Seth Godin ignited a firestorm online when he announced that he’ll no longer persue traditional publishing for his books. I think we all saw this coming, especially since the marketing for his last book, Linchpin, completely bypassed the traditional channels.
Tim Ferriss did an excellent writeup in response to Seth but more so to others who might consider following Seth’s example. It’s a good read if you’re wanting to write a book, but the gist of it is that becoming an author the traditional way, through a major publisher with a reputation and distribution, is still a viable, even preferable option for most of us.
See, the thing is, and Tim made this point quite nicely, Seth’s already established his reputation, so he’s now able to cut out all the middlemen. He can go straight from writer to consumer.
That’s the essence of permission marketing, which Seth has so ardently promoted.
Just today, I was re-listening to Seth’s book, Permission Marketing, and in it, he gives the example of Amazon.com. Seth said that Amazon’s asset is its permission to contact customers it’s already had in the past. In the book, he specifically says that Amazon will eventually cut out middlemen so much that it’ll leave only the writer and Amazon between the book and the customer.
With Seth’s move away from traditional publishing, he’s just taking his own advice: he’s built up the permission to contact his customers, readers all over the world. Now instead of getting the publishers involved, he’ll simply sell directly (or almost directly) to them.
But here’s the part many people miss when they claim that traditional publishing is dead and cite Seth’s example: Seth has already written 12 best-sellers to earn the permission and trust to pull this off. Twelve best-sellers! The rest of us have a lot of catching up to do to earn that amount of trust.
So yeah, I’m sure many of you already knew this. I wanted to write it, though, because I’m not sure I fully grasped it.
