I read a lot of business books. Far more than I would actually like to read honestly. And while I tend to learn something from ever book I read, with very, very few exceptions, I would learn just as much (probably more) if those books were shorter. In fact many business books started off as a single piece of research or a couple of ideas and the author took that single object and built on it and added to it, and added to it until they finally had enough pages to justify a publisher publishing it.
Just a few examples that highlight my point would be Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows, which started off as an article in The Atlantic: Is Google Making us Stupid? You can read my review but basically just read the article and spare yourself the burden of reading the book. A more recent example is Umair Haque’s The New Capitalist manifesto. Umair makes an important point but the point is painfully lost in his effort to stretch his idea out and fill it with nonexistent examples.
Harvard Business Review is almost famous for taking case studies that professors publish and then turning them into books, when you’d get just as much value out of the case study without all the extra stuff.
In my quest to read some really high value nonfiction without all the fluff and filler, I found myself being drawn by to some classic works:
- An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding by John Locke
- The Essays of Francis Bacon
- Civil Disobedience By Henry David Thoreau
- What Is Man? and Other Essays by Mark Twain
Format Follows Function.
Now granted, these are masters. I don’t expect most business authors to rival their level of intellectualism or talent at writing. But does that mean we shouldn’t try? I think we can also learn something from these writers and not everything we write has to be “a book.” In fact most writing back in the early days of the printing press and publishing weren’t books. They were leaflets or serialized content in news papers.
Now one way to think about these are the historical equivalent of blogging. And I think that’s an apt comparison, except that it misses some key elements. Namely that they were still published. They still put a lot of work and craft into those pieces.
But we’ve let the publishing industry dictate the format, because that’s what used to sell. The marginal cost between publishing an essay and publishing a 200 page book is minimal and it’s easier to sell a book than a pamphlet – or at least it used to be.
With digital publishing I’m hoping we can break away from the “book” metaphor and instead focus on publishing great content, regardless of word count.
It’s difficult to get comprehensive stats on the publishing industry but here are some stats I found specific to the US:
- Over 1 Million books were published in the US in 2009.
- And according to 1-800 CEO-READ, almost 11,000 business books are published every year.
- The average U.S. nonfiction book sells less than 250 copies per year and less than 3,000 copies over its lifetime.
- A book has less than a 1% chance of being stocked in an average bookstore.
These are sobering thoughts to myself, as someone who has long contemplated the option of writing a book, but not wanting to be someone who just writes the book because that’s what a consultant with a blog is supposed to do, but because I genuinely want to share my ideas in a format and in a way that you can’t on a blog.
So I am no longer interested in publishing a book. I am now profoundly interested in being an essayist and publishing more extended thoughts in the form of essays. I’m not saying there won’t ever be a day where I decide to write a book. Anything’s possible, but it’s not my goal now. Instead I want to focus on creating high value content without any filler.
I have some thoughts on this and I’ll of course keep you in the know as they develop, but I hope this is something that more authors or would be authors think about. You don’t need to write a book. Say what you have to leave out the filler.
Related articles
- Humanizing Your Business Is Your Greatest Challenge. Here’s How To Do It. (newcommbiz.com)
- Book Review: The New Capitalist Manifesto by Umair Haque (wall-notes.com)
- The transformation of books (wall-notes.com)
- “If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned…” (wall-notes.com)
- The Kindle Lending Library (wall-notes.com)
