Marly talks to Seth Godin

Update: Perhaps I'm not very clear on the tone for this one because people have taken the introduction far more seriously than I meant! No worry. A couple of podcasts (okay, maybe I exaggerated--so I exaggerated!) will not magically transform me into a market-minded maniac. But I am rather fascinated by the slant of view and think he would make a good character. He even looks like a character...  A Dickens character, I think, one of the active and colorful "flat" characters.


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When I decided that I really must think about marketing, I listened to Seth Godin while I folded the laundry. He’s an informative guy, and he has quirky ways of looking at marketing. They are not my ways (I am afraid that marketing and I are a strange pair), but I find him weirdly revelatory of the way of the world.

I don't imagine that I will ever get to chat with such a well-known marketer as Seth in the flesh, so here I’m going to talk to an e-Seth, using some clips from an interview with real-Seth, along with my responses.

Usually when Seth talks, I just listen. This being my blog, I get to say more than he does.

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Seth:

Mostly, though, I think it’s a fading of the power of a published book to influence the conversation. When anyone can publish an ebook, anyone will.

Marly:

The Tower of Babel Redux, and we have to deal with it--that's a fact. Our tongues are divided and swinging like mad, and the cacophony is increasing. 

You describe "a fading of the power of a published book to influence the conversation." How terribly poignant. But that is life a century after the crack-up of Modernism, it seems.  And one must tilt with the facts. 

Nevertheless, Seth, I still believe that there a secret world tucked inside our big, fat, hyper-materialist, and often-tasteless world--a world of people who care about beauty and rightness and all the golden things handed down to us by the Gawain poet and Shakespeare and Herbert and Austen and Dickinson and Dickens and more. And maybe that hidden world is enough to sustain a lot of us who are seeking to make something worthy.

Seth:

An author starting out today needs to pick herself, establish a niche, become truly the best at it and relentlessly and generously give it all away as a way of leading and making a ruckus.

Marly:

Seth, this is a bit discouraging, this niche business. I know all about giving away my words, but niche?

What if your sameness, your niche-ness, has always been never being the same? What kind of niche is that? Publishers never liked it--sounds as if you think the market won’t and perhaps can't either. 

Here I have to make a confession. I will go on dividing myself into poet and novelist (of various sorts) and children's book writer, and if my silver stream is diffused by the nature of the marketplace—by the way it considers all those things as being not from the same source (though they are, and seamless in some important ways), so be it. 

Further, Seth, I find that writing the strong, beautiful book I always dream of writing and that having a position of humility before the great masters of the past is more to me than having a niche and so gaining numbers.

I like “increasing readership”: yes, I do. But I love the tradition and the burning image of the strong, beautiful book more. And if I must choose, I choose the image and the masters.

You know that is unfortunate--you think that choice is in certain ways quite unfortunate. And in a worldly, blockbuster sort of way you are exactly right.

Seth:

Who said you have a right to cash money from writing? I gave hundreds of speeches before I got paid to write one. I’ve written more than 4000 blog posts for free.

Marly:

In the past, if you were mid-list who never got a "push" from a publisher, it was pretty much the same as writing for free--a dollop of money once in a very great while—and so that still means doing the work for love. Or love and pennies.

As soon as we finish this chat, Seth, I'm going to go read "The Artist of the Beautiful" one more time. Actually I am going off to a voice lesson, but in a metaphorical sense I will be reading Hawthorne.

Seth:

Poets don’t get paid (often), but there’s no poetry shortage. The future is going to be filled with amateurs, and the truly talented and persistent will make a great living. But the days of journeyman writers who make a good living by the word–over.

Marly:

“Truly talented”: what does that mean? I am a person often praised for tact (thank you, my Southern ancestors who don't allow me to say what I think!), but here I must veer toward the tactless. There's a kind of book we all know to be the equivalent of Twinkies--an easy dessert, a Ho-Ho of sugary cake wrapped around sticky-sweet cream. That kind of book is rising in the free and near-free e-book market, just as it rose in traditional publishing.

Often, then, the cooker-upper of Ding Dongs "will make a great living."

Just as in traditional publishing, there's a mix of good and bad in the future you predict.  Just as in traditional publishing, what’s not so great can be rewarded.

I'm not talking about genre here; I'm talking about quick, somewhat sensational or trendy or just plain junky books that have no soul, whatever their genre--literary or mystery or nonfiction or fantasy, on and on. (Besides, the only kind of book worth talking about is a good book; genre is nothing.)

Give me "a great book" over making "a great living." I have that choice, and I choose. The attempt to write true books is labor and play in the vale of soul-making. 

I've had decent advances, and I've had lousy advances, but the difference between decent and lousy money has never made one whit of difference to the work.

Seth:

It’s not the market’s job to tell authors how to monetize their work. The market doesn’t care. If there’s no scarcity of what they want, it’s hard to get them to pay for it.

Marly:

Absolutely true. The question is what people want, isn't it? And a lot of people don't want to sit down and read a good book, do they? We used to teach our children that thing called taste, didn't we?  But we don't anymore. And that's just that, a hard nugget of fact.

But there will always be scarcity of the best, Seth. Even among things (including books) touted as great or as works of art, only a percentage will make it to that pinnacle.

How will we know when books are great, Seth? Tell me that? When everybody has an e-book, and Babel is a nest of clamor, how will we find those voices?

Tell me that.