get panicked far faster than ever before…and why not? When someone nearing retirement sees a $200,000 account turned into a $110,000 shadow of its former self—while hearing the D-word (Depression) on every cable news channel nearly every day, you can understand why people would want to cash in their chips and try to hang on desperately to what’s left.

Unfortunately, nothing I say here is going to change anything. We will only become more obsessed with the scoreboard in the days, months, and years ahead. Instead, I will impart only one modicum of advice: keep your holdings diversified—stocks, bonds, cash, and maybe, dare I say it—even real estate. If the time to buy is when there is “blood in the streets,” how much more red can there be? At some point, a crisis turns into a genuine opportunity. Oh…yes…and try not to watch your stocks so closely. They are going to look better from a distance for the foreseeable future.

November 14, 2008 · Filed Under Book News, Business Books, Inside Publishing, Management

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Obama, the Natural

Drucker spent much time talking about “naturals”—those gifted people who are viewed as “born” managers. Naturals set the right priorities, spark others to perform, and know how to make the “life and death” decisions (who to hire, fire, and promote).

Naturals do not micro-manage people to death. They understand intuitively that autocratic, bully-like leaders are not effective and are part of yesterday.

Naturals know a lot of things that others do not. They understand that intimidation and scare tactics have no place in an organization. That kind of toxic behavior is stifling and hurts the morale of the unit. It also shuts down creativity. After all, who wants to take a risk by presenting a new idea when they are likely to be slapped down?

Naturals are confident. That’s no small feat. GE’s former chairman Jack Welch once said that finding a truly confident individual is rare indeed.

Naturals trust their own judgment and have “edge”—they know how to make the tough decisions. They say yes or no and eschew the maybes.

Barack—the Natural?

By most anyone’s judgment, Barack Obama closely adheres to Drucker’s definition of a natural. He would have to be to defeat all comers in a grueling, two-year campaign at the young age of 47. Not that he will be the youngest president—that honor goes to Teddy Roosevelt who was only 42 when he was sworn in after the assassination of McKinley in 1901. Next comes John F. Kennedy (43) and Bill Clinton (46). On January 20th, Obama will be sworn in as our fifth youngest president, knocking Grover Cleveland out of the top five (#4 is Ulysses S. Grant, who, by the way, wrote the best presidential autobiography in history).

Obama ran an incredibly disciplined campaign, as was discussed in the last posting. What I left out was some of the other qualities that made him one of those once-every-other-generation type candidates. His incredible ability to remain cool under fire. No matter what was thrown at him he remained incredibly unflappable. That was in marked contrast to McCain’s lurching behavior in the final days of the campaign.

Perhaps the greatest evidence of Barack, the natural, is his lack of any substantial unforced errors throughout the campaign. Pundits called it the most disciplined campaign they had seen in decades. In all those many months and dozens of debates he did not make any major gaffes (the comment about Pennsylvanians sticking to their guns and religion does not rise to the level of a significant “operating unforced error”).

As important is the lack of unforced errors on the part of Obama staffers. Well, there was one Obama staffer who called Senator Hillary Clinton a “monster” during the primaries, but she was summarily dismissed and the incident was quickly forgotten.

What does all of this tell us about how Obama will lead? He will be incredibly well disciplined, will lead by inspiring rather than intimidating people, and run a very tight ship. With his second major hiring decision (Joseph Biden was first)—Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff, Obama is also showing us his pragmatic self as well. Emanuel, a seasoned politico, worked as a top level aide in Bill Clinton’s administration, and is well versed in the ways of Washington (from Congress to the White House). And he was selected for the right reason: Obama said “no one is better at getting things done as Rahm Emanuel.” Once again, we have the President-elect focused like a laser on performance, accomplishment, and achievement. And that is vintage Drucker:

“Management, in every decision and action, must put…performance first,” declared Drucker.

So far Obama has followed the Drucker script quite closely. Come back in future days and weeks to see if Obama continues to stick to the Drucker playbook.

November 7, 2008 · Filed Under Book News, Business Books, Druckerisms, Inside Publishing, Management

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Broken Washroom Doors…or Don’t Jump 36 Floors!

Peter Drucker felt that every organization had its share of dysfunction. But he described it in a very vivid way:

“Every business has its ‘broken washroom doors,’ its misdirections, its policies, procedures and methods that emphasize and reward wrong behavior, penalize or inhibit right behavior.”

He described one very funny example of a dysfunctional organization to me, when he told me how Henry Luce—the founder of Time, Inc. as well as Life, Time & Fortune Magazines—managed his company.

Drucker told me a few of the highlights of Luce’s story: Luce was “a very peculiar man.” He had been raised in China and managed Time, Inc. “by misdirection and by running around people.” Drucker told me Luce could not fire anybody, especially any classmates. (Remember that Drucker’s ideal manager could hire, fire and promote people, and here he was telling me that Luce could not fire anyone).

That was a problem.

That’s because when Luce and Drucker met, about 70 years earlier (Luce apparently loved Drucker’s first book), the chief editor of Fortune Magazine was someone named Mitch Davenport. Drucker described him as “a very fine writer but a hopeless editor, and hopeless for one reason: he did not believe in deadlines. Simply did not believe in them,” he repeated for emphasis. Of course, deadlines are the lifelines of a magazine, whether it be a monthly or weekly. So Luce kept him “but managed around him,” asserted Drucker. He then made some noises that suggested that Luce wanted Drucker to take a management position at Time, Inc.

“And he [Luce] had another problem,” said Drucker. He had a foreign editor at Time who was [allegedly] an ardent admirer of Hitler. And paranoid, by the way, but a classmate [of Luce's], who eventually killed himself by jumping out of the 36th floor!”

Drucker then told me flat out that Luce wanted to hire him: “He wanted me to come to Time and be the foreign editor around that man (I assume he meant the man that admired Hitler). Fortunately, I said said no to all of these things,” said Drucker. ”I wanted to do my own writing.”

Somehow, all of this helped Drucker make the decision to get into consulting, something he would do (and love) for the rest of his life.

The moral of the story? If you are interviewing with a company and sense that they have as much dysfunction as the company Drucker described…run! Even if the company is very successful, as Henry Luce’s Time Inc. certainly was.

If you are currently working for a company with as many “broken washroom doors” as described above, then prepare your resume and quietly make some industry inquiries. The company doesn’t have to have a manager who admires Hitler or a manager who cannot live by deadlines. There are a million other ways a company can be dysfunctional. In fact, if you work—or have worked—for a company that is dysfunctional in some unusual manner, I want to hear about it. So please drop me a comment and tell me about the dysfunction. I am curious by nature, and would love to hear how other organizations harbor, contribute to, or tolerate dysfunction. And who knows? Your story might make it into my next book (with your permission, of course).

October 27, 2008 · Filed Under Book News, Business Books, Druckerisms, Inside Publishing

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D-Day

Today is the official release date for Inside Drucker’s Brain. As far as I know, the information gleaned from my full-day interview with Drucker—which forms the centerpiece of the book—is the last major Drucker interview never-before-published, until today.

As I have started doing radio interviews for the book, one of the first questions I usually get from interviewers is this:

Why did you write a book on Peter Drucker? And why is he important now?

The truth is that I have been fascinated with Peter Drucker since the mid-1980s. First a bit of history: In 1992, I edited the first book ever published on GE’s Jack Welch, entitled The New GE: How Jack Welch Revived an American Institution. It had an awful jacket [cover] and was published by one of the smaller business book publishers (Dow Jones-Irwin), so even though the book did well, no one remembers it. Since that book came out I edited five other books on Welch and wrote three of my own. Ever since that first book on Welch, many of the former GE’s best management moves have been credited to Drucker. That always got me wondering about who this man really was. Because Drucker never headed up any large corporation (or any corporation, for that matter), nor was he a professor at say, Harvard or MIT, my curiosity over this man-behind-the-curtain only grew as time went on.

Of course, I had heard of Drucker since getting into the publishing business in the early 1980s. It was common knowledge that he was the best of the best. That was something business editors had taken as a given—like how Babe Ruth was the greatest home-run hitter of all time. But my interest in him only grew to a fever pitch after I started editing and writing books about Welch.

As an example of a Welch strategy that started with Drucker, let’s take [Welch's] most famous management strategy—dubbed #1, #2. That was the theorem that held that unless one of your businesses was either #1 or #2 in its market, then it should either be “fixed, closed, or sold.” Welch explained that the originator of that concept was Peter Drucker. That got me thinking—how many more of Welch’s ideas came from Drucker (interesting aside: I learned far more about that during my interview with Drucker, which is highlighted in the book).

As for how timely Drucker is now, well, I have always believed that when things get bad one needs to get back to the fundamentals. When it comes to management, there was no one more fundamental to the field of management than Peter Drucker. He was the one who said “there is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer.” That sounds pedestrian now, but it was anything but when he first espoused it in 1954. Whether Drucker used fancy catch phrases as other later authors (e.g. reengineering, execution), he was the first to discuss so many important topics. The chief purpose of Inside Drucker’s Brain is to devote a quick chapter to each of Drucker’s signature ideas (16 in all), including such topics as:

* How to build your organization on strength

* How to incorporate innovation into the fabric of one’s organization

* How to make “life or death decisions”

* How to manage during a crisis

That should give you some insight into what’s in the book. The book acknowledges that Drucker wrote 38 books in all, and is written to provide a succinct summary of the best of the best of his seminal ideas (to order the book, go to the home page and click on “store.” The book comes up first and will take you to Amazon, barnesandnoble.com, 1800ceoread, etc.).

October 16, 2008 · Filed Under Book News, Business Books, Druckerisms, Inside Publishing

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The Book Package, Part II

In the last posting we discussed the specific elements of the book package, using a definition that included the author’s platform (e.g. how actively and effectively he or she is able to promote the book). Let’s pick up where we left off to discuss how the package impacts several key parts of the book’s campaign and its ultimate success:

* The # of copies advanced into bookstores: This is really a critical number. Based on the book’s depiction in the publisher’s catalog (e.g. picture of the cover, the author bio, description of book, etc), the book buyers will make their decision on how many copies of the book to order for their stores. Remember that in a weakened economy business book orders will suffer. If your book is able to advance, say, 10,000 copies or more into stores that’s a good number. That will ensure pretty wide distribution—meaning that if someone goes to a store looking for your book there is a good chance they will be able to find it. But remember, your publisher does not get to decide how many copies each chain or store will order, or which stores they will put them in, or where in the store they will be placed. Those decisions are made by the bookstores themselves.

* Whether or not your book will be “green lighted” into a special placement promotion: Sometimes your book will appear on a table near the front of the store—either on a “just published” or a special business book table. When that happens, chances are your publisher paid a special promotional fee for that space (like “slotting” fees in grocery stores)—and the bookseller agreed to take the publisher’s money. Both the publisher and the bookseller must be on the same page for this to work. Put another way, publishers try to get special placement (tables or “end caps”) for many more books than the bookseller can handle, so the bookseller decides which of these books will be included in a promotion. If an author’s book does not get on a table (and the vast majority don’t), then it’s more than likely that your book will appear spine out in the business section. With something like 10,000 business books published each year, it makes sense that the vast majority of books go spine out on a shelf in a business book section.

* The licensing income: This is something authors hardly ever think about. However, a book that has a great package and global appeal will be highly sought after by publishers in other countries. For example, we recently published an incredibly timely book by David Smick entitled The World is Curved: Hidden Dangers to the Global Economy, with a reading line that says “The Mortgage Crisis was only the Beginning.” We would classify this as a “globalization” book, and publishers in many countries have purchased the rights to publish this book in their native languages.

* The actual sell-through: This is, of course, where the rubber meets the road. The number of copies sold—week in and week out—is the authors’ and publishers’ primary concern. The book’s package will play a huge role in book sales, especially at the outset. But after a few weeks, word of mouth will come in and rule the day, making the package somewhat less important. Nielsen Bookscan has made the entire publishing world one huge open book test, telling us how many copies every book sells each week, in each category, from what city, at what rate, etc. We can now see how each book sells vs. every other book, which is incredibly informative. A decade ago we had no way to measure this.

So when your publisher agonizes over the subtitle or the table of contents of your book, you will know why. They are trying to get the package exactly right.

October 10, 2008 · Filed Under Book News, Business Books, Inside Publishing, Management

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Business Books and the Economy

With all attention now centered on the economy, many have asked me if there is a relationship between business book sales and the economy. The answer is a definite yes.

When the economy is soft, as it is now, business book sales suffer. When the economy is in crisis, as it has been over the past two weeks, business book sales can really suffer. That’s because potential book buyers, usually managers, business professionals, and educated consumers, are glued to business websites and their televisions to see if and how the $700 billion bailout package turns out. In many respects, the comparison to an economic 9/11 these last weeks has been an apt one: that’s because so much of what needs to go on in the business comes to a grinding halt. I have heard from some close to the market that ”nothing is selling.” Of course, that’s an overstatement. Good quality business books sell no matter what, just not in the same numbers when events overshadow everything else. (we are fortunate at Portfolio, as our books stayed strong even during the weeks when the overall category fared the worst).

What about financial books? Are they even more affected by the soft economy? Once again, the answer is yes. That’s particularly true when the financial markets sink. Here we see even a stronger relationship between book sales and the economy. The performance of the Dow Jones Industrial average is an excellent indication of book sales. When the Dow goes up, people love financial books. And the opposite is true as well. Publishers recognize this, and when there is real fear in the market, we try to counter it by publishing “what-to-do-when-the-markets-crash books.” Historically speaking, many of these crash books have done very well.

One of the early examples of a crash book was a book published more than two decades ago entitled The Great Depression of 1990 by Ravi Batra (S&S, 1985). That book was a New York Times #1 bestseller when the financial markets were doing great (1986), as well as when they crashed (October, 1987).

However—with few exceptions—publishers cannot and should not attempt to change their overall publishing strategy every time the market lurches one way or another. But there are exceptions. The two most obvious examples took place in the last decade. In 2000 the multi-million-dollar-market for day trading books died almost literally overnight. In 2006, after many years of a record run, the market for real estate books experienced a similar demise. But those examples involve business book categories or niches.

When we look at the business category as a whole—with the exception of instant books—it is clear that books are a poor medium to chronicle the headline-making events of the day. Business books are much more effective when they stand back and give measured perspective on a particular event or era. Examples include Barbarians at the Gate (the greed-is-good 1980s) and The Smartest Guys in the Room (Enron). We already know that there will be several books detailing the events of today’s financial crisis—likely to be published in the fall of 2009 all the way through 2011 and later. The book that will win won’t necessarily be the first book to hit the market, but the one that provides the clearest explanation of what happened; that takes us behind-the-scenes of the primary participants, and explains in clear and compelling fashion, what happened, why it happened, and how to avoid similar crises in the future.

September 29, 2008 · Filed Under Book News, Business Books, Inside Publishing

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