1. Illumination A Trend
2. Dispel A Myth
3. Solve A Problem

I would make the argument that if your book doesn’t do one or more of those things, you probably shouldn’t write it either.

The payment was for a book that is not done yet, and the money was not an advance against my royalties. It was for copies that we have already sold.

Because we starting selling Every Book Is a Startup as soon as I had the first chapters complete, O’Reilly and I started to earn revenue immediately.

Minimum viable publishing turns a bunch of traditional ideas on their head, one being cash flow for the publisher and the author.

I have done a lot of teaching over the last fifteen years ranging from two hours to two days, but this will be the first time that I have to put together 20 sessions of instruction. Luckily, the course topic is the business of publishing, a subject I find endless fascinating. The students in the program have been exposed to the process steps of book publishing and, in a variety of courses, the commercial aspects of the business. The purpose of the class is to pull together those learnings, learning the business “rules” of publishing, and how those rules are changing.

During each week of the course, I am asking the students post links on Google+ that inform the rule-making and rule-breaking going on right now. Students will also be commenting on those links and creating some opportunity for more conversation outside the classroom.

Given what I know of the audience for this blog, many of you might also be interested in those conversations. The class will be using #psupubmgt as a hastag to mark posts, giving anyone on Google+ a way to find them. You can easily a search for the hashtag and save the search (there is a button in the header next to the search term) to go back to. You can also follow me on Google+ and see the posts that I am commenting on.

I hope you will also consider jumping in and adding your thoughts to our Google+ discussions.

“A self-published book is to commercial publishing what karaoke is to a live concert performance. There are some very good karaoke singers, but not many, and they’re not known outside of that bar.”

This quote is from the consultant to consultants Alan Weiss and with an initial look, his statement appears to be a slam against everyone trying to independently publish their work, but if you can get past your emotional response, Wiess’ simile brings out two important points.

First, self-publishing has created a way for all of us to write in public and some of us are just better than others. We need no more proof than watching the opening weeks to the upcoming season of American Idol to see the variability in talent that exists in the world. Worse, too many of us avoid any objective feedback that would show us where we rank against those who get a yellow ticket to Hollywood week.

Second, being big dog at Tuesday karaoke is not the same as playing the show on Friday or building a following that puts you on the road for two weeks playing a different club every night. Labels, studios, and publishing houses can help with making you bigger, but commercial media is about selling to thousands of people. Remember, editors and A&R execs want something that can be sold to more than the people who came to sing-a-long with you at the bar.

Jack and I lengthened several reviews. There are new sidebars about decision-making, visual thinking and the year that changed business book. Most importantly, The 100 Best is cost less than ever to purchase. The new paperback edition is $16 (or less on Amazon). The fully updated ebook edition is $9.99 and available for the Kindle, Nook, iBook, and Kobo.

The biggest question you probably have is if we have changed any of our selections and the answer is no. We still stand by the original 100 books we chose, but it has been five years since we made those selections. Thousands of business books have been published in that time and many are good titles that are worthy of your attention.

To fill the gap since our initial selection, we have a created a new ebook called 5-4-3.

We looked at the last five years, picked four books from each year, and choose three things to tell you about each book. Each book has a short description for those who haven’t bought the book, a suggested starting point if you own the book, and a highlight outside the book for those who are already fans.

5-4-3 is free and available at Scribd.com. We hope you’ll leave a comment there and share the ebook with others who might enjoy it.

P.S. I am also in Day Three of posting The 100 Best in 100 characters on Twitter. Check out my Twitter feed to follow along.

In 1959, a wealthy English industrialist named Henry Kremer established a £350,000 prize for the first person that could develop a human powered airplane that could fly a figure eight course around two markers spaced a half a mile apart. Several attempts had been made in the early part of the century but no one could develop an airplane that could travel any significant distance. Over the eight years, several more groups would make attempts without success.

At this point, the Kremer Prize was only open to the British, but in 1967 Kremer raised the prize to £500,000 and opened the competition to all nationalities. Ten more years passed before someone would pass Kremer’s challenge and complete the course with a plane powered by a human.

You probably know the winner more by his creations than his name. On August 23, 1977, The Gossamer Condor was the first human powered aircraft to complete the course. The larger Gossamer Albatross followed two years later with a successful flight across the English Channel and won a second Kremer Prize. This inventor’s work later shifted to solar powered aircraft with the creation of the Gossamer Penguin, the Solar Challenger, and NASA’s Helios Prototype.

Behind these marvels is a man named Paul MacCready and given it took over twenty years for someone to create the machine to accomplish the Kremer’s original challenge, it would seem proper to ask what was remarkable about MacCready.

First, MacCready was motivated. In this case, he needed the money. He was the guarantor on a loan on a family member’s failed business and was in need of $100,000 to repay the bank, but what was truly unique about MacCready was his approach to the work.

The teams who had attempted to create human powered aircraft all used the same approach. They would plan, conject, and theorize for a year and then build a machine that contained all of their assumptions. During shortly into the first test flight, those assumptions would come crashing down to the ground and the process would repeat.

As Aza Raskin and Alan Kay tell the story, MacCready’s radical approach was to build a prototype that could be quickly modified and rebuilt. His plane could be fixed in hours and the new assumptions could tested again the same day. With this approach, MacCready solved the twenty year old challenge and the age old dilemma of human powered flight in six months.

So, what happens when we can build things that can easily rebuild?

In my essay The Paperless Book, I lament the paradigm that governs our view of the book, the way it paralyzes the ability for the concept of a book to evolve.

Books aren’t built to be rebuilt. Authors labor in their sheds and their untested assumptions cause so many books to come crashing down from the sky. There is a better way.

I just finished a new chapter for Every Book Is a Startup called Minimum Viable Publishing. It will be added to the project in a few weeks and it will be my first attempt to get at the benefits of being able to test your assumptions and rebuild books as you create them.

#1 – My favorite was The Simpsons skewering of YA publishing in the episode The Book Job. The Ocean Eleven motif with Neil Gaiman as crew gopher is brilliant. Homer’s one liners are incredible and Lisa’s struggles writing her book will look painfully familiar to anyone who trying to put words together.

#2 – Lisa Kudrow has a web series called Web Therapy. She stars as a therapist helping people remotely using webcams. At the beginning of Season 4, Kudrow’s character Fiona Wallis is writing a book and she talks interacts with her publisher Maxine DeMaine (played by Rosie O’Donnell). Some of the hidden whys and hows of books comes through nicely in the arc.

Web Therapy Season 4 Episode 1 – Morals to the Max
Web Therapy Season 4 Episode 2 – I Heart New York
Web Therapy Season 4 Episode 3 – Tokens of Affection
Web Therapy Season 4 Episode 4 – Publishers Cleaning House

(Note: the links next to the videos on their site are messed up and take you to the wrong episodes.)

#3 – My final choice comes from xkcd and his strip titled Major In The Universe.

The focus of this interview was to discuss the background of Lean Startup methodology and Eric’s path to write the book. My purpose was to focus on what brought him from the world of technology entrepreneurship to the world of book publishing. His blog Startup Lessons Learned was written anonymously when Eric started but within few months his readers wanted to know who he was. Interest from publishers followed, but Eric says that in Silicon Valley writing books is referred to as “putting the ink on the dead trees.” Putting that stigma aside, he decided that codifying the Lean Startup methodology was important and that a book was the best way to do that.

The Part I of the interview last 28 minutes.

Download Part I of The Interview

“Entrepreneurship is the management discipline that deals with situations of high uncertainty,” says Ries at the start of the interview. In the second part to this interview, we talk about how this is precisely the world that authors occupy as they launch their own books and we talk about a variety of concepts from The Lean Startup methodology apply directly to book publishing. I will be posting the second part in early January.

Every year, I sort back through what was published to highlight the books that changed how I saw the world. That’s the bar. This year I completely changed my view about the purpose of holding a meeting, I realized startups search for business models and I became more aware of the mental traps programmed into my mind. And that is just the start.

Here are 11 books for 2011 that are still worth your time:

1. Steve Jobs by Walter Issacson – This biography shows Jobs and all of the complexity–the tantrums, the showmanship, the extreme diets, his practice of Buddhism. The edges aren’t smoothed. Take the opportunity to read the life story of the man that did more than anyone to shape the way we use computers. (link: My Storify page with reviews and interviews)
2. The Lean Startup by Eric Ries – Ries’ book is beginning of a movement that will change how we practice entrepreneurship. Rather than relying on the notions that luck and determination are the keys to success, the principles behind the lean startup movement based in Toyota Production System, the Agile programming movement, and inquiry using the scientific method. Ries believe entrepreneurship is a professional skill will be taught as completely as management is today and I believe him. (link: Ries’ appearance on The Week In Startups is both informative and entertaining)
3. Reality Is Broken by Jane McConigal – Games will save the world. Their use will make us happier. The results will change our behavior. And the future of gaming is about bringing the real and virtual closer together, not pushing them further apart. Just read the first 50 pages that better describe the research into what makes us happy than anything I have read and see if you don’t keep reading the mind-bending book. (link: McGonigal’s 2010 TED talk)
4. Read This Before You Next Meeting by Al Pittampalli – As the best of what The Domino Project offered, Pittampalli changes the reason to have meetings. He supports brainstorms and working sessions, but rejects any meeting that is informational, social, or whose purpose is to create consensus. “Meet only to support a decision that has already been made.” The book is 66 pages and free for Amazon Prime customers. No excuses not to check it out. (Link: The Seven Tenets of The Modern Meeting Standard)
5. I Moved Your Chesse by Deepak Malhorta – Picking up where the mega-bestseller “Who Moved My Cheese?” left off, the mice of the maze now consider WMMC the gospel but a few renegades question whether the only option is to accept the inevitability of change. The main characters of Max, Big and Zed come to find the maze is the problem and each deal with that realization in their own way. I Moved Your Cheese is not satire or parody, but instead a wonderful counter-argument and extension to the original book.
6. Practically Radical by Bill Taylor- Practically Radical is full of stories about large organizations who are finding ways to reinvent themselves. The book represents a kind of journalism that is rare and sorely needed. Each chapter could have easily served as a cover story in Fast Company, the magazine Taylor co-founded. (Link: My interview with Taylor about the book)
7. The Big Thirst by Charles Fishman – Fishman, a longtime writer for Fast Company Magazine and the author of The Wal-Mart Effect, takes on the conflicted relationship we have with water and how those conflicts, left unresolved, will only lead to bigger problems as the water we need becomes more scarce. From the opulent water fountains on the Las Vegas Strip to water delivery trucks in India, from a wool processing plant in Australia to a IBM microchip production plant in Vermont, Fishman illuminates the unknown ways water gets used while showing how our attitudes about life-giving liquid must change. (Link: My interview with Fishman about the book)
8. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kanheman – This nobel laureate with long time partner, the late Amos Tversky, have fundamentally changed our view of how we make decisions. This book is the first time we have been able to access those theories outside of academic journals and college textbooks. Take the opportunity to learn about Kanheman directly from him. (Link: My Storify Page with reviews and interviews)
9. Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo – The book, published by PublicAffairs, looks at the ever present tension around the methods that should be used to provide food, healthcare, and education for the more than 1 billion people around the world who live on less than one dollar day. On one side, aid organizations and governmental bodies most often advocate giving aid to help elevate these pressing problems. On the other side, a growing number of groups have pushed for market based solutions. Banerjee and Duflo walk a wonderful middle line that dispenses with rhetoric and instead collects data directly from the people affected. For those who question whether Poor Economics is a business book, they merely need to look at the price elasticity of malaria nets, the power of sampling, and the ever difficult challenge of demonstrating value to customers, even when it is a matter of life and death.(Link: My review after Poor Economics won the FT Goldman Sachs Business Book of The Year)
10. Great by Choice by Jim Collins and Morten Hansen – This is a book you need to read to be conference-room-conversation-literate for 2012. 10Xers, 22 miles, and Leading Above the Dead Line are going to become the metaphors your colleagues use to impress. The book is nicely paired with The Lean Startup for entrepreneurs managing high growth companies.
11. Boomerang by Michael Lewis – Many have ranked this book as a year-end favorite in non-fiction and you might be surprise that it barely makes my list. The inclusion of Boomrang was certain, the rank is a matter of taste. I have always been more partial to business books that applied to working in business. Lewis’ narrative is an important follow-up to last year’s The Big Short as he writes about the economic crises outside the U.S., a topic that is timely with the current consternation in the European Union. You won’t be disappointed. (Links: Lewis’ two Vanity Fair features about Iceland and Ireland)

P.S. Also check out my nine essays about the future of publishing I wrote in 2011.

Last week, Baldur Bjarnason at the FutureBook blog shared his impressions of their 2011 conference. He write about the directions that various publishing companies are moving in the market.

The future might look something like this: A product innovation and commercialisation company develops a property into various products. They partner with a infrastructure management company like Ingram to provide the backbone that keeps everything together and moves everything from the right spot to the next right spot. Sometimes they partner with another former publishing company, that now emphasises publishing services instead of products, to fill in the gaps in their own capabilities. And they partner with a customer relationship company like Amazon and Kobo (for ebooks), or Apple and Google (for apps), for the ever so important end point of selling something to a consumer. The issue of one customer relationship company effectively owning all customers in a single sector is mitigated by the fact that the product company isn’t tied to doing a single kind of product.

Bjarnason properly credits John Hagel and John Seely Brown for the strategic construct. The long version can be found in their book The Only Sustainable Advantage. The shorter version can be found in a 1999 HBR article that Hagel wrote with Marc Singer titled Unbundling The Corporation. In the latter source, Hagel and Singer actually lament Amazon’s strategic choice to be both a customer relationship company and an infrastructure company. It would be interesting to hear their rebuttal to Amazon’s recent and growing movement in the third space of product innovation as a book publisher.

The question I have pondered in this three part structure is if product innovation and customer relationship are better paired together. Look at the incredible success of Apple’s move into retail and the role that has played in their growth. The Lean Startup methodology suggests that you can’t make what the customer wants unless you are close to the customer.

Or look at Louis CK’s choice this week to offer a new show directly to his fans for five dollars (and smartly asks during the checkout if you would like subscribe to get email updates). It’s Kevin Kelly’s 1000 True Fans riff is about finding people “who will purchase anything and everything you produce.” In so many cases, you want to create great art and own the customer relationship.

P.S. Chris Dixon wrote last week about how the separation of design and manufacturing creates an environment for “garage ready” startups. So, the separation of innovation and infrastructure makes space for new companies to grow. It also creates the need for someone to build the interface and the tools so these two disciplines can talk to each other.