Mac is the author of Stop With The BS, a collection of 75 funny, real, raw thoughts and occasional rants about starting a career, doing work that matters, and making a difference.

He’s also the Director of Product at Zaarly and the founder of Hello There. Previously, he spearheaded marketing for Seattle-based Gist, which sold to BlackBerry for millions. Mac is also an author, professional musician voted best wedding band in 2009 and has been featured on the NYTimes, Wall Street Journal, CNN and the USA Today.

Matt Gartland: You wrote Stop With The BS to share what you’ve learned about careers and creativity with the pretext that you’re still learning. What have you learned about the writing/publishing process specifically or creativity generally through this experience? And what do you anticipate learning in the coming year?

Shane Mac: You can’t do it alone. There’s so many pieces that go into publishing a book, it’s important to find what you love and you are good at and get others to help with the rest. If you love layout and design, do that. If you’re a writer, find someone else to do the design. Someone to set up the distribution.

MG: You believe in the power of questions; that they “are everything.” What burning questions drive your curiosity in art, both as a musician and writer? For writers specifically, what questions should be asked by all?

SM: Am I doing something that matters? I ask myself this daily.

MG: You write that “boredom kills careers,” not people and companies. How have you combatted this force in your own professional career? And given the instant gratification dynamics of our society, do you sense that boredom is a growing problem?

SM: Most of us need to feel progress, feedback and completion. The simple things matter. People need know where they are going, feel challenged in their work and know how to succeed to the next level. If you don’t have a clear path, people become content and bored. That’s when the work stops.

MG: How do you score yourself against your stated goal of not wanting to write “just another book?” And what should writers of all stripes learn from those scores?

SM: I think this might be one of the biggest learnings from this book. I’ve literally had hundreds of emails and letters about the book and most of them talk about the things that we did different. I truly believe that being creative and coming up with one or two things that everyone will say in common about the book really helps the word of mouth spread. That’s why I have a playlist for the entire book, a photo out the window, my real time thoughts and the concept of the train.

I think some people like the concept more than the content.

MG: What is the best writing advice you’ve ever received or been privy to?

SM: Write drunk, edit sober.

Kaufman specializes in teaching professionals in all industries and disciplines how to master practical business knowledge and skills. His first book, The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business, is an international best-seller.

Learn more about Kaufman at his website, PersonalMBA.com. And be the first to hear about his next book, Eureka Overdrive: The Art and
Science of Rapid Skill Development, by signing up
to his advanced list.

Matt Gartland: Your first book, The Personal MBA, teaches how to master the fundamentals of business without the enormous expenses and time of business school. Such methods, instincts and knowledge are well suited for authors looking to control their own financial destiny. What are the business fundamentals that authors must master, and where should they start?

Josh Kaufman: The best place to start is by learning the fundamentals of business: concepts and relationships that are present in every business, from the smallest garage startup to the largest company in the world. It’s not difficult, and it doesn’t take long.

At the core, every business is simply a collection of five interdependent processes, each of which flows into the next:

1. Value Creation – discovering what people need or want, then creating it.
2. Marketing – attracting attention and building demand for what you’ve created.
3. Sales – turning prospective customers into paying customers.
4. Value Delivery – giving your customers what you’ve promised and ensuring that they’re satisfied.
5. Finance – bringing in enough money to keep going and make your effort worthwhile.

Within each of these five core topics, there are only 20-30 core ideas that carry most of the value. Learn those ideas first, and you’ll find it much easier to build a sustainable business. Learn a few more ideas in human psychology and systems theory, and you’re a force to be reckoned with.

Business is not (and has never been) rocket science — it’s simply a process of identifying a problem and finding a way to solve it that benefits both parties. Anyone who tries to make business matters sound more complicated than this is either trying to impress you or sell you something you don’t need.

For authors, it’s amazing what you can do when you stop thinking like a literary critic and start thinking like an entrepreneur. It’s much better to think of yourself as the CEO of your own publishing company.

Sometimes it makes sense to subcontract your printing and distribution to another company (like a large publisher), and sometimes it makes sense to keep certain projects or capabilities in-house. Regardless, considering all of the available options will help you make better decisions, particularly when those decisions affect your to-do list today and your bank account for decades.

It’s easier to make a very good living as an author or creative person today than at any time in history. All it takes is the willingness to learn a little bit about how businesses actually work, and spending your work time completing high-value activities that build your publishing business over time. You can’t hand over everything but writing to a publisher and expect to do well.

MG: You’ve built a powerful author platform at PersonalMBA.com, complete with over 35,000 active readers via your email newsletter. Where did you invest the most time and energy when initially growing that base? And where are you focusing your efforts these days?

JK: For the first few years of The Personal MBA as a project, I spent the majority of my time creating and refining a list of the best books available for business self-education. (You can find it here: http://personalmba.com/best-business-books/) That single resource is responsible for over 60% of new visitors to PersonalMBA.com, and new websites link to it every day.

I update my reading list annually, which gives people a good reason to opt-in to my email newsletter, which I use to notify my readers when new information is available on PersonalMBA.com. I’ve spent a lot of time making the site easy to use, as well as testing various designs that make it easier for readers to find what they’re looking for.

Once PersonalMBA.com had a stable readership, I began focusing more on creating useful evergreen resources for my readers. My audience keeps growing day after day with little active effort on my part, so I can spend most of my time researching and creating high-value training my readers will find useful, like books, guides, book summaries, courses, etc.

MG: What key lessons about book writing and community building have you learned since your first book that you’re now applying as you develop your second book about rapid skill acquisition?

JK: I seriously underestimated the importance of defining the book’s structure before you spend a lot of time drafting. Writing a book is very different from writing shorter pieces like blog posts. If the book’s overall structure isn’t solid, you confuse your readers very quickly. Once you nail the structure, writing the book is much easier.

I went through nine major iterations of the structure for PERSONAL MBA. Each iteration was painful: the book wasn’t working, and I couldn’t figure out why. Each time I changed the structure, I had to scrap or rewrite a ton of material.

For the second book, I had the structure largely defined before I signed on with Penguin/Portfolio. I’m making minor changes along the way, but the structure is working, and the book is coming together nicely.

In terms of community, I’ve experimented with every type of format: forums, Meetup groups, chats, conference calls, wikis, you name it. In the end, day-to-day moderation and administration becomes a huge low-value time sink. It’s far more effective to focus on creating really cool things for your readers, then making them aware when new resources are available.

An author’s most valuable asset in community building is a simple email list. No one cares about your work as much as you do, but there are tons of people out there who want to know when you post new material or publish a new book. It’s in your interest to make it easy for your readers to stay in touch with you.

Your email list serves dual purposes: it’s your primary method of reaching your readers, but it’s also your clearest signal to a publisher that you have a large enough audience for a commercially successful book. The larger your active readership, the more effectively you’re able to negotiate with a publisher. If you’re not collecting email addresses from your readers and sending them a note at least every month, you’re really missing out.

I’ve learned a lot about website design, resource creation, email lists, and marketing measurement via the process of launching PERSONAL MBA. I’m planning to use everything I’ve learned to launch the next book. (For details about the new book, visit http://eurekaoverdrive.com) My entire book launch strategy revolves around building evergreen resources that will market the book in perpetuity without active day-to-day promotion.

If you spend most of your energy building resources that will promote your book after the initial burst of easy publicity dries up, you’ll do quite well.

MG: With so much of your expertise anchored in business systems and strategies, could you share a bit about how your business operates? What are your primary revenue streams? How are you leveraging publishing to advance your business objectives? And what business concepts have you experimented with in the past that didn’t work?

JK: My revenue comes from five primary sources: (1) book advances/royalties, (2) direct course/training sales, (3) royalties from training material sales, (4) business advising, and (5) affiliate commissions.

When I started working on the Personal MBA full-time, most of my revenue came from business advising and consulting. Now, royalties and training sales are the lion’s share. Affiliate commissions, like the referral fees I receive from Amazon when readers purchase books from my reading list, cover 100% of my non-salary business overhead.

In general, if I don’t think a project will be just as important and relevant twenty years from now as it is today, I don’t do it. That’s been a great filter for me so far. PERSONAL MBA has been selling consistently well since it was published, and appears to be growing every month via word of mouth. I expect it will remain on bookstore shelves for quite a while as a solid backlist title.

Publishing is great in that your audience can snowball if you create good material and pay attention to marketing. Every project I complete turns into an asset that keeps selling without my direct attention. Each project also attracts more people who are interested in what I do, so each new project reaches a larger audience than the previous project.

I’m a one-man army by choice: I have no employees or contractors on retainer. Everything you see on PersonalMBA.com comes directly from me. I’ve experimented with assistants and contractors several times, but most of what I do can be considered experimentation or R&D, so it’s tough to delegate. My assistants would have to read my mind to work effectively, which isn’t fair to them or efficient for me.

Working by myself has its share of drawbacks and tradeoffs, but I enjoy the flexibility and control. Instead of spending most of my time managing and delegating (which I emphatically do not enjoy), I’m learning how to program so I can automate a good chunk of my day-to-day work. I’ve coded everything on PersonalMBA.com, from the website design to my email newsletter management software. I know how everything works, and I can make changes to any part of the system in minutes.

Now, I can experiment with business models of any type: courses, membership programs, subscriptions, etc. Automating routine tasks helps me serve more readers without stretching myself too thin. Becoming more comfortable with the technical aspects of publishing has increased my options considerably, and I plan on exploring what’s possible in in the months and years ahead.

MG: What do you see as the #1 business opportunity for authors today, and what do you advise as the first step in seizing that opportunity?

JK: For fiction authors, there’s never been a better time to self-publish. You don’t have to wait years and suffer hundreds (or thousands) of rejection before readers can enjoy your work. Editors and artists can be hired at very reasonable fees, and services like Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing and Lightning Source make it easy to produce a professional product in weeks instead of years. The profits roll directly into your bank account, and you don’t need anyone’s permission to get started. Start researching your options now: they’re more attractive than you may think.

For non-fiction authors, it’s a very short leap from publishing a useful book to offering courses, training materials, seminars, consulting, etc. Think of your book as marketing you get paid to produce, then decide what you want your readers to do after they’ve picked up your book. If your material is solid, a book is a very important trust signal that makes it easier to offer your readers higher-value, higher-priced, higher-profit options.

If I focused on fiction, self-publishing would be a no-brainer. Advance levels for non-fiction books are still high enough that trade publishing makes sense, but the gap is getting narrower every day. Every new project deserves a lot of thought, and it’s in your best interest to explore all of your options and avoid signing away the rights to your work without substantial compensation.

Wright is an author, entrepreneur, and full-time traveler. He moves to a new country every four months based on the votes of his readers, and along the way runs businesses and writes.

Learn more at his blog, travelogue, books, or publishing community. You can also follow/contact him on Twitter and Facebook.

Matt Gartland: As an independent author and entrepreneur, what do you find most compelling about the business opportunities emerging in the wake of the publishing industry’s transformation?

Colin Wright: The publishing industry is definitely at the biggest crossroad its encountered since the development of the printing press, and its an incredibly exciting industry to work in as a result of that.

Most compelling, I think, is that for a long time that most difficult part of the publishing process seemed to be getting your work out to a lot of people. You could write something stellar or terrible, and either way when you’re done you would run into this wall that was unyielding and seemingly random in its determination as to who it would let through.

Don’t get me wrong, that filtering process led to a lot of great work getting published over the years, and even made a lot of that work better than it would have been otherwise, but I would guess that for every success story of that kind there are just as many books that went through the wood-chipper of legacy publishing and came out the other side half the product it once was. For each amazingly handled book that went through that process, there were probably 100 books of the same calibre that didn’t make it past the initial stages of securing an agent or getting their work looked at by acquiring editors.

Today, however, the problems are flipped, and anyone can get an audience: the hard part is writing something that resonates and gets people talking. In my mind, this is a good tradeoff that’s been made, because now people are focusing on the work, not the gauntlet they’d need to run to get their work to an audience. The opportunities that have arisen as a result of this funnel-flipping are myriad and wonderful, and I think after legacy publishers get a grip on it, and indie authors understand it better, the whole industry will come out a lot better for it.

Most exciting for me on a micro level, rather than the macro level extrapolated upon above, is the chance to try out new business models, delivery systems, and types of published content. The business model for books is one that has made sense for a long time, but paid newsletters only became prevalent after the dawn of the Internet, and with good reason: they were a tricky business to make money from when dealing with atoms instead of pixels. The same goes for serialized fiction and poetry collections and essays: the market for these has always existed, it’s just been troublesome to identify, serve, and monetize. Today it’s far more possible, and we’re able to watch these new markets grow out of very little, and in some cases appearing out of nowhere.

The industry is an entrepreneur’s dream right now, and thankfully it’s a content creator’s dream, as well. It’s not every day that the interests of those two groups align so perfectly.

MG: Once upon a time, you founded Ebookling, an independent ebook marketplace aimed at helping “turn authors into authorpreneurs.” Can you share a bit about the Ebookling story: why it existed, how it worked, what you learned, and why you decided to deactivate it?

CW: The concept behind Ebookling was a piece of advice that I tell my creative friends all the time: the days of being able to consider yourself and artist that doesn’t need to work or worry about money are over. There will be a fortunate few who find benefactors or who are able to have their hand held while their work is discovered, scooped up, and published as-is, but it’s about as likely as winning the lottery, and in most cases won’t pay as much.

These days, the smart artists are owning their work and their business infrastructure. This control allows them to continue to produce work over the long-term, rather than having to work a second job to support their passion, as has often been the case throughout history.

Through Ebookling, I wanted to create an easy to use platform that would get rid of a lot of the gimmickry and background knowledge necessary to self publish, and would provide other tools that helped writers build their audiences as well; a key component to creating not just a piece of art, but a career around many pieces of art.

Unfortunately, although the company was profitable from day one all the way to the day I pulled the plug, my team and I weren’t able to compete with the technology offered up by other platforms like Amazon and Smashwords. They leapfrogged us without even trying, and I realized that with the technology they had begun to offer it was a smarter choice to provide information and services to authors, rather than trying to rebuild the wheel. They had come up with some really stellar wheels since the day I started Ebookling, and it seemed silly not to use them. The concept still holds — that artists need to be entrepreneurs — but I’m approaching it in a very different way now.

We could have continued to keep the company going and made a decent amount of income each month, but that would have missed the point: we wanted to help move publishing forward, and simply making money to make money didn’t interest us.

MG: You have recently partnered with Thom Chambers, Ryan Nicodemus and Joshua Fields Millburn to found Asymmetrical, a digital publishing company that exists to “improve the quality of published work.” How is Asymmetrical unique from other micropublishers, and how will the company fulfill that big vision?

CW: The idea behind Asymmetrical is to try and remix the traditional publishing model by integrating it with ideals from indie publishing, record labels, and angel investing.

The business model behind it comes in three sections: the Community, the Press, and the Studio.

The Community is free for everyone, and we don’t make any money from this directly. It’s a place for authors and editors and bloggers and poets and anyone involved in publishing of any kind to get together and share resources, ideas, feedback, and the like. We wanted to give folks a place to do that without it being tied to a specific company’s products (Amazon has a popular forum, for example, but very often anything not Kindle-related is given the boot) because we wanted that kind of forum to use ourselves and found that nothing like that really existed yet, at least not on the scale we wanted to build.

The Press is our riff on a publishing house, and through it we partner with different kinds of authors and other publishers to create, market, and distribute products. Our advantage is that everything we do — from editing to marketing and helping them decide what vehicle is best to deliver the product to the consumer — is very lightweight, so our overhead is also low. We put in a lot of time and bring our knowledge and experience to bear, and in return we get 20% of the profits from the product (while the creator of the work retains complete ownership — we’re just investors). This works best with people who are going to produce many books or blogs or whatever over time, of course, so we focus on people who are somewhat prolific and who create really solid work. We’re hoping to expand to work with journalists and educators and other folks who are publishing beyond traditional books, as well.

Finally, the Studio tier of the trio is where we provide the same time and knowledge and experience to clients that we usually only provide to authors who we’re working with through our Press. For a flat fee (instead of the 20% of profits we usually earn from the Press), we’ll help chisel a product into tip-top shape, then help get it to the best and largest audience possible. This is a service we’ll be offering to individuals, but also to other publishing houses, which is something that ordinarily costs them a whole lot of money to do internally. We can do it for a lot less, due to our extraordinarily low overhead and the methods we’ve refined over several years.

Through these three different approaches, we hope to bring our experience and knowledge — as well as that of the many other people in the Community and who we work with through the Press and Studio — to a far larger audience. We’re also producing open source publishing business models, collections of resources for indie publishers to use, and other such time- and money-saving devices. We want the industry as a whole to grow, and the more any of us succeeds, the more we all succeed. We want to get more know-how out to more people, and to have more success stories worth talking about to inspire people and get some deserving work into the limelight.

MG: Much of your writing projects and entrepreneurial endeavors are rooted in the ideals of community. What have you done right in building an engaged and supportive community? And what have you done wrong?

CW: The best thing to do when building a community is to communicate well with that community.

Over the years I’ve had various degrees of success with this, and probably the most successful thus far has been the Exile Lifestyle community that I maintain over several different sites and in real life. I think stripping the process down and figuring out what I could do to really add value for people was key, so I avoided all the trendy things that other people were doing and honed in on a few things that my readers were telling me they really wanted. A few places where they could talk directly to me, check (Twitter and email). A few places where they could read my writing, check (the blog, my books, and Exiles). A way to be updated on my various projects, check (social media and my newsletter). A place to find out what I’m interested in and reading, check (Twitter and Facebook). Beyond that, anything else would be somewhat superfluous.

The times when things haven’t worked so well are highlighted by my not being able to leave things well enough alone, or not having a good enough grasp on what people in the community wanted. I made both of these mistakes with a brand called Most Interesting People in the Room, which — although I still think it’s a killer idea — failed to ever break past the initial growing pains of a community, so I pulled the plug on it twice. The first time around, I went wild and tried out too many things all at once, which confused the brand and the purpose behind it. The second time I focused a lot better, and the primary intent of the community (a space for high-level conversations, which are otherwise tough to find on the single-serving culture of the internet) was embraced by a few, but others wanted something else from it, and I wasn’t able to catch on to what they were looking for fast enough to give it to them.

Valuable lessons, all of them, and the best piece of advice I can offer up front is to make damn sure that you’re part of the community you’re building. It adds legitimacy, sure, but it also gives you the ideal way to get feedback and make sure things are going well: people can talk to you from within the community itself, and you, as a member, will know if things are amazing or terrible.

MG: What is the #1 piece of actionable advice you’d give to an author accomplished in writing (perhaps with published books) but new to whole “community building thing”?

CW: You’re going to be either excited to get things going or hesitant to tute your own horn, and either one can be a hinderance that leads you to jump too quickly, and maybe off the wrong cliff.

Start with one small platform (like a blog, or your Twitter account) and expand from there. Let it grow organically. If you find there’s something you’re not able to accomplish with your current platform, but that you want to do and people want you to do (say you’re running a blog and want to share links, but it doesn’t fit within your blogging schema), then start up another platform and invest some effort to see if it grows. In this way you’ll spend as little time as possible on potentially useless sidetracks, but you’ll still be able to sound out what your people want. And at the end of the day, if what you’re working on isn’t providing them value and doing the same for you, it’s probably not worth your time.

Nick Disabato is a designer and publisher from Chicago. He helps other people make Distance, a quarterly journal for long essays about design and technology.

And he runs The Publication Standards Project, an organization that encourages awareness and action around digital publishing issues. You can call him nickd.

Matt Gartland: You recently wrote a persuasive two-part essay on A List Apart about publishing standards. In part one, The Fragmented Present, you write that “Everybody suffers from our current system.” In a distilled form, what are the affronting conditions?

Nick Disabato: There are so many, but here are a few:

• Amazon is strong-arming publishers and readers by locking them into their platform, driving down prices, and playing hardball with negotiations – even going so far as to remove all of a publisher’s books from sale.
• Amazon and publishers are hurting libraries with hostile ebook lending terms.
• Publishers are hurting themselves by releasing many ebooks well after the print release date, which encourages piracy.
• E-reading platforms are hurting authors and publishers by instituting DRM, which also encourages piracy and hurts sales.
• Authors are hurting the whole ecosystem by publishing with the “big six” in the first place.

Readers are affected on every side of this fight. Sometimes they benefit (such as from low prices); sometimes they suffer (DRM, lack of a standard ebook format). Mostly they suffer, though.

MG: With all things considered, which role suffers most: readers, authors, publishers?

ND: I don’t know if that can be quantified. We drag each other down equally; if one group suffers, the others do in turn. It’s a negative feedback loop.

MG: The lack of a simple way to create semantically correct ebook files underpins your stance that the ebook landscape is broken, technology-wise at least. Why should authors care about such a technical matter?
Ultimately, how does such a fractured ebook technology landscape impact an author’s book sales and larger business prospects?

ND: Because it affects the sale, distribution, and longevity of their books. Proprietary formats are hard to archive, leaving the author’s work hard to access if the format becomes deprecated. DRM makes it hard for the author to distribute copies for review, and if the platform goes down at some point in the future, all of the author’s books will become unreadable.

Authors are readers, too, and having a unified ebook format would also make it easier for them to transfer their ebooks from one reading platform to another. And even if they don’t care about that, their readers do, and they will sell fewer copies if their readers opt out of the system.

As ebooks become more widespread, it becomes more imperative that these issues are addressed. Even if we’re not writing code, we all need to understand the way that technology works, because otherwise it’ll get the best of us.

MG: In part two, A Standard Future, you write that “Our ebook reading and creation tools are primitive, nascent, born of necessity, and driven by fear.” In your view of a standard future, what is the first all important step toward rectifying today’s shortcomings?

ND: Nobody wants to cooperate with each other, and nobody wants to follow standards bodies. I think a lot of this is born by greed – most parties, libraries and readers excepted, want more revenue from ebooks – but none of this is sustainable in the long term. I believe it makes the most sense to tackle this now. We’ve lost sight of what makes books so great. So, the first step might be to realize that publishers and e-readers will take in slightly less money in the short term, for a potential flourishing in the long term.

MG: Why should today’s authors, who are increasingly responsible for their own marketing and business efforts, take a deep interest in the design and interoperability of their ebooks?

ND: I think they should care for the same reason they should care about technical matters. (Interoperability is also a technical matter.) Overall, design is the way that your book is marketed and perceived. If you don’t have agency of that, then you may not be providing the right message to your readers – or at least the message that you want.

MG: And how far should they (the authors) go in terms of learning the technical skills involved?

ND: Ideally, they shouldn’t have to. You don’t need to know HTML to start a blog, for instance. An ebook tool should allow easy import of a manuscript, some WYSIWYG cleanup, and one-click publish – just like any blogging tool allows.

As they presently stand, our publishing tools could use a lot of improvement. Right now, the best thing out there is iBooks Author, which exports only in the iBookstore’s proprietary format. And I don’t know anybody who is handling publishing quite as well as WordPress or Tumblr are.

MG: You proclaim that “We’re used to the web disrupting many industries, and it’s time to embrace the turbulence around publishing, for better and worse.” With that spirit, you founded The Publication Standards Project, which has lofty long-term goals. What’s your most palpable hope for the project?

ND: A unified ebook standard embraced by all e-reader manufacturers, top-notch publishing tools that embrace that standard, and a community that cares more about what we’re saying to each other than the best ways to turn discourse into a numbers game.

MG: And what’s your most potent fear?

ND: That we’re not in a position to change anything. I worry about this every day.

MG: What’s the #1 thing authors (or their designated design/tech person) can do right now to improve the user experience, which is to say the reading experience, of their ebooks?

ND: Self-publish. Connect with your readers directly. There don’t need to be any more middlemen in your work. You can hire an editor, for example, but self-publishers continue to have the final say with what they put out the door.

It takes more effort, but you’ll know your readers better and be able to engage with them more meaningfully.

Trunk co-founded Brazen Careerist and two other startups. Her career advice runs in 200 newspapers. Her new book, The New American Dream, is about the pursuit of interestingness, not happiness, for a career filled with variety.

Follow Trunk on Twitter: @PenelopeTrunk

Matt Gartland: You recently revealed that you walked away from a big publisher to self-publish your latest book, The New American Dream. What was the largest factor that influenced your decision to abandon traditional publishing?

Penelope Trunk: They didn’t have any idea whom their market was or how to reach them, so I thought: I’m not going to learn anything about publishing this way. And publishing is changing so fast. And I’m a writer, so I have to learn how to publish. So I felt it was really, really important for me to learn another part of the industry since the traditional approach is obviously broken.

MG: You spent six months studying and analyzing the publishing industry in-depth. What were your profound discoveries and biggest learnings?

PT: I learned that a lot of people see an opening in publishing, but don’t have any business model in mind to seize that opportunity. They think because they understand that publishing is broken and because they really like books, they’re going to get in on it. But it’s very, very difficult to come up with an absolute business model for publishing. And I think most people who are involved in publishing right now are in denial about that.

Publishing is really up in the air. Almost no one has a good model. The good models are extremely specialized and very, very high-end. On the low-end, no one’s got a model that’s working profitably. The most surprising thing to me was how absolutely open-ended and completely unstructured the publishing world is right now.

MG: Through your learning process you discovered Hyperink and ultimately chose to publish with them. I presume you feel they are one of the very few companies out there that are getting this right. What really spoke to you then about Hyperink–their service or model–and did your experience with them live up to your expectations?

PT: Hyperink is a startup. They have funding so they don’t need to make money from authors or book sales right now. They basically have funding to figure out publishing. I think a lot of publishing start-ups are in a similar position right now, that they don’t quite have a model but are funding to figure out a model.

Hyperink has by no means cracked the code on the publishing industry, but what they are good at is SEO. And I’m completely convinced that if a publisher is partnering with an author, the author’s core competency is going to be content and probably some sort of audience ownership. But the author is never going to be good at SEO. It’s too specialized a skill set that’s too time consuming to learn and that changes all the time.

To me, a partnership between an author and a publishing SEO expert makes the most sense, which is why I selected Hyperink because every time they talked to me, they were so SEO focused.

MG: That way of thinking blends with the new rules for book publishing you articulated in your “How I got a big advance from a big publisher and self-published anyway” article. Of your five rules, what would you prescribe as your number one piece of advice for rising star authors that are trying to assess their publishing options?

PT: Well, the whole idea of a “rising star” author is just preposterous. For example, there are really only six big cinema writers. They’re artists. They’re doing art. The business they’re in cannot be controlled. It’s a business for a lucky few. It’s like a lottery, right? So, you can’t really control if you make money as an artist or not. You just have to do your art and say a prayer. That’s the case for fiction writers at least.

Then, there are the non-fiction writers. Most non-fiction writers think they’re going to support themselves writing non-fiction books. That’s just completely out to lunch; it just doesn’t happen at significant enough a rate to even be talked about as a possible thing. You should play the lottery instead of that. The way that most non-fiction writers make their money is using their book to sell something else.

That’s what you should be doing. You should figure out what is the thing you’re selling, why are you writing a book, and what are you going to sell from that book besides the book. After that, determine who’s the best partner for you to reach that goal. But if you don’t know what you’re selling besides the book, there’s no point in publishing the book. Just go flip burgers at McDonald’s; you’ll make more money per hour.

It’s really old fashioned to think that people who write books are somehow authorities. They’re not. People who have audiences and make money because they’re good at something that audience wants are authorities.

MG: I’m glad you mentioned audiences. You wrote recently that, “the person who has the relationship with the customer is the one who owns the business.” How are you changing or implementing new ways to manage and further grow your customer relationships after learning so much about the state of publishing?

PT: Well, I’m a blogger. I’ve been blogging for ten years. That’s my audience. I don’t need other sources to sell my books. Out of town PR for this book just isn’t cost effective for me. It’s much more cost effective for me to just do a really good job on my blog. If I write a good blog post, a thousand people like it on Facebook; that’s their way to get to my book. It’s much more productive for me to just do what I’m good at, which is building the audience that I already have. I don’t need to do anything else to sell my book.

Ultimately, my book isn’t what feeds my family. My community is what feeds my family. The book is just one little, tiny thing. I think that perspective is so, so important for book authors to think about. If you have a community, you can always support yourself. Maybe there’ll be a book; maybe there’ll be something else.

But if you have only a book, you probably can’t support yourself. People just don’t do that with books. The book is just icing on the cake for a community.

MG: Speaking of your audience, have they been excited about your new book and how you published it? Have they really embraced the book? Are book sales going well?

PT: This is my third book, so I already know what to expect from my audience. Also, I am constantly asking my audience to take some sort of action, so I know really well what to expect from them. Book publishers have this crazy question like, “How is your book selling?” If you don’t know your audience you don’t know how it would sell, so people are asking. But it’s not even an interesting question. “How is my book selling?” It’s my third book. I always feel my own audience, so of course I know how to write a book for my audience.

The very common question that you ask an author, “How is your book selling?” It shouldn’t even be a question. It’s like asking, “Are your subscribers clicking through to the comments?” No one answers that, right? It’s just consistent. I know what percentage of my readers that subscribe click through to the comments. It should be the same thing with book sales; you just know what percentage of your readers will buy that kind of book because you know your audience.

MG: I agree that that question asked in a vacuum is uninteresting. However, given the decisions and circumstances surrounding how you published, I was interested to know if that context had special influence on your audience in terms of driving book sales.

PT: Oh, no, they don’t care. My audience doesn’t care. My audience is just my audience. They already know that I complain about the publishing world all the time.

The post I wrote about my publishing experience and decisions was very popular and I got interviewed a lot on sites that I’m not always on, like TechCrunch. I don’t write for them that much, so the fact that I was on there and interviewed about my publishing perspectives means that a lot of TechCrunch people who don’t usually read my blog came to my site. But that traffic doesn’t really translate into buyers to be honest. I mean, anyone who’s trying to get on big sites like TechCrunch don’t realize that does not translate to sales. It does not translate to people taking action.

The people that you can get to take a prescribed action are people that you have a relationship with, not people that see you in one post.

In general, yes, the book has gotten tons of coverage, tons of buzz and all that. But buzz doesn’t translate to book sales. Community translates to book sales. And really, if buzz translated to sales, then publishers would know better how to make book sales, right? It just doesn’t translate. One of the things that has been really shocking to me throughout my career as a buzz-builder is that getting on CNN or 20/20 or 60 Minutes–I’ve been on all of them–doesn’t translate to anything. No one who watches you on those shows does anything online because of it. If you’re on 60 Minutes that doesn’t mean more people buy your book.

There was one moment–I think it was three years ago–when some big show, maybe 20/20, called me and asked me to come right away because of a tweet I did that was big news. They wanted me on the show, so they were going to fly me and my kids and the nanny to New York City the next day. I finally just said no because I was like: “Well, I never get anything from this. I just get to be able to say that I was on the show, but nothing ever changes in my life because of it. So I just told them no. To me, that was a big turning point where the goal wasn’t to get on big media. If I’m not able to make any money off that, then all my goals are really shifting. I had to really look at what I was trying to do.

MG: What’s the one thing you’ve been wanting to say about publishing or your book or the intersection of the two but haven’t yet because no one has asked that question. What’s the one question you’ve been wanting to reply to?

PT: Everyone who wants to talk about publishing I think is really just avoiding talking about community building. Community building is tens of billions of times harder than publishing a book. But that’s really what people need to do in order to get any traction with anything they care about. You need a community of people to take action.

I think the whole discussion of self-publishing and traditional publishing and all that, it’s only relevant if you know the one percent of people who make a truck load of money selling their books. For everyone else, it’s just a red herring. They should talk about community building and how they’re doing that in their life.

Disclosure: Penelope Trunk hired me as a publishing consultant during her intense study of the new book economy. The experience was mutually enjoyable and fruitful. In her own words, “I learned so much from you. Thank you for everything you taught me. You were a huge bridge to me to get to where I was going.”