Would You Rather Be a Best-Seller or Critically Acclaimed?
My hunch is we'd all say critically acclaimed until we're actually in the situation where we're trying to build a career. Then, it gets tricky. It's a subject close to home, because while my book is selling pretty well, the reviews, letters and feedback are much better. Like any metrics, I tend to get sucked in to looking to them for validation, and have to keep reminding myself why I wrote it: To tell an important story right and inspire and educate would be entrepreneurs. Not the ego of seeing my name on a best-seller list.
There's a legitimate reason to want best-seller instead of critically acclaimed that doesn't have to do with ego or money. Numbers are like votes, so when something is a mass hit, it's an quantitative analysis that you did something good. Reviews, letters, articles -- even effusive ones-- are all qualitative, and somehow hard to trust. Less scientific somehow.
That's thinking many a Web entreprenuer gets sucked into as well: You start it for the love, then the numbers get seductive. It's so easy to think of them as an objective, rational calculation of your worth...until they stagnate or fall.
But the truth is it can't be a rational calculation of worth, if we all know endless examples of indie hits-- be it movies, music, whatever-- that were better than blockbuster hits. I've been having a similar thoughts about this re: this blog. On the days I blog heavily, traffic goes way up. Especially if I weigh in on the Valley obsession of the day. It's seductive to just do that everyday. But is that really adding value and building something different? Maybe not. I recently read something from Michael Arrington addressing how TechCrunch's "community" had changed. (Sorry....can't find the link this second.) He essentially said as an audience grows it inevitably gets diluted and the trolls, spammers etc come in. I really love my blog audience. I get great comments from people I know and don't know. Occasional shocking comment from Fake Steve Jobs aside, my comments tend to be interesting, relevant conversations. I already write for two mass properties in BusinessWeek and TechTicker...suddenly I'm seeing the beauty in staying small. I'm not at a point where I'm trying to monetize this blog, but I wonder if a smaller community ever has an endemic value over sheer size of a mass community? I'm not talking about a niche-- because niches can still be mass when there are more than 1 billion people online.
And in my third random association of the day on this topic, my
husband surprised me with tickets to see Liz Phair last night. She sang
her one truly great album, Exile in Guyville, from start to finish.
This was the absolute
listen-to-after-every-bad-day-at-work-slash-bad-date anthem of my early
20s. Sadly, Ms. Phair never put out another album as good, and in a bid
to become the big commercial hit she never was her last two (Or maybe
one? I stopped paying attention after a while) just veered horribly off
course, IMHO. So maybe she was never as commercially successful as she'd
hoped. But judging by the room of swooning early-to-late women in their
30s who knew every word to Exile, she'd clearly created something
people loved-- and still loved 15 years later.
Of course, that's no excuse for not blogging more, or for blogging lazily. But not having internet access in my new house for much of last week is.
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An unforgettable portrait of the emerging world's entrepreneurial dynamos Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky is the story about that top 1% of people who do more to change their worlds through greed and ambition than politicians, NGOs and nonprofits ever can. This new breed of self-starter is taking local turmoil and turning it into opportunities, making millions, creating thousands of jobs and changing the face of modern entrepreneurship at the same time. To tell this story, Lacy spent forty weeks traveling through Asia, South America and Africa hunting down the most impressive up-and-comers the developed world has never heard of....yet.
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Sarah Lacy is an award-winning reporter who has covered high-growth entrepreneurship for fifteen years. Based in Silicon Valley where she's a senior editor at TechCrunch, Lacy travels the world looking for great entrepreneurs.
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I think most people would take the money in any situation, until they were at a place in their lives where they no longer had to work. Whether it's a web company start-up, a published author, artist, or whatever. I think, once you get that initial big payday, you can then start doing things "for the art" and for the critical acclaim. From the perspective of someone who still must work for money, I'm working hard for some kind of big payday. I look forward to the day, when I can wake up and do absolutely anything I wanted.
Posted by: Michael Tolosa | June 24, 2008 at 05:21 PM
At the end of the day, all you can do is write the book you want to write and hope your peers -- or the peers you desire -- believe you to be worthy of the craft.
The rest -- no matter how much you market and advertise -- is largely out of your hands. And the validation of a big-seller or an uber-clicked story is not real. It goes away like waves in the ocean.
Respect from your peers (e.g. other writers) is much more lasting and real.
(Although it doesn't get you a vacation home.)
Posted by: Brad King | June 24, 2008 at 05:22 PM
Two comments, not entirely related:
1) I'm an entrepreneur and I just finished reading your book. Things at the startup were going well, but I was drained, mentally and physically. But reading your book changed that. I literally felt energized, inspired and ready to attack my work with a passion I hadn't had in a while. All this for twenty bucks. You can't compare the sales figures to the impact you could have on the lives of your readers. That is simply not quantifiable. But talk to them, and you'll see that there are surely more out there like me. So thank you.
2) Y Combinator runs a great news site called Hacker News. The community is very small: made up of entrepeneurs, intelligent investors, hackers, and generally those genuinely interested in startups. The quality of conversation and information on the site is priceless, and is orders of magnitude better than any of its larger peers.
Keep writing and good luck!
Posted by: Shafqat | June 25, 2008 at 12:53 AM
I think a book about tech startups is always going to be a niche product. I'm a startup founder so I bought your book and know who all the people in it are. The only tech founder my non-tech friends have heard of is Bill Gates. I mentioned Steve Jobs in conversation once and was asked 'who's he?' by an iPod owning friend. Bottom line is while a lot of people may use and like facebook they have no interest in Mark Zuckerberg.
Posted by: Robleh | June 25, 2008 at 08:10 AM
great comments and a lot to respond to! first off:
@robleh: I'm going to challenge that *a bit*. i think it's a marketing challenge but a great story is a great story. liars poker continues to be one of the top selling business books and it was published about a very specific time in american finance, which i'd argue is far more esoteric than facebook etc. people still buy it because it's a great read. ditto moneyball- as a hardcore A's fan i can tell you- it's not a sexy team everyone loves.
but, as i said, it is a marketing challenge and mostly it takes time and word of mouth for narrative business books to catch on. people giving a copy of the book to their mom when she asks what web 2.0 is. it showing up in a book club, etc. etc. the biggest audience are the people who don't realize they need to read it. so they're inherently hard to sell to. it's like campaigning. you have to energize your base and then hope they evangelize for you.
to shafqat's point: first off thanks! that's incredibly sweet and i'm so happy it could inspire you. always love reading your comments on the blog! at the end of the day that's so much more important to me than sales. this is a very personal book on a lot of levels. it was for me to write, the people in the book really opened up in ways they haven't before, and all that comes across in the read i think. so people tend to react personally to it. if nothing else, i've forged so many new relationships with readers around the world as a result of the book-- which is a huge reason i'm doing the user generated book tour-- to get out and talk to them!
last: on the subject of money: i think michael is right in the practicality of needing a "big" hit. but as a reporter, i've already had more good fortune than i ever thought i would. i am able to travel, go to dinner with friends, buy a house in san francisco and generally enjoy life with my husband. materially speaking, not sure i need more than that! one advantage in hanging out with millionaires and billionaires all the time is you see the problems money can bring-- and just how beyond a point it doesn't add that much happiness
Posted by: sarah lacy | June 25, 2008 at 08:31 AM
I think to break out as a narrative success you need a real villain or huge failure. The narrative tech books I really liked were High Stakes No Prisoners by Charles Ferguson and Boo Hoo by Ernst Malmsten. Ferguson blasts people left and right which may be unfair but is entertaining while boo.com was such a trainwreck it made for an utterly compelling read.
Posted by: Robleh | June 25, 2008 at 09:44 AM