Jan B. King: Book Publishing Inspirations and Explanations

Twyla Tharp’s late 2009 book called The Collaborative Habit: Life Lessons for Working Together, is my new favorite.  Collaboration is certainly something that has been essential to my working happiness and reading her book added new thoughts to that old joy.

I find creating collaborations to be a challenging intellectual puzzle.  Great collaborations happen every day, but they are hard to create and sustain.   When you do have one there is nothing like it and the synergy of the effort when two heads and hearts connect is a thrill like a roller-coaster.

Because I know what great collaboration feels like, I go into many with high hopes.  When they don’t work, it is always disappointing thinking of what could have been, if only…

Sometimes you want to collaborate and sometimes you don’t.  Sometimes you want to do something alone or sometimes you just want to hire someone to do something for you without your input.  Being clear not just on the outcome but the process will save you a lot of angst in miscommunication with those around you.

Some projects require collaboration.  I don’t see how buildings are built or restaurants are run without it.  Collaboration may not be something you desire, but the circumstances require it.  I think developing a book is one of those.  You may write alone, but successful publishing is all about putting many heads together toward a common goal.

You can read by clicking the link, in outline form about the steps involved and the professionals required in the Work of the Author.  Beyond the specifics, what is really required is a spirit of collaboration, the intent to enjoy the process and the willingness to make the art and act of collaboration part of your strategy for success.  Here are six things that will improve any act of collaboration:

1. Be candid. If you can’t say what you need to say, then you can’t really collaborate and it doesn’t matter whether you are intimidated by the people or the project.  Being candid is more than being honest – it means giving enough information for each person to help you fill in the missing pieces of project’s puzzle.  It means trusting each individuals’s integrity and sense of common purpose to allow them to enjoy the collaboration as well.  Tell everything you can to every person on the team and ask for their opinions and responses.  There is generally one team leader and that person will rightly make the final decisions.  Not being asked or heard is death to collaboration.

2. Think project, not person.  With a collaborative project, the project goals trump individual effort so sometimes you will give more than your fair share and sometimes less.  If you are mentally dividing the expected effort equally all the way through, you are probably going to be unhappy.  Your goal in a collaboration should be to give more than your share, not paying a lot of attention to what everyone is giving.  Of course, if this goes on for the duration of the project, this is probably not a sustainable collaboration.  But day by day there is no requirement for equal effort.

3. Think completion, not credit. The goal of a collaborative project is successful completion and you can no more think about individual credit than you can about the amount of individual effort. Group efforts are not intended to provide ego satisfaction to individuals, but there is tremendous satisfaction to being part of something larger than yourself, if you let go of personal expectations.

4. Talk through roles and expectations up front. It is our own expectations as much as the behavior of others that can sink the collaborative ship.  Voice the deal-breakers and must-haves before you get in too deep.  I’m a time person, so nothing upsets my collaboration expectations as much as someone who says, “I’ll email it to you tomorrow” and it still hasn’t arrived days later.  People who don’t have that same value will not be put off by that.  If your collaboration involves money, than talking it through isn’t enough – get it in writing as a confirming letter or a real contract.

5. Be responsible for controlling your own emotions. If you don’t get frustrated, anxious or angry during the course of a project than it probably doesn’t mean very much to you.  High emotions are expected when a lot is at stake and things really matter.  But each good collaborator is responsible for behaving well toward others, regardless of what he or she is feeling in the moment.  You can vent outside the group to a good friend, you can work on getting perspective, but eventually you will need to talk out your feelings with those involved, unless those feelings subside naturally which sometimes happens as you better understand the whole picture.

6. Underpromise and overdeliver. When people are counting on you, really think about what you can do and the time it will take.  So often in the moment and in our wish to please we make promises we rationally know we can’t really keep.  If you can reset from immediate gratification to something more long term, think how they would feel about you as a team member if you constantly beat your own deadlines!  Rarely are we required to overpromise – this is something we generally do to ourselves and we are the only ones who can change it.  I know service providers who always get the contract because they seem to beat everyone else’s timetable.  But they often to be the ones who are late or produce something of less-than-stellar quality.

It takes a village to create a book and great collaborations create great books.  Take a look at the acknowledgments pages of any book and you will find profound gratitude from an author who knows how pivotal the unsung heroes of the process were to the final product.

The next time you have the opportunity to collaborate, experiment with bringing a “what can I do to make this great” attitude into it, instead of the usual “what’s in it for me.”  Learning the collaborative art form and spirit may be one of the best lessons of the journey to a published book.

I found time to catch up on some movies I missed during 2009 thanks to Netflix and some down time over the holidays.  I expected that the movie Julia and Julie was going to be a light-hearted story about two women who lived in two different times but enjoyed a love of cooking and food.  It was that, of course, but the core of the story was about book publishing – something I didn’t expect.

Julie is a “failed” writer whose novel was not picked up by any publishers.  She’s searching for purpose thinking that she has to figure out what to do since she is no longer a writer.  So she gives herself what she calls a “deranged assignment” to cook all of the recipes in Julia Child’s cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking over the course of a year and to blog about the adventure.

Julia, also searching for some sort of purpose for her life, other than travel and marriage, decides that since she loves to eat she might love to cook.  She signs on at the Cordon Bleu in Paris and by the third week there she is in “utter bliss”.  As time goes on she realizes that there is an unfulfilled need, to have a French cookbook available in English.

Julie’s assignment gives her a “regimen”, short term goals, something purposeful to do everyday. Julia similarly finds something to do everyday as she is learning the skills of French cooks, although they do not understand or appreciate the joy she brings to the mundane tasks of the kitchen.

I watched in wonder as both played out the real-life drama of getting a book published.  The best thing Julie did was to give up on the expected dream of becoming a novelist and living happily ever after in the life she was prepared to inhabit.  Giving up the past completely, whether contentedly or fighting it every step of the way is the only way to start anew.  Giving up the old dream does not mean you are giving up your old skills, and she connects in a new and powerful way with an audience she didn’t expect or do much to find.

Julia had no intent or interest in publishing a book, but the need was too great in her mind to ignore the assignment life had given her.  She states her mission clearly: “To write a French cookbook for American women who don’t have cooks.”  Her purpose became her passion and the way was anything but smooth.

Neither of these women was looking for money.  They both were lost and then found through a simple step by step search to find passion.  They didn’t know anything about what they were getting into so they didn’t know to be afraid.  But they set an intent and stuck with it, despite criticism and set backs.

Both found fame, fortune and happiness in the process.  And both became published authors and not just once. Both found their purpose in books.

I wish for you that you have the struggles, soul-searching and left turns that these two women had in their book publishing journeys.  Writers who easily become authors never feel the same sense of mastery and personal pride that authors who have faced disappointment and have persisted in the face of it do.  They often do not feel they deserve success and will undermine or downplay their accomplishments.  We know we’ve found our passions when they drive us to persevere.

The pace of change in the book publishing world is increasing and that is very exciting, especially for us working primarily in the nonfiction area.  This change is particularly interesting in the area of electronic book readers, such as Kindle and others in development.

This is where the worlds of the nonfiction book versus the fiction book diverge.  Although Kindle and other eBook readers are working hard to replicate the look and feel of a book for those of us for whom that really matters, it is the next generation that is already comfortable with accessing information electronically and not in book form.

Nonfiction books (along with magazines and newspapers) were once the primary method of disseminating problem-solving information.  Where do you go when you have an immediate problem to be solved now?  The Internet.  We don’t have time to wait for tomorrow morning’s paper that might or might not have what we are looking for and we don’t have time to either go to a bookstore or order a print book from Amazon.com.  You get a health diagnosis and you Google it.  You need a recipe for blueberry muffins and you Google that.  You want to know the test scores for your new school district and you Google that.

The purpose of nonfiction books, then, has to be not only to give information but to analyze it and help the reader integrate it into the rest of his or her world.  The reader will still want this information instantaneously, which is where Kindle comes in.

Because of this clear and pressing move to electronic media, I am more and more concerned about new authors signing contracts with publishers that sell electronic rights and particularly for the current small royalties in exchange – 15% to 25% is typical.  Electronic rights royalties should be 50/50 and my prediction is that they will end up there over the next few years.  If you are contemplating a new contract, try to build in a clause that allows you to renegotiate the royalties for this right every few years.  This is the biggest area of change and since the author contract is for the life of the copyright (the authors life plus 70 years) that is a long time to regret selling electronic rights for 15%, especially when future sales of your book might be 90% electronic and 10% print in the not-so-distant future.

Although there is no question that the new generation will read novels on Kindle and other readers, I think that there will always be more print poetry books, cookbooks, novels and children’s books than you will find soon in the self-help and business nonfiction book world.  In nonfiction where the information itself is what is being sold, electronic media is the perfect way to get that information out.  In the fiction world (and the more creative part of the nonfiction world) the reading experience is paramount and books will continue to be the best way to have that full experience for some time to come.

It is interesting that we talk about book publishing as a whole when the futures of nonfiction versus fiction are probably quite different, both in the development of the intellectual property and in the media most appropriate for them because of how we want to experience them.