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010: Guy Kawasaki | The Artisanal Publishing Movement + Book Giveaway
Hi everybody and welcome to this smart business revolution podcast episode number 10. This is John Corcoran and in this episode I talk with Guy Kawasaki who is a best selling author, a speaker, venture capitalist. He's the former chief evangelist at Apple and in this interview we talk about the revolution that's happening right now in the self publishing industry. Guy refers to it as artisanal publishing and we also talk about how entrepreneurs can use artisanal publishing to get their ideas across and help fuel their business and we're going to give away a few copies of Guy's new book, If You Act Quickly, so I'll tell you exactly how you can win a copy of his new book after this. Welcome to the small business revolution revolution revolution. Revolution. Do you want a revolution? Say you want a revolution. The revolution. It's going on right now. Welcome to the revolution, the smart business revolution podcast, your source for how to grow your small business without working 24/7. Now now your host for the revolution, John Corcoran. Hey everybody, this is John Corcoran and thank you for joining us for another episode of the smart business revolution podcast. Now listen to a few of these statistics about Guy Kawasaki. He has 1.3 million followers on Twitter, 3.9 million followers on Google plus, 286,000 likes on Facebook. And I just checked a few minutes ago and Guy has over 350 reviews on Amazon with an average review of five stars for his latest book, which is Ape, author, publisher, entrepreneur, how to publish a book. It's an average of five out of five with 350 reviews. Now I'm no statistician, but that's almost impossible. I mean, I have no idea how you can even get an average of five out of five stars, or at least it would break my calculator. I couldn't figure it out. But what does this say about Guy? Let me tell you about my experience with him. I saw him speak at the new media expo and I wanted to meet him, but it was kind of a zoo and he's a bit of a celebrity, so I didn't get a chance to meet him face to face. But afterwards, I sent him an email saying I'd enjoy what he had to say and that I would love to interview him on my podcast. Now he doesn't know me from Adam, but he said sure and we set up the interview pretty quickly after that. Now Guy worked directly with Steve Jobs. He's published over a dozen books. He's been interviewed everywhere and he was still willing to come on this little podcast. Now I think that's why he has so many followers. Guy realizes that social media, it's just a tool. It's just a tool to make a personal connection with people. If you're going to be a jerk behind all those followers, then you're not going to have that many followers in the first place and you're not going to get very far. But he realizes that business is really about having a personal connection with your customers, with your clients, and social media is just a tool to get to that point. Now Guy was also generous enough to donate a couple of copies of his new book, a couple of Kindle copies that we're going to give away to a few lucky podcast listeners. So if you'd like to win a copy and you're listening to this shortly after the podcast episode is released, then here's what you have to do. Go to the blog post for this episode and if you're at the gym or driving or something like that, when you get back to your computer, you can go to smartbusinessrevolution.com/episode 10. That's the numbers, episode 10. And then all you have to do is leave a comment saying that you'd like to win a copy. That's it. And I will be announcing the winners about a week after this episode goes live. So one final thought, I just love listening. I love hearing from listeners. So feel free to email me or hit me up on Twitter. My Twitter handle is @JohnKorkren or send me a message through the blogs, my business revolution. And finally, if you liked this episode, I encourage you to go into iTunes and subscribe. So that way you'll receive future episodes of the podcast directly sent to you. And I also hope you'll sign up for me, my list is smartbusinessrevolution.com. Okay. So that's about it. And now let's hear from Guy. Oh, and one final note, we had a couple of interruptions during the interview. And so it might sound a little bit broken up. There are two points we had to break the interview, but hopefully you piece it together, okay. And I hope you enjoy it. All right. Welcome, everyone. This is John Korkren. And I'm very pleased to welcome to the line best-selling author, Guy Callisocki. Welcome, Guy. Good morning. Good morning. I left out a couple of descriptions there. You're also entrepreneur, venture capitalist, speaker, am I forgetting anything? If I could only do one thing well, Jack of all trades. That's right. So I wanted to start off, you know, it's kind of cliche to say that the internet has changed everything and that there's been a sea change in many different industries as a result of the tech world exploding. But really traditional publishing is really changing before our eyes. And you argue in your new book, Ape, that traditional publishing isn't dying, but that self-publishing has really come of age. Why do you say that? Why at this time? It's this time because the traditional publishing constraints of limited shelf space and limited readership and the necessity to transport books physically printed, the reliance on a publisher's imprint as a proxy for quality, none of those are true anymore. So Amazon has unlimited shelf space, there's many more readers. You don't have to transport physical books anymore. And what really matters is the number of stars or the most recent reviews of your book at Amazon or at some of these reading communities. So all of that has changed and traditional publishing has not changed with it. You know, that leads to a great question I'm going to ask a little bit later, but in terms of quality of books that are coming out now, you know, it used to be people relied on reviews or book clubs primarily. And now we've got a more social world where you can read other reviews and stars. Is that enough in terms of the self-publishing world? Or do you think that there's going to be some other organization or an icon or a badge or something like that? I've seen some out there that indicates a kind of an indicator of quality for this self-published book, whereas before you could say it's a Simon Schuster book, we've got a good review in the New York Times. You know, I suppose that independent organizations could try to do all this, but you know, the number of stars on your Amazon page is just so efficient. I just, you know, I mean, it's hard to imagine that something's going to replace that. I mean, think of all the traffic and all the searching and all the reading that goes on Amazon and, you know, two guys in a garage with a million dollars is going to start a new badge. I mean, it's hard to imagine. Right. I want to ask you about some of the successful published authors because there are a few published authors, well-known names who have been critical of the growth in self-publishing. Would you prefer the term artisanal publishing as I do want to ask about it a little bit? I love that term. Okay. I want to quote for you, Sue Grafton who said recently, "Self-publishing is a short cut and I don't believe in shortcuts when it comes to the arts. I compare self-publishing to a student managing to conquer five E.C. pieces on the piano and then wondering if he or she is ready to be booked in the Carnegie Hall." What is your response to her? Well, first of all, she later retracted that quote. Yeah, I saw it. It was in a Kentuckian or something like that. In fact, I quoted in eight, you know, I guess even if she retracted, even if she didn't mean it, even if whatever, I still understand the sentiment. And the sentiment I think is typical of any industry where old people are criticizing new people. And so, you know, you would probably in the computer business, if you took a Pascal programmer or a Pascal programmer would say, "Yeah, you know, when we were programmers doing Pascal, you know, that was real programming. We didn't have all this stuff and we had to really write tight code for small amounts of RAM and we had to compile it and all that. But now today, you know, these guys are really sloppy. They have PHP, they have Python and all this object-oriented stuff. That's not real programming like we did. And then, you know, 20 years from now, somebody is going to say, "Yeah, PHP and Python, that was real programming, not the stuff today." And so, I just think it's a generational thing that, you know, everybody says that what they did was really great and secure in the good old days and what these young people do today, that's lazy and not as good. It's just human nature. Yeah, it's funny. It's like the publishing version of, when I was a kid, I had to walk the school uphill both ways in the snow. Yeah. And read my candlelight. Right, exactly. And now, these people, all they do is turn on their computers, right? I was calculating the number of books you've written. So since 1987, you've written about 12 books in over 25 years, that's about one book every two years. Yeah, of course, the first 10 of them were all published by traditional publishers and they've made you quite famous, given you big speaking engagements like the New Media Expo where I saw you speak a couple of weeks ago. Do you feel at all like what you're saying is heresy a little bit or you're biting the hand that fed you? Well, let's just say that both I and these entities did well by each other. So if it were heresy and ungratefulness, it would presume that I did well by them, but they didn't do well by me. We both did well. And I will tell you, if it came down to people, I would love to work with the people at my traditional publisher. I just cannot work with the constraints that they are held to. If they were all freelancers, I'd work with every one of them. Well, it seems like that might come to fruition at something. It might indeed. Yes. Yeah. I want to ask. So you were one of the first employees at Apple whose job it was to evangelize the Macintosh. And I see similarities here between APE. With APE, it feels like you're evangelizing an entire industry, the artisanal publishing industry. Are there... Do you see similarities between what you're doing now in terms of talking about artisanal publishing and where you were back then? Well, I think a closer paradigm would be not necessarily myself, but there are other people at Apple who did it. They were evangelists for a concept called desktop publishing. So rather than offset printing and big runs and yet they're professional type city equipment, everybody with a Macintosh and a laser writer could be a desktop publisher. And I think that is a more apt metaphor that now someone, you don't even need a laser writer, you don't need a printer, all you need is a computer and internet access. And two days later, Amazon could be selling your book. So in that sense, yes, I think I'm an evangelist for the next data point on the curve of the democratization of publishing. What inspired you to spend as much effort? And I have to say that the book is unbelievably comprehensive. It really takes you from soup to nuts how to put together your own book and get it on Amazon and other platforms. What made you feel that you needed to spend your time putting together this type of comprehensive how-to guide? Well, I self-published my previous book called What the Plus and I Learned How Painful It Was, and so I just decided that there had to be a better way and I would write a book to explain how to do it. And there's a little bit of OCD in me and so I just decided if you're going to do it, you shouldn't just do the publishing part of it because really there's also the writing part of it. Even if you wrote and published a book, that doesn't mean it's going to sell, so you need to do the selling part of it. And so there are books that do authoring, there are books that do publishing and there are books that do marketing, but there's no book that takes you author, publisher, entrepreneur. Right. So there are a couple of different ways of looking at the growth in, well, first of all, let me ask you about the term Artisanal Publishing, which I mentioned a couple of times, I really like that term. Why did you use that term? I use term Artisanal Publishing because there's a stigma attached to self-publishing and even more so to vanity publishing. The thought being that you couldn't get a real publisher to publish your book, so you had to do it by yourself. And I think that is unfair and inaccurate. In the same sense, there are artisanal bakers, artisanal winemakers, artisanal brewers, artisanal filmmakers and artisanal musicians. You would not go to any of these people and say, "Well, so you couldn't get a job, Isaac Bush, you couldn't get a job, Aloe, or you couldn't get a job making Twinkies, or you couldn't get a job at Sony Pictures." So since you're a loser, you decided to do it by yourself, right? And that's just not fair. You would never say that to any of those artisanal careers, so why would you say it to an author? Right. Now, there are a couple of ways of looking at analyzing the growth in Artisanal Publishing. I think from the author's perspective, from the reader's perspective, so let's tackle it from the author's perspective. Tell me about what the advantages are for authors to publishing on their own. So the advantages to an artisanal published author is, first of all, you make more per book, you have greater control over the book, cover design, content, et cetera. You get to market faster and you get to continue to market your book until you want to give up as opposed to until your publisher wants to give up. So those are tremendous advantages for artisanal publishing. With those advantages come more responsibility. So before you used to hand off a manuscript and magically, six to nine months later, you'd have a finished book. Well, not anymore. Now, you don't hand off the manuscript to anybody. You continue to, you have to find your freelance editor, freelance cover designer. You have to produce the book. I mean, so it's not just advantages. There are also greater responsibilities and expenses as well, right? Yes, because you're hiring the freelancers. Yes. Yeah. Let's talk about that a little bit because you've said that it's better for an author to have too little money than too much money when they're publishing their own book. Why did you say that? Because I think when you have too much money, you start thinking in sloppy ways that, you know, add an extreme, you're going to run an ad on the Super Bowl for your book, you know, and you're just going to do, you're going to go on a 10-6 tour and you're going to do all these things where I'm not saying that you should spend no money. I think that to finish your book, you should probably spend $4,000 or $5,000 if you wanted to do really complete marketing, you'd spend another $20,000 total, so $25,000 total. But if you had, you know, that's about, I probably spent a little more than that. But, you know, if I allocated $100,000 to this process, I don't know what I would do with the next $60,000 or, you know, $70,000. Get a bunch of those ads, probably, TV ads. I don't know where, yeah, where I run it on cable TV at 3 a.m., I don't know what I would do. Well, I guess, as I say, necessity is the mother of invention. It certainly is, yes. And now you're a big fan of editors and you really praise how valuable editors are so much so that you actually released your book out to hundreds of your followers. And they came back with some great edits. Can you tell me about what that process was like? Yeah. So I really believe in tapping the crowd. I probably tapped the crowd more than any other author in the history of man. When I am happy with my outline, I ask 5 million people to tell me what they think of the outline. When I am happy with the manuscript, I ask the same 5 million people if they'd like to read the manuscript and then I have to fill out some information and I send it to almost everybody who says they want it. And then when the book is quote unquote done and it's in sort of final PDF format, I ask 5 million people if they want to review it, if anybody says yes, I send it to them. So prior to Amazon flipping the switch and making it available for sale, probably 1500 people had read the book. Wow. That's significant. As more than some books ever get read. Yeah, that's true. But the advantage of this is if you look today, I have about 260 reviews of eight, 50 days after publication. And you know, I have a book called The Art of the Start and The Art of the Start, which is about nine years old, has 262 reviews. So nine months versus 50 days, there's a reason for that, actually there are many reasons for that. But one of them is that I do this. All right. Let's talk about this from the readers perspective as well because I read a quote recently from Brad Thor. Hopefully he didn't retract this one as well. But he said, "If you're a good writer and have a great book, you should be able to get a publishing contract." So from a readers perspective, what advantages are there to the growth and self publishing? You know, if you take into account a perspective like Brad's, again, you know, it's easy for Brad Thor to say this. And actually it would be easy for Guy Kawasaki to say this. I just happen not to believe it. You know, I just, if you look at some books that have been rejected 29 times and then the 30th time it got accepted or the person self published it and made it successful, I guess you could say, yeah, it was survival of the fittest and you know, books have their own destiny and all that. But I don't know how you can make the argument that, you know, we should make this the most autocrat, difficult, challenging, idiosyncratic process possible so that only people who truly, truly, truly refuse to give up are successful. I just can't get my mind around that. You know, that's like saying, well, let's not have a public school system. Let's not encourage people to educate their kids. Let's not create laws that, you know, guarantee education because if somebody really wanted an education, they would find a way. You know, there's just something wrong about that kind of attitude, right? So you worked directly for Steve Jobs a number of years ago and I know that you've said that he's been a big inspiration for you. How did Jobs influence the writing of this book? Well, he certainly influenced it in the sense that he taught me about, you know, creating great product and how great product is the key, a certain design aesthetic of the book. He taught me that you need to write the book, not necessarily that people are saying they need, but the people really don't know they need, but they need. So sometimes it's just anticipating the market. Steve Jobs was a tremendous influence upon me. So I hope I do him justice with all my efforts. You know, I know there are a few companies who have been jumping into helping authors to get published on platforms like Amazon in terms of formatting the different types of files that you have to create. Do you think that there are more opportunities for companies to do that? Yes and no, you know, on one hand, I believe that there are authors who really need this help. And yet I've sort of written book the book AIP so that they need that kind of help as little as possible. What I'm afraid of is that companies are going to take advantage of people's desires to get published and maybe not rip them off, but charge them for things and charge them in prices that, shall I say, are inappropriate. And so my goal is to make it so that anybody can publish. Not anybody can pay somebody else to help them get published. Yeah. Well, whenever there's a demand, there are market opportunities, I guess. Yes. So I want to ask you another question, which isn't necessarily related to your book, but this is really more about opportunities that you see in the marketplace today. So you've found it or advised a number of tech companies, including your current all-top and you've advised Evernote and Buffer and StumbleUpon. So aside from artisanal publishing, what opportunities do you see for companies and entrepreneurs in the marketplace today? In publishing? In publishing, but also in the tech world, just in terms of the entire landscape. I know you're a big fan of Google+, and you praised Buffer at your speech a couple of months ago with me. Well, it's a broad question, maybe too broad. Yeah. The things I love, Google+, I love Evernote, I'm an advisor to Evernote, I found Evernote extremely useful for writing a book. I love Dropbox, I love You Send It, I could just go on the list. I love Chrome, I love Android, there's a lot to love these days. I'm a big fan of Android as well, and sometimes I'm a little embarrassed. Why? Well, you know, there's still that iPhone charisma, you know? Yeah, but real men use Android. I'm going to use that. Okay. Okay, final question, and then I'll let you go. So you wrote this book partially at least in a dorm at UC Santa Barbara. Yes. And I went to UCSB and I lived in the dorm for my freshman year. So my question is, did you write the book, a mild dorm room? I wrote much of the book in the clusters. That's how we call them, the clusters. I don't know. The clusters are next to like a, I think it's the tallest dorm at UCSB, you know, right on the other side of Aylavista, there's a dorm that's about nine stories high. And next to that is the clusters, which is like three stories high. So it was in the clusters. Okay. So that's good enough. I'm going to tell people you wrote it in my old dorm room. Close enough. Okay. Close enough. Well, thank you guys. I really appreciate you taking the time and best of luck to you. Thank you. Thank you for interviewing me. Thank you for listening to the Smart Business Revolution podcast with John Corcoran. Find out more at smartbusinessrevolution.com. And while you're there, sign up for our email list and join the revolution. Revolution. Revolution. Revolution. And for the next episode of the Smart Business Revolution podcast. [MUSIC PLAYING]