Dangerous startup ideas infiltrating the book world

What's in a word, or a name? How much power does what we call things have over how we perceive what it is and what we think about doing with it? Read a book on the history of metaphor in language like I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World and you realize there is no end to the depths of influence on how we think about things based on the words we use. (PS: Read that book if you're a language geek like I am.)

And so it is in the publishing revolution. In the last ten years or so, startup culture has exploded from Silicon Valley and other tech hubs across the country into a major economic and social force. While self-publishing is older in the sense that vanity publishers were around well before computers were commonplace, it is the Internet and startup culture that has done much to fuel and give rise to the entrepreneurial, DIY self-publishing author.

What language?

Todd Sattersten, author of Every Book is a Startup, wrote a fantastically insightful and provocative post at O'Reilly earlier this week about the role of startup ideas into the evolving world of publishing. Statterson focused on the value of drafting a book out in the open, of getting reader feedback, and of using that to improve the book. He cited Tom Wolfe and Charles Dickens as examples of writers we all know and admire who have used serialization to do a similar kind of process before the Internet age. It's a good point, and one that I think shows both that every writer has a different process and that the iterative process of creating a startup (or a book) is not as new as we all talk about it as. 

Statterson's post originated as a response to Dustin Kurtz's lamentation of the whole "book as startup" mentality (Kurtz's own post was a response to this New Yorker article from the TOC conference). 

Book as startup

The basic idea of a book as a startup is that anyone can create and publish a book, and that to manage that process and come out with a book that you then market on the other end is very similar to what is going on with startup founders. Editing a book is a lot like iterating on a digital product. Trying to get readers for a book is a lot like trying to get users for a new app. Etc.

Kurtz is not a fan of this way of thinking.

He points out some specific terms that LeanPub founder Peter Armstrong uses in his manifesto about publishing. 1) Risk (As in market risk), 2) Creative (As in starting a starup or writing a book are both creative), 3) Stealth (As in the isolation required to write a book is similar to the "stealth mode" required for developers to make a first version), and 4) Funding (As in both authors and startups are looking for funding).

You can read in depth about Kurtz's responses here. It's a very smart article that picks apart the comparison of being an author to being a startup founder.

But whatever the degree of similarity or lack thereof, the part that interests me the most is the terms. Kurtz ends his article by saying, "Language shapes, language is, thought, and the more comfortable we grow talking about nascent books as “content”, about drafts as “iterations,” the more we trivialize those books that don’t benefit from focus groups. These guys, this language, is hurting literature by changing how we think about books in general."

That's the core issue, I think, and one I wrestle with in my own work with authors, startups and marketing. Some authors do well to approach their book as a piece of "content" that is being created for a specific "audience." That's pretty straightforward "content marketing" that is what makes the Internet go 'round for many companies.

The point

I could easily end this post with the idea that both are "correct," and that some people will treat a book as a startup and others will treat it as a piece of art created from the ether. Most will fall somewhere in the middle. That may be true, but it's not the point here.

The point that each of the articles I referenced bring up is that the language we use to talk about writing books is important. And the fact that we are using business words to talk about writing books is an important thing to consider, and not a shift we should take lightly.

If we use the language of business to discuss an art form, we will end up thinking about it as a business. And the same holds true in the other direction, as when FearLess or someone talks about business in a more creative way.

What do you think? Should we use startup terms to talk about writing a book?

Images courtesy of Lead from The U.S. Army via flickr, Internal from murphyeppon via flickr