Don't Believe Everything You Think
Plus: dispatches from our first fall
Hi all.
Today's another New Release Tuesday, which this week means the launch of our expanded and repackaged edition of Joseph Nguyen's wildly successful Don't Believe Everything You Think, now available in bookstores from coast to coast (to coast: we've launched it in Australia, too!).
We sweated the details of getting this clothbound hardcover just right, and Joseph's face when he first held the finished book says it all. Many thanks not only to the design and production teams at Authors Equity, Simon & Schuster, and Lakeside for getting this in on time and looking great, but also to Nicole LePera, Simon Sinek, Lori Gottlieb, Deepak Chopra, and Francesc Miralles for helping give it a boost with readers.
Fall is stressy season in publishing, with thousands of new books coming to market between Labor Day and Christmas. Even with half the business being digital, orchestrating the physical side—from paper supply to printer capacity to precise store delivery—requires careful coordination of many moving parts, all under the very real constraints of the clock and calendar.
Thanks to the strong partnerships with S&S and Lakeside, and to some creative problem-solving from the AE team, we're navigating the season with relative ease. Still, anyone who's been in publishing knows that occasional bumps are part of the journey—what matters is how you handle them.
It's when those inevitable challenges arise that human relationships become so critically important - not just among our AE colleagues but also with our other colleagues, the authors.
A few weeks ago at the Frankfurt Book Fair, (where, no, we did not run into Bob Dylan, much to my deep regret), I found myself addressing a question many non-Americans were too polite to ask directly: since we don't offer authors financial guarantees, why would someone with options opt for us? It's a great question because it gets at the heart of why we exist. The authors we work with have other ways they could go—in many cases they've been very successful with the traditional approach—so why go with Authors Equity?
There's definitely a financial argument for our profit-sharing model (and maybe in a future newsletter I'll make it... or more likely Nina will), but from what I can tell, that hasn't been the deciding factor for any of our authors. Instead, they're opting for an experience that feels different.
This approach means authors who sign up with AE are in deep. Instead of working with a single point of contact as at a larger company, they're in touch with almost all of us at different stages, and sometimes all on the same day. They're part of the "we," as in: how many should we print? Do we want to pay for X or Y? When we're weighing trade-offs—like whether to shift our PR strategy if we’re not gaining traction, or to prioritize one partnership over another—authors help make the call.
The publishing team is clear about our point of view based on expertise and experience, but we're also clear that the author knows their audience better than we do. It's not always comfortable sharing these real-time challenges, but we've found that transparency builds trust, even when (maybe especially when) things get a little clunky.
This level of transparency is rare in publishing, where a surprisingly large number of critically important discussions typically take place without the author in the room. That's one reason for the familiar disconnect: the publisher feels they're doing everything they possibly can while the author feels frustrated that nothing is happening. You're unlikely to value what you can't see.
Selling books is just plain hard. In a world where high-quality, informative, and/or entertaining content is freely available, getting someone to plonk down $15 or $30 or whatever-bucks for a good old-fashioned book is daunting. Even if you’re fully supportive of subscription models that lower the price barrier somewhat, you’re still rolling that boulder uphill: click this, please!
Availability and demand are different challenges to be solved. Publishers (all of us) are really good at solving the former. Part of the AE hope is that in working differently with authors, we'll get better at the latter.
I saw these partnerships in action at a recent dinner with our authors. This was a very disparate group, but as it turns out, experts on politics, nutrition, romance, strategy, habit formation, the sex lives of the rich, the Trump trial, and cannibalism on the high seas had a lot to talk about—with one another and with those members of AE they were meeting in person for the first time.
As one author said afterward: "In all of my time as a published author, I have never felt as part of a team or as warmly embraced." And from another: "I didn't know I could feel this way again. It's been a long time."
While in Frankfurt, I addressed a group of industry peers. My theme was scale: where it's helpful, where it's not. My suggestion was that, regardless of size, changing how we as an industry work with authors is the key to progress we've all been looking for.
And with that, we're thrilled to celebrate Joseph and the expanded edition of Don't Believe Everything You Think today. We'll share more about this book next week, but for now we're simply grateful to see the fruits of our partnership with Joseph find its way into the world.
Happy reading!
- Madeline
I loved reading this and thinking about all of the details that go into getting a book to be that beautiful. It also made me think about my own choices as a person to go smaller. I wanted to get deep into the community I live in and the richness I appreciate about living this life is grand. All of this to say, it is not a stretch for me to see why authors might want to go deep into the process. Risky? Yes. But also rich in experience.
I think your business ethos is inspiring and hopefully a new way forward in the industry.