“Okay, what’s your plan for my book?” I ask.
I’m on a call with a top imprint at Penguin Random House. An editor had reached out a few weeks earlier to “discuss future projects,” after my self-published book, The Pathless Path, started climbing the charts. In a quick call, she said she thought their team could help the book reach many more people. While skeptical, I accepted her invitation to another call, this time with the senior publisher and lead editor.
I pop onto Zoom. Three people are waiting. They seem in a rush. After a short round of intros, they cut to the chase: “We want to get The Pathless Path to more people. We know how to do it. We’d take it out of print, redo the cover, and update the content.”
This throws me off.
Hmm. . . People are buying this book right now. I’m literally selling thousands of copies a month right now. Why take it out of print? Also, I love the cover.
We keep chatting. They detail why I will struggle as a self-published author. I’m slightly annoyed but open-minded.
“Okay, what are some of the ideas to reach more people?”
“We like this book a lot. We can send preview copies to authors we work with, like (redacted).”
“I mean nothing’s stopping you from sharing it with you now,” I jokingly say.
“Nice try.”
(silence)
“Ummmm, any other ideas?”
They don’t seem to have more. They are thrown off that I’m not jumping at the offer. While it’s no question that they have much better distribution than I do, I thought they’d have at least one idea related to the themes in my book.
“Look, this is a really good offer. You should take it. It’s good for you. Your book will reach many more people.”
But it doesn’t seem like a good offer.
Caring Is Incidental To Most Publishing Houses
To a publishing company, my book is one line in a massive database of titles. Their game, if I handed it over, was to see if they could turn it into a cash-flowing perennial seller. If it didn’t take off, they’d move on.
To me, the book is a significant creation. It is more than a line item. Through writing it, I stepped deeper into a portal for a different way of being. It isn’t a business card for further opportunities. It’s part of my life, an expression of something deeper, and now, a part of my readers’ lives too.
Writing The Pathless Path also unlocked something in me. It helped me admit that I care deeply about my work and I care about how I do it.
To them, my level of caring was an incidental factor, not one that be part of a business case for acquisition. On the call, it was obvious that a team publishing hundreds of books each year could only care about my book so much. It’s not their fault, its the game they have to play.
Even more simply, the math didn’t math. In the month before the offer, I made $10,000 in royalties on 2,000 copies. By the time I talked to the full team, sales were inching even higher, which made a $70,000 offer for lifetime copyright plus 70 years after my death easy to reject.
Before the call ends, I can tell they don’t like the fact that I am not enthusiastic. They push me to tell them what would make me interested. I haven’t thought about it in detail, assuming they won’t negotiate.
“I don’t know. Much higher,” I respond.
“Okay, tell us.”
“Okay, ummm, uhh…I’d be more open to selling the rights to only The Pathless Path and not including a future book. But I think the book has a lot more potential than your offer implies. At $600k, I might be interested.”
As soon as I say that number, the energy drops to zero. They are shocked. They think I’m out of my mind.
They tell me I need to talk to an agent.
The call ends, awkwardly.
I sit there for a few minutes, thinking, “What was that?” Eventually, I get up and walk into the kitchen. I tell Angie, “I’m definitely not doing a deal”.
But in the days after the call, I feel great. I am fired up. These were the people who were the best in the world? They wanted to take a book people loved and take it out of print? And they wanted me to sign over lifetime creative control after only a 30-minute call? It all felt like a weird dream.
None. Of. This. Makes. Sense.
Still, I needed reassurance that I wasn’t being reckless. I texted my writer-friend David Perell, who lived nearby: “Yo, I just got a publishing offer, and I’m likely going to turn it down, but have no idea what to think about this. Can we go for a walk?”
Along the Colorado River in Austin, David and I started walking.
I get right to it: “Am I crazy, or does this industry not make any sense?”
David had been running the online course Write of Passage over the past few years. His course had attracted thousands of people. Like me, he had embraced the power of the internet, connecting with and helping a group of people on unconventional paths.
David saw traditional publishing through a similar lens. The prestige these institutions offered was overpriced. And certainly, almost nothing was worth selling out our most valuable asset: creative passion.
He pushed me to dream bigger: “You are still early. All my students love this book; I hear people talk about it every week. You should double down on it, just like you talk about in the book.”
On the call with Penguin, I hadn’t planned to make a counteroffer. When I threw out the $600,000 number, I shocked myself, too.
Really, it was a first step in acknowledging that I did, in fact, have a hit, and it was worth continuing to invest in. At that moment, a fire was lit inside of me. I needed to be bolder. I needed to keep going forward, in my own way. If the industry wasn’t going to obsess over the details and care about the book in a way that felt right, then I would do it myself.
The Publishing Industry Isn’t Broken, But it Sometimes Breaks People
I wouldn’t have lasted ten years in strategy consulting if I didn’t enjoy a deep dive into the structure and incentives of a new industry. So, for the next few months after declining Penguin’s offer, that’s exactly what I did, guided by simple questions:
- What’s the deal with this industry?
- Do the traditional publishers still matter in a digital age?
- What is so powerful about the combo of prestige and a modest one-time advance that convinces authors to relinquish lifetime creative control over their most important work?
My conclusion: The book industry isn’t broken. At a high level, the industry is growing. Online sales and digital formats are booming, and self-publishing has opened the door for more writers to write books and build a career than ever before.
When people say the industry is broken, what they are really pointing to is the publishing houses in New York City still running a 1960s playbook. They keep ebook prices high, dismiss self-publishing tactics, resist print-on-demand, and limit authors’ creative input and rights. When authors do obtain alternative arrangements, like Hugh Howey, publishers don’t take the opportunity to compete or take the chance to make more money; industry insiders beg each other to maintain the status quo:
Practically, these companies are “working.” They generate steady, reliable cash flows for conglomerate owners, excel at a playbook for certain kinds of books, and offer prestige and credentials that still matter to many. These companies will keep chugging along as long as passive backlist income keeps flowing, which can be up to 70% of revenues for some companies. To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, “It is difficult to get anyone to change when the business model means there is no incentive to do anything different.”
Employees and agents have emailed me lengthy complaints in private, acknowledging a strange code of secrecy that seems to pervade the industry. This seems to extend to authors, too, who play along, afraid to share royalties and deal information. Their messages are always the same: They entered this field because they genuinely care about books, yet the system makes it nearly impossible to do so. Many people leave a burnt husk of themselves.
Jimmy Soni, author and head of Infinite Books, details the state of the industry: “The problem is there’s been so much consolidation and there’s just less room to take risks. If you have a bunch of books that aren’t successful, you’re costing the publisher money without having a return.” This means each book has a short window to prove its worth. As Jimmy adds, “The entire business model is predicated on your book being a hit within the first two weeks. If it’s not a hit within the first two weeks, publishers sort of give up on it and move on to the next project.”1
This Creates Unnecessary Cynicism at Scale
I’ve never encountered an industry as cynical as the book industry.
The closer you get to its orbit, the more you start to hear several phrases repeated as if they are trying to convince you to join a cult: Don’t worry about control over your work. Trust the agents and publishers; you can’t negotiate your own deal. Of course, you shouldn’t expect help with marketing. Sure, the deal is not good, but everyone signs the deal. Publishers know “the market” better than you. Just sign the deal. Take the money. Self-publishing is for losers.
Here are only a few things authors who have participated in this system have said to me privately over the last couple of years:
- “I didn’t come close to earning out my advance, so it’s worthless to ever talk about my book.” (at least 4–5 authors in some form)
- “I hated the cover, but I just didn’t want to fight them anymore.”
- “I hate the subtitle of my book, but they wouldn’t compromise. Sadly, I am just less enthusiastic about promoting it now.”
- “I’m shocked at how quickly they stopped responding to my emails and caring about my book. I wish I could get back the rights.”
- “I’d love to do a spinoff, smaller book, but I can’t do anything related without asking for permission first.”
- “As soon as it was clear the book wasn’t going to take off, they moved on.”
The publishing industry takes the most ambitious, creative, and driven writers, extracts their exuberance, and replaces it with cynicism. Writers become “authors” who focus less on the craft and more on gaming the system, becoming agents for these faceless conglomerates.
I’ve seen even the most principled and determined authors get sucked into this vortex. I hate to see it, but I also know incentives matter. The system is getting what it wants.
Creative work should inspire more creative work, but the industry doesn’t seem to feed that cycle. Instead, it inspires bigger and bolder attempts at the same playbook and generates creative pollution in the form of cynicism.
In an era where writers literally have direct access to the means of production and a direct way to reach readers, we can push back against this. We can raise our standards. We can invest in the direction of creativity instead of PR. We can say no to deals that risk undermining our creative fire. We can retain our rights. We can take risks that might not work.
We can reclaim the book.
To Reclaim the Book, We Must Care About The Book Itself
A friend once told me that he felt the pressure to write a book from a young age. His grandmother was a best-selling author, and his parents also wrote books. Finishing a book was how you “made it” in his family.
I had no such pressure or expectations upon me when I set out to write a book. To me, it was a fun extension of what I was already doing, publishing words on the web, mostly to friends and fellow curious humans. It was an advantage not knowing anything about doing a book the “right” way. By crafting it in my own way, I injected my own weird quirks into it. I structured it in ways that would horrify most non-fiction editors, moved through references quickly, leaving the rest up to readers, and refused to tie my ideas into a bow with prescriptive frameworks.
It wasn’t supposed to work.
Two people with publishing experience warned me against shipping it.
It wasn’t ready, they said.
But it worked.
The history of publishing is filled with such eccentricity, and it’s where we should look for inspiration.
One example is William Morris, who founded the Kelmscott Press in the 1890s and vowed to push back against the uninspiring books of his day, amidst the rise of mass production. Morris was obsessive and opinionated, with strong perspectives on paper, typography, and the spacing of words, lines, and text on a page. He studied the calligraphy of the Middle Ages and the typography of incunabula, early printed books from before the 1500s. He designed his own typefaces, including Golden Type, Troy, and Chaucer, which he created specifically for Geoffrey Chaucer’s works. While many of his projects were unprofitable, many of his books are now seen as masterpieces of the era.
He felt that, behind building your own house, the book was “Perhaps the most satisfactory work of art one can make or have.” In more direct terms, he told an interviewer for Bookselling in 1895, “I felt that for the books I loved and cared for there might be attempted a presentation…which should be worthy of one’s feelings. That is all. The ideas we cherish are worth preserving, and I fail to see why a beautiful form should not be given to them.”2
In today’s age, as soon as you snap out of the spell of the traditional publishers and look around, you do notice inspiring experiments.
Stripe Press clearly cares about books. Infinite Books and Jimmy Soni are entering the industry with an author- and tech-first mindset. James Clear helped launch an authors-first hybrid publisher at Author’s Equity, and the authors I talk to love working with them. Bookvault pairs beautiful design with print-on-demand flexibility. Lulu gives you an API to print & ship books anywhere in the world. Craig Mod has nearly a decade of putting art and craft first, publishing beautiful art editions of his work. Derek Sivers sells direct and only makes authors pay for his books once. Steel Brothers is turning books like Walden into breathtaking collectibles. MSCHF is remixing reality itself with its releases. Even rogue divisions within Penguin’s imprints prioritize design, like their clothbound classics.
My Contribution
For the last 18 months, I’ve been trying to channel my inner William Morris, creating a book that expresses the care and passion I have for the ideas in The Pathless Path. It’s a significant investment, and the most I’ve spent on any project by a 10x margin in my 8+ years as an independent creative. It’s a bet on beauty, a bet on books mattering, and a bet on caring in a world that is not optimized for caring.