* * *
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.
* * *
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.
