In the immortal words of Johnny Cash, “I’ve been everywhere, man.” In terms of the book industry, I’ve agented books; I’ve designed books; I’ve helped a dozen authors self-publish their own books – and I’ve advised hundreds of others not to self publish. I’ve worked on publicity campaigns with major publishing houses; I’ve done grassroots and highbrow marketing. I’ve had my own book go to auction to earn a six figure book advance, get published and make it on to the Amazon bestseller list. I’m currently in the glorious, grueling process of writing my next book: The Fire Starter Sessions.

So, naturally, I’m jaded. Really jaded. And yet! I remain ever devoted to the art of the book and the game of publishing. I’m a romantic. Just like Johnny. Creating a book is an intimate experience. You give shape to your innermost feelings, you share them with critics and other lovers of ideas and story. And then you shop that baby until the cows come home. How you do it is a very personal decision.

To Self-Publish or to Sign with a Publishing House? It depends how you define success. It depends what your motivation is – profit or creative gratification? It depends on how talented you are and how timely your material is. It depends if you’re really crazy, or just a little bit crazy.

The Pro’s and Cons and the In’s and Outs of Self Publishing and Publishing Houses:

DISTRIBUTION
Let’s start with the most important aspect of making a book. Forget content and design, forget marketing and PR…for a moment. Getting your product into the hands of booksellers and book buyers should be your A#1, paramount big daddy priority.

Self pub: If you choose to self publish, distribution will be your greatest hurdle. In the eyes of major book chain buyers, you’re a nobody. The head buyer at CostCo or Borders has established relationships with sales reps from publishing houses. They have buy-meets at book shows and scheduled times where they order dozens of titles at a time for the upcoming season. They won’t even take your call. You will have to hire an independent sales rep to pitch your title.

Or…you can go to local bookstores and pitch it yourself. It’s hell – a hell possibly worth walking through, but put your armor on, wear your lip-gloss and best smile, and be prepared to schlep books in your car trunk for weeks, months even.

Pub house: distribution is done for you. That simple. This is the single most important reason to try to get your self a book deal. Publishing houses have tentacles that reach far into book shows and bookstores across the world.

THE DESIGN PROCESS
Self-pub: guess what? You’re now a book designer, content and copy editor, color expert, typography and paper specialist – and you thought you were just a guy with something important to say. Even if you hire out your book to a graphic designer (and you probably should, for anywhere from $500 to $20,000 in design fees depending on the type of book you’re producing,) the aesthetics of the book rely on your approval. Do you know what cover will appeal to consumers next season? Do you have access to the recycled paper printer you want who can print in bulk? For better or for worse, you will have total creative control. Could be a beautiful thing.

Pub house: I know more than a few authors who didn’t know what their book cover was going to look like until they saw it for the first time on Amazon — tragic but true. You may have zero say in how your baby is dressed. Could be a disaster. Could be a beautiful thing.

TIME TO MARKET
Self-Pub: The turn around time with a self-published book can be as fast as you can drive the process. Once it’s written and edited, you can have a book in your hands in as little as two months. Zoom.

Pub house: Prepare to go gray before you see your book in stores. Unless you’re writing about a time-sensitive topic of major cultural relevance (like, a meteor drops to Earth and you happen to be working on a book about How To Survive A Meteor Crash,) then you’re likely looking at eight months to two years from the time you sign your publishing contract to the day your book is in the Barnes & Noble window. It’s a long time.

Traditional publishing is a lot like the fashion industry. There are a lot of players involved and they each need lead time to do their job: the editing department, the foreign rights department, the designer, the offshore printer, the marketing team who is selling to stores a two seasons in advance, the publicity team pitching to magazines three to six months in advance, and the warehouse who needs time to ship to stores.

THE MONEY
Self pub: If you do it right, you can be earning as much as $10 bucks a book, perhaps more. Yipee! Hopefully that’ll be enough to re-coup the capital you put in to fund the book – graphic design, perhaps an indexer, various registration costs, marketing, a hefty Fed-Ex bill… It could all add up to thousands of dollars — easy.

Pub house: A book advance is an incredibly civilized concept. You get paid in advance to write your book. Wow. You typically get a third of the advance money when you sign your contract, a third when you deliver your final manuscript, and a third when the book is off the printing press.

Most authors never see a dime after their book advance – simply because they need to sell enough copies to “earn out” their advance. After you’ve sold the amount of your advance in books (essentially paying the publisher back for their investment) then you start to realize a royalty on books sold after that – which is usually in the low range of a whopping $2 per book.

PUBLICITY
Self-pub: Got contacts? You better have. Facebook friends may not get you on the bestseller list. You need editors’ emails and TV ops. It’s timing consuming and critical. Not your thing? You’re looking at a minimum of $5000 to hire a publicist to run a decent campaign for you.

Pub house: They’ve got contacts – oodles of them. Media editors and producers are used to being pitched by publishing house staffers. But don’t think for a minute that your publisher will take your book to the mount and flog it. It’s a rare exception that any book is nurtured beyond a very concentrated, one-time push to the media that lasts about three weeks if you’re lucky.

Whether you self publish or land a book deal – publicity and marketing will ultimately be fueled by your stamina.

It takes a village to raise a book. But it takes your creative genius to make it, guide it, and carry it to the world – whether that’s with a prime-time media interview or small book signings where only two people show up – and one of them is your mom.

Johnny Cash lasted so long in the music business not just because he was a pure talent, but because he was a remarkable combination of tough-as-nails and romantic. Either direction you take — self publishing or landing a book deal — you will need to be steely, you will need to embody passion, you will need to take your show on the road…everywhere, man.

May applause follow wherever you go.

The concept of a book starts within someone who is restless with a concept. So restless that he cannot keep it to himself. He feels like sharing it with anyone who’s interested. He becomes like a live volcano wanting to erupt and express itself. It takes days, months, years and sometimes a lifetime for a writer to put down all his thoughts in a book. But when it does, he feels spent and fulfilled at the same time.

Most people read books either to be entertained or to seek information. Some also read to find what someone else thinks. But the real worth of reading is when one reads a book to read his own mind.

I am referring to those unexplored, untouched and hidden sparks of wisdom that can be excavated within us only when we resonate with a like minded writer through the medium of a book. I am talking about those “Ahh! I know exactly what you mean…” moments in reading when one comes across statements which you can claim as your own because they have been nestling in your head or at the tip of your tongue, waiting to come out. Sometimes you feel jealous of the writer for having written it before you.

Swami Vivekananda in one of his very intense speeches proclaimed that there’s no knowledge that comes from the outside the mind. My interpretation of this assertion is that all knowledge and wisdom are perennially seeded in the mind. Like with dry wood, the potential of fire is always present, it just needs the spark to light it. The fire in it is “sushupta”, subdued and subconscious. But it’s there. The author through his book tries to ignite the fire in the reader’s mind. But if the wood is wet, then nothing can fire it. This wet wood represents the state of a closed mind when it is heavy and dense with preconceived notions.

There are really only two types of books. One type feeds escapism and entertainment impulses and the other opens up your mind to allows you access to long-seeded ideas that need expression. I lust after the latter because it ignites the fire of self-exploration in me. I am passionate about this kind of book because it has a transformative effect on me as I connect to the writer on a deep level. It feeds my hunger for answers and self-expression. The book becomes an intimately shared bond with the writer and allows me to expand my mind and consciousness which is one of my primary purposes in life. Book lust is a fascinating addiction….don’t you think?

Just how do they do it? The premise is simple. Past behavior patterns forms a basis to predict what you are likely to do in future. The premise works on getting hold of huge masses of data that can be analyzed to look for trends and patterns. Every day we produce loads of data about ourselves simply by living in the modern world: we click web pages, flip channels, drive through automatic toll booths, shop with credit cards, and make cell phone calls. Now, in one of the greatest undertakings of the twenty-first century, a savvy group of mathematicians and computer scientists (The Numerati really) is beginning to sift through this data to dissect us and map out our next steps. Their goal? To manipulate our behavior — what we buy, how we vote — without our even realizing it.” As you swipe a credit card to pay for purchases, pay at the toll booth through a pre-paid tag, blog or leave a comment on a website, visit the dentist or even write an email or sms a friend, you are creating a big electronic footprint that says something about you. When any such data is collected over time some patterns begin to emerge. When this mass of data is analyzed to look for patterns, it builds up the probability of behavior patterns. You got to hear Stephen Baker explain how this book happened in this video before I share my interview with the man who brought the word Numerati into mainstream.

The photo of Stephen Baker with his cat Rock Sand is courtesy the private collection of Jalaire Craver.

Here is how my interview with him went:
AB:. Who is the reader you wrote The Numerati for? What impact did you hope to create in the reader? Do you think your book has made the Math nerd cool?

Stephen Baker: I wrote the Numerati for people like myself. They don’t think much about math or computers, but are interested in the forces shaping the history of our times. I knew as I wrote it that the book might disappoint the true Numerati, that they would likely look to it for a level of detail and technical insight that it lacks. But most of them have been surprisingly generous in their responses. More than one has told me that his mother can finally understand what he does.

I can only hope I helped people to understand how cool math nerds are, and how fascinating their work is.

AB: You have mentioned the work the Numerati are doing in various areas like Marketing, Politics, Healthcare, Blogging, fighting terrorism etc. Where are we most ahead of the game?

Stephen Baker: The Numerati are by far the most advanced in marketing and advertising. These are areas where they can afford to experiment widely, and make lots of mistakes at a very low cost. If you think about it, Google has built a empire on educated guesses.

AB: You have been exploring the concept of Friendship for sometime. What is the best measure of friendship – the secrets we share? The ones we yearn to meet again and again? The one who shares our deepest secrets?.Has the social media made it tougher to have the sense of privacy that builds depth in a relationship? So much so for having 300+ friends on Facebook.

Stephen Baker: I think the best measure of friendship, as you say, are the secrets you confide in your closest friends. (Of course, we have ways of dividing different secrets among different friends.) Maybe it’s taking some people time to figure out the nature of online friendships. But I think the younger generation will teach us all how to protect the fragments of privacy that add depth to our friendships. Privacy itself, though, is a shifting value, and it always has been, through history and cultures. It will continue to evolve.

AB: You have been a journalist for 20+ years, a published author for a year and a very widely followed blogger* for a few. Why have corporate blogs not been as successful as you predicted in your cover story in Businessweek.

Stephen Baker: The power of a blog, as in so many other endeavors, is tied related the amount of control one cedes. Successful corporate blogs, and there are very few, give full and unfettered voice to the public. They interact with it, and learn from it. And that conversation attracts more people. The problem with corporations is that they want to control the message. They control comments and publish press releases. Usually the result is a dreadful bore.

In my defense, I don’t think I predicted that corporate blogs would be such tremendous successes. The most important point for corporations, from my view, was to take blogs seriously, to monitor and interact with them.

This has to do not just with blogs, but all of the other grass-roots activities of networked people. Think about it: The Obama campaign, Linux, YouTube, Facebook. This is a huge story of this decade. (And all of these phenomena produce mountains of data for the Numerati to analyze.)

Read more about The Numerati at http://thenumerati.net/

*Stephen Baker’s blog was rated by NY Times as one of the Top 50 blogs to watch

LIVING LIFE CREATIVELY AND JOYOUSLY

The Fine Print of Life brings alive the charmingly named Panna Lal, Hira Lal, Mishri Devi, Jalebi Devi and others as they muddle through life in their search for happiness and success. Struggling to make it big, but not sure what they really want from life, they reflect our own doubts, difficulties and apprehensions. As the author, P.S. Wasu, guides us, through them, to a new awareness of ourselves, he offers no prescriptions. What he does is far more valuable: he enables us to create our own paths and see the possibilities of our own lives.

There is no magic wand to solving life’s problems. But short of that, The Fine Print of Life shows us how we can live creatively and joyously. The book is not about making hard work of life. It is about letting go, effortlessness and spontaneity—the qualities we had in such abundance when we were children. It triggers something that brings our childhood back, showing us how to live life in the here and now.

With wonder and curiosity. Energy and enthusiasm. Trusting our impulses and acting upon them. Best of all, with the feeling that life is beautiful and it is great to be alive.

To read the introductory chapter of The Fine Print of Life, please go to this link:

http://tickledbylife.com/index.php/the-fine-print-of-life/

The Fine Print of Life
How Panna Lal Found Happiness, Wisdom and Mishri Devi

By P.S. Wasu

ISBN 9788172237516
177 pages, Price Rs. 195
Published by HarperCollins India

In bookshops in India from mid-April, 2009

Order online for delivery in India. Click here.

For delivery in the rest of the world, please contact N.S. Krishna, Sales Director, HarperCollins India, at krishna@harpercollins-india.com.