Year-End Wrap-Up, New Year Plans, and Our Favorite Books

What are we doing, where are we going, and will they have snacks there? David and I talked some about our aims for this podcast, and how we (still) don't want to try to boil things down to five takeaways, or share advice much. Mainly, we love exploring fresh takes, and sharing about humans we're excited about. 

Toward that end, we discussed whether there's room for "books that don't do anything," and an idea about how writers might be better served by embracing a writing life rather than worrying too much about SEO and book sales. 

We shared some ideas and wants for season two, and finished with a couple of our favorite books. Look forward to sharing more disruptiveness in the New Year!

Publishing Disrupted is at PublishingDisrupted.substack.com

Mick Silva is at MickSilvaEditing.substack.com

David Morris is at dvdmorris.substack.com, LakeDriveBooks.com, and Hyponymous.com.

Transcript

I'm Mick Silva 

and I'm David Morris 

and this is Publishing Disrupted. 

Mick: We don't come with notes. We're not giving you five points on anything. We're definitely not Tony Robbins. 

David: I listened to so much of his stuff at one point in my life as part of my work at Guideposts.

Mick: It's all about the productivity mindset. I think that's part of my deconstruction. It's like a knee-jerk reaction. We think we have to have a takeaway, we have to have the five points. What's the point? What's the felt need? You can't even evaluate a book proposal without that felt need or you can't sell it. That's true. But increasingly, I guess I want books that don't do anything. I just want them to be a good read.

David: It's like Seinfeld, which I've been watching a lot of lately. There's this horrible, horrible news about Rob Reiner that just came out, and Castle Rock was his production company, which produced Seinfeld. I forget where I was going with that, but oh, Seinfeld was a show about nothing. 

Mick: I want to read books that don't do anything. But tell a great story. Or just kind of like circle. Like Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. That is my classic, like what is a book that doesn't do anything. But clearly it's doing something, like there's subterfuge, there's artfulness there. And it's not drawing attention to its art, it's just saying, here's what you can learn by walking around a pond, and looking at the bugs and the plants and having thoughts about God or life or whatever. This podcast is kind of like that. Books still matter. How do they matter? Well, they matter more than just what the internet does, which is bring us a bunch of garbage to have to filter through. Books are an experience, man. I want a book to like take me somewhere.

David: Maybe it's not all garbage, but unsorted information.

Mick: I feel like AI is turning the internet into garbage. And my daughters, they're out of the teen years now, starting to have these amazing thoughts independent of their parents. They're not Luddites exactly, but they're leaning that way. They don't want the new phones, they don't want the updates, they don't like AI, they don't even want to use it. They want in-person as opposed to online or digital life. They want to go back to analog.

And I feel that strongly myself. Although I live in the real world, which involves digital media and such. But maybe that's where some books can exist in this almost pre-internet space, where you don't necessarily have to contend with "should this give us a takeaway?"

David: It helps with SEO and keywords. I used to get these pitches from anonymous people saying they can improve the SEO on my website. That should just tell you that there's something not real here. It's not actually working, but there's an allure that it might work. In self-publishing, indie publishing, there's always this talk about metadata and getting the right keywords in there. Yeah, those things, you should do them. But the magical thinking is where we go wrong.

Mick: I found it demoralizing as an acquisitions person that you can't lead with content in the discussion when talking about acquiring a book. If you do, you'll be laughed out of the room. "We're trying to make a business decision here, sir. And we're not talking about the content of the book right now. We're talking about the platform of the author." I get that. I had to learn that. But I guess we should all agree that we don't know how to push the button to say this book is the best one that everyone will buy. We don't have that button. And we've seen so many celebrity books just fall flat. A big platform is no guarantee of good sales right now. And I would argue it's never been. The best sellers are anomalous. You can't point to one thing that made that book sell. 

David: Some break happens, and then it starts to be self-fulfilling. 

Mick: I love it when a book has been out for a while and then suddenly it catches on for some reason. 

David: You'll ask five people who worked on the book what got it to work, and sometimes they'll each say something different.

Mick: All have different answers. I love that. It's so confirming to me. All of you are looking for things further down the line that this author had an amazing idea that they executed well. As a former industry professional, now trying to find his way in the indie market, that's a really good story to be able to say—there's so many books that have done way better than they should have. And one thing I think you can say about all of them is they were written by very informed authors who knew what they were doing... a powerful execution. At the end of the day, the content ultimately grabbed people, and by the time those people finished, they wanted to share it. Word of mouth helped sell that book. Your idea and the way you execute it, the method in which you share it, that is unique to you. Your voice or your compelling data that supports your points, whatever, that matters. And how you write your book is ultimately the most important part.

David: I wonder if there are just too many books where people aren't really saying something. The contribution isn't that potent. It might not even need to be original because newsflash authors think you're the first one to say something. We can find other people who said the same thing.

Mick: But the ones that do well do feel original. 

David: It could be just a really craftily told story, which is something you don't know how to do unless you really have worked at it. Like with Rob Reiner, what came out after his death about the complexion of his work. There was this interview with Leslie Stahl from 60 Minutes where he talked about being seventeen, on the set of a play as part of the construction crew. What he saw in that play was both humor and the human experience. Stephen King wrote about Reiner's treatment of his short story that turned into Stand by Me—the tension between funny and suspense.

When we're approaching our book writing, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, do we have some kind of idea about that? What is the experience of the writing? Because a book isn't just like a list of things. A book is a story, even if it's a nonfiction book that's about nonfiction things.

For example, there's a book on my daughter's Christmas list—it's about how to take care of her car. My wife found a used book from 2014, and when I was browsing it, what struck me was just how fun the book was. It had these cool lists, graphics, it was well designed. It started off with myths about cars. It was just fun the way it was structured. And it wasn't about teaching my daughter like all the how to change the oil... It was more how to care and what are the different components of a car and how to care for them.

Mick: It's like bringing the human element to car care. 

David: I thought that was way more crafty than probably most expert car mechanics could ever write a book. There's even a book that came out—or is coming out—an Idiot's Guide to Faith Deconstruction. You might get really crass about that, or you might say maybe it really is a movement and maybe this book is presenting it in a way that's just a lot more fun and interesting to understand than having some super expert talk about it.

I think it's also about cultivating a writer's life. There's too many books coming out by people who don't practice writing as a regular discipline. I want to say, maybe you should just be out speaking and not put it in a book. Do you really want to write a book?

Mick: I'm having that conversation with a lot of people. People with means—pastors, businessmen, doctors, lawyers, psychologists. Could they hire somebody? Because that's probably better. It's gonna be a better book.

David: Maybe we're bouncing around, and the listener can judge. But I've been reading about mourning and loss, about how Americans struggle with loss of common culture, everyone having immigrated from somewhere else. There's this book I've been trying to get my hands on—The Inability to Mourn by Alexander and Margaret Mitscherlich, two German authors from the early seventies. It helps contextualize why a nation like the Germans could become susceptible to an authoritarian dictator. It's super relevant for the time that we live in right now.

The writing is splendid. The translation is amazing. And here's the thing—I'm working on trying to get the rights to republish it. I contacted the original publisher in Germany. They gave me the name and address of the heir who lives in Switzerland. I'm trying to track them down, trying to find the person who wrote the translation. I want to make it available for twenty bucks and see if I can get it to sell. People need to know about it.

I found this copy at the Grand Rapids Public Library, from their back room. Finished all 320 pages. It meandered here and there, but it's excellent.

Mick: We need some excerpts.

David: Who knows if this is a good idea. I've got a lot of things I should be doing.

Mick: It's something you'd do anyway, right? It's something you're interested in, it's following your bliss.

David: There are all these books that missed the digital revolution. A lot of publishers went back to their backlists when ebooks kicked in around 2009, and converted their best books. But even fewer were converted to print-on-demand. So there's a lot of really good books published up through that time that have just gotten lost to history.

I think republishing things like this is disruptive behavior. I think this is getting on the ground with things. And I want to start a conversation about these things. It feels good to do it, and I know no one even cares. 

Mick: But probably some people don't know that they care yet.

My favorite book I've been listening to on my runs is Slaughterhouse Five. I'd never actually read it. James Franco does the read, and the voice is great, so dispassionate and war-weary. It's about Billy Pilgrim's break with reality, his post-trauma from the war, making up this alien race. Or maybe he doesn't make it up—maybe he does actually get taken into space. You're led to believe it's trauma-induced psychosis that leads him to come up with the Tralfamadorians.

It's got all this kind of reality of war, PTSD before it was even called PTSD. And Billy Pilgrim is just such a wonderful character because you love him. He's not cynical. He still believes in the goodness of humanity.

Mick: You don't hear that about Slaughterhouse-Five. At least I didn't. I had all of these wrong notions about that book, and when I actually read it myself, I'm like, oh my gosh, this book has been done such a disservice.

So there you go. A novel and a nonfiction. Season one's over. We'll start season two next year.

Happy holidays, everybody.