#20 SHELF CONTROL

Alex Karp has a new book out as of yesterday, and over the weekend he did the usual favor of generous "profile access" in a pristine location to fluff a Journal reporter.

It's a good profile if you have time. 

But I’ll admit the book itself is a bit further down on my reading list. Not because I don’t appreciate Karp's thinking (I do), but because I know it’s going to be so esoteric-per-sentence I’ll need time to read it properly.  

That means the physical book, in an uncomfortable chair, with a pencil in my hand. My normal "hoover method" (Audible) doesn't work on dense prose, and Karp has earned a bit more than the Publera Speed Read (paperback, between meetings). 

One line in his interview made me laugh out loud. 

After WSJ notes that some content choices for the book might not have been the most marketable, Karp says, 

“The book I should write to sell would be, ‘AI Karp Karp AI Karp AI AI Karp.’”

Chef’s kiss. 

On the one hand, it's great to see a new era of books by C-Somethings filling the WSJ reviews. 

On the other, Karp's joke points to a serious problem that's bummed me out for more than a decade. 

Simply put: publishers don't like to print books that don't look and sound like books they already printed.

Which, by the way, is really only a problem when your idea is original.

I've seen intense fights on this, and some serious losses. Indra Nooyi, for instance, (whose book we were not involved with) might be one of the most remarkable and undersung C-Somethings in our generation. 

Her grit, intelligence, and leadership (as well as the substantial growth she implemented at PepsiCo’s helm) should inspire us all.  

How many people did Indra’s book inspire?  Exactly one: some decider at Penguin with paper dollars for pants.

It's a sad story. Check the imprint: Penguin Portfolio is a business book imprint, yet here's a memoir in the mix. Someone at Penguin clearly knew how to land the book (business), while someone else at Penguin clearly had different perf goals: memoir sells better.

Aaahhh the bubbly fizz of corporate politics resulting in frankensteined products. (Jesse turns on Microsoft Zune, continues drafting newsletter with Bic For Her pen)

Meanwhile, Nooyi clearly had an idea and an original, if simple, proposal: giving executives and directors leeway to support their parents can retain some of the most valuable senior talent in a large company.  E.g., young managers have kids to take care of (which we already understand), while much-higher-value executives have parents to take care of.  It's a fair question to consider that investment for some businesses.

This is a book that had the potential to do for C-somethings what Lean In did for women navigating and accelerating their careers. But someone, or some team, at Penguin decided to Crystal-Pepsi Nooya's idea into a memoir. 

The result we got is Homer Simpson's favorite snack.

(Btw, speaking of snacks, a small bag of Lay's potato chips contains less salt than a single slice of white bread. While she was busy buying Tropicana and Quaker Oats, Nooyi also engineered an entirely new crystal structure for SALT, **the oldest commercial mineral on earth** so we need less of it to enjoy the same Fritos.)

In any case, this happens a lot. Beware.

Editors of large publishing houses tend to exercise much more control over celebrity and C-something books than they do no-name or pop authors.  I see two reasons for it.

1. C-Somethings have built-in audiences but publish fewer books. Publishers need to make as much $ as they can on your first one. 

2. A lot of “book people” actually don't really respect C-Somethings. Executives may just be too "other" to be taken seriously. 

That second point is something that's annoyed me from my earliest days in poetry school. 

Yes, you read that right: my formal education is in poetry. Starting with my first workshops and classrooms, it's always surprised me how many writers seem to view capitalists or the economically ambitious as intellectually (if not also morally) inferior.  I’ve even helped a couple of writers become millionaires who still think this way.

For this reason, I was the first among my poetic colleagues to “sell out”. And wow is compounding a haiku. (So allow me to say just because it's seventh grade math does not make it intellectually inferior.)

From early reviews on Karp’s book, it appears he may have stood his intellectual ground against anyone who tried to disabuse him of it. This is usually hard to do. 

(He’s lucky he had good academic cred before becoming a billionaire made him dumb and controversial.)

In all seriousness, please do not let this happen to your book, or the idea it's about. 

An easy way to think about it is publishers are just small-cap PE firms. Or, they're like residential housing developers: books that look the same as every other book in the neighborhood are safer bets. 

The market has comps, the realtors know how to sell them, the financing is commoditized—and the business model of everyone involved requires a higher ratio of successful attempts. 

So is your book idea better for PE, or seed-stage VC?

E.g., Do you have a 5-street-windows, vinyl-sided, 2-car-garage book to write?  Or did you have something architecturally unique in mind? 

Either is fine. But my unpopular advice to both Nooyi and Karp would have been the same: self publish. 

If you have an audience (most C-Somethings inherently do), and you have means for a non-profitable venture, and you truly have something UNIQUE to say–then I say you should say it on your own terms. 

The reason all this matters is most people I meet who have questions about writing a book are asking because they feel like they have something new to share. (One reason you want to write it is you’ve never read it.)

There's some process complexity here we could talk about in a future issue, but it all begs a bigger question: 

Is the idea even worth a book?

Conventional wisdom says "a book is just a very expensive yet very effective business card."  

That's true! Revenue-wise, a book is typically 1-5% of a content funnel for 60-80% of the cost.

Books rarely make money through sales, and instead through opportunities.  Whether it is a promotion, new career, more consulting clients, credibility selling a product, etc etc. These are all obvious.

But most of the C-Something books we've written have a very different purpose, and there are a few:

First, careers are long and memories are short. Do you remember the chip wars when AMD was aggressively communicating its chips were better than Intel's because they allowed employees to work with TWO monitors instead of one? I do.

Björk was popular and iPhones weren't invented. I was super young and writing for AMD then, and their CEO had been working on semiconductors for 35 YEARS. 

Imagine the shit he saw and forgot, if we can't even remember liking Björk.

In fact, when Hector Ruiz finally published his book about it in 2013, public company CEO Zuck Dawg had already fixed his failure to predict the entire world would switch to mobile from laptops–a memory so absurd it’s hard to recall even by some of us in attendance.  

Your career is precisely the same. So many battles aggressively fought, and yet almost as many are forgotten even before your next perf cycle.

So what's Ruiz writing about AMD vs Intel in 2013 for? Retired, 68 years old at the time, his battle having been won, and his legacy (like all C-Somethings with enough tenure) cemented?

Some reasons are valid: 

A) For people like you to find it. History repeats itself, yeah, but people who make history benefit disproportionately from reading it. 

B) For the grandkids to see something cool on the shelf.  

That might sound silly, but if you think it's hard to explain your job to your mom, you're still just warming up. Think about explaining your accomplishments to your grandkids. (Our 22yo nanny hardly understands what it means that "Facebook was a startup.")

Second, if we're being honest (we are), I suspect there's also an important combination of A+B: sometimes you need to explain a long career to YOURSELF. 

Was all that work worth it if no one remembers your battles, hardly even you?  

I think it was. Purpose is a beautiful and powerful force to feel; we should all have it or be busy finding it.  

But it can leave you wondering sometimes after you've fulfilled it, or found a new one. So I say make sense of it. Write a book about what you did when you had that particular purpose. Put it on the record. Not all heroes have world wars. 

Third, a book can be a platform. It's a jumping-off point and a meeting place for your idea.

Lean In, whether you like the book or not, is a great example of this. Because it's actually a non-profit foundation, a movement, and a rallying cry. It's an IDEA, MANIFESTED. 

Right now more than 100,000 Lean-In Circles (small groups of 8-12 people), meet regularly in more than 180 countries. I challenge any of you to do that with your idea. About a million people still meeting up and pulling an idea forward, from a pile of paper that was printed out 12 years ago.  There’s whole churches jealous of those numbers.

So let’s take stock. You've either got a business card, history, legacy, or platform. The final question is whether you or your idea merits any of those at all. 

One of the best lines that ever got stolen from me is (ironically), "If you're going to be a thought leader, you need to have thoughts."

In my work, I've noticed two poles of the same spectrum: 

1. Client has too many thoughts, and we struggle to channel, crystallize, and communicate them as a powerful whole. 

2. Client has only a few big thoughts, and we struggle to expand, apply, and make detailed meaning from them. 

Interesting quirk: It's very hard for most C-somethings to identify which group they're in. Your ideas may be unique, but to you they usually just make sense.

Which means, to me, it doesn't really matter. It's just the two different kinds of work for a communicator.  The takeaway for you: know what you’re trying to achieve before you start your book, and it’ll be easier to work from whichever end you’re on.

I mention all this somewhat nostalgically, because over the last 2 years, I’ve made the strategic decision to take Publera out of the book-writing business. We are finishing our final one ever as of last month. 

There are several reasons, but the simplest way to summarize it is to say books just aren’t the best use of my time anymore. (And it required disproportionately MY time).

Books bring me joy, but I’ve always enjoyed what they accomplish—what and who they MOVE—much more than the act of reading and writing them well. Form plus function, they say: I enjoy building Emily a beautiful table with the intensity of sculpture, but mainly because she needs a table.

Books are one tool in a full toolbox, or one element of a larger strategy, (which is how I ever got into them in the first place.)  

And my purpose, which I've hopefully described above, remains helping people and ideas win.

Or, as it would be described in my favorite haiku:

There's no more room in 
my heart for you because my 
heart is full of blood.

Bleeding for you, and dying to read your book,
Jesse

PS: Last week I tried a 1-question poll, and it didn't get much response compared to the usual poll of whether this email was even useful. Results anyway: everyone is pretty much mixed 1/1/1 on whether to allow, prohibit, or encourage AI in job applications. A wash, and newsletter experiment concluded.

I will say I was forced to encounter this issue early, back when Chat GPT was still a wee little idiot. I received an interview test clearly completed with AI.

I debated whether to ignore the candidate or proceed to interview. Epilogue: a long time later it's been a great hire (shoutout 😉) as we now try to move at the speed of AI’s changes to use it in our workflows, experiment in our play and learning time, and evaluate BS to communicate not-BS.  Lean in to AI.

But my core promise to you is I won't ask any more 1-question polls in the PS.

PSS: Links.

• Here's the link to the WSJ Karp profile.  

• And Karp's new book.

• Nooyi's book is still worth a read, despite my gripes above. You’ll see she is a C-Something who’s proficient very far in both directions from the decimal point.

• Hector Ruiz's book I haven't read, but I bet we would all learn something useful today if we did. Might add to my list after all this snark.

• And finally, a link to Sheryl's book in case you're the same age as our nanny and don't remember a world with more Björk than iPhones.   

• And you know what? Eff it—here's Björk's most popular song ever. Listen to that just one time and you'll read books with music off the rest of your whole life.

• Also to make up for that awful Björk link, here's Non-Traditional C-Something Emeritus, Dolly Parton doing her first reggae collab at age 76.

PSSSSSSSSS: Share block! Send this one to your friend who's thinking about writing a book.