I just came back from a short vacation that included a road trip with my son, Charlie. We drove from Washington, DC, to Boston for a graduation, then back a few days later. We split our listening between podcasts (Fresh Air, This American Life, etc.) and whatever we could find on radio. Not knowing much about current pop music (I’m a child of the 60s), I spent a lot of time asking him about what we were listening to.
Beyond the predictable and ubiquitous (Justin Timberlake, Taylor Swift, et al.), there were some surprises. In particular, Pitbull. I knew him as the guy who wrote and performed “Don’t Stop the Party,” a catchy song that I had dismissed as a one-hit wonder like “Macarena” or “MacArthur Park.” Yet, he kept turning up in various guises on our trip, and I began to wonder why he has been so successful.
To my ears, there is not much that distinguishes Pitbull’s music from that of other artists. His music is up-to-date and has catchy hooks, but so does the work of dozens of other musicians. A quick look at Pitbull’s Wikipedia page shows that his “overnight success” has occurred, as it has for many others, only after years of hard work. Again, not a surprise. But, looking closer, it’s clear that in addition to paying his dues as a performing musician, Pitbull has paid special attention to building relationships both within the music industry and with the general public. He collaborates with dozens of well-known musicians, bringing them into his recordings and participating as a guest artist on theirs. And he maintains a strong presence on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, TV, advertising, and more.
What makes Pitbull successful goes well beyond the music and the hard work. He is a good example of how relationships, both with peers and the audience, can build a successful career. I think his success can help us understand why some books make it and others don’t. And maybe it can help set aside the persistent, and dangerous, writing myth that brilliant content is all that’s needed to make a book successful.
Consider J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, widely recognized as a brilliant, ground-breaking book. Salinger essentially disappeared from the public for the last 45 years of his life, yet The Catcher in the Rye, which was published in 1951, still sells around 250,000 copies every year. So, you might think this is an example of a brilliant work that rose to the top based solely on quality. But, in fact, before he withdrew from the public eye well after the success of The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger’s career looked a lot like Pitbull’s. He went to great lengths to meet Ernest Hemingway, he dated Eugene O’Neill’s daughter, courted Hollywood, and built relationships with other writers. He wrote constantly, sent stories to magazines, collected rejection slips, and worked hard not just to write great fiction, but also to sell it.
Most of the time, it takes the long, hard path of a Pitbull or J. D. Salinger to make a book, even a very good one, a success. The first part of that path is, of course, creating quality work, which for nonfiction authors means a work that delivers well-written, needed information to its audience in a usable form.
But, beyond that, my experience has been that the most successful books are those whose authors have established a sustained and active presence in their communities before, during, and after writing their books. As with Pitbull and Salinger, this means interacting with the target audience and with peer practitioners.
Interacting with the audience is known to be a strong marketing strategy; in fact, there’s a whole industry built up around exploiting social media to build an audience.
However, peer relationships can be just as important. Of course, peer practitioners are the first place to go for help with technical reviews and error checking. But beyond that, peers can be strong endorsers and supporters, and because they are “on the inside,” they can positively influence other practitioners. They can also do the reverse. I have seen books badly harmed when an insider gave a bad review or simply ignored a book. In some of those cases, it’s been clear that the author was not active in one or more of the critical communities for that book, and sales suffered as a result.
For a publisher, this can be tough, because the strategies that helped make J. D. Salinger a successful writer and Pitbull a successful musician are largely in the hands of the author, not the publisher. Publishers can help with advertising or by introducing authors to potential allies, but they can’t build relationships for the author. He or she needs to do that work. Doing the work won’t guarantee a bestseller, but not doing it nearly always guarantees the opposite.
Richard L. Hamilton is the founder of XML Press, which is dedicated to producing high quality, practical publications for technical communicators, managers, content strategists, marketers, and the engineers who support their work. Richard is the author of Managing Writers: A Real-World Guide to Managing Technical Documentation, and editor of the 2nd edition of Norm Walsh’s DocBook: The Definitive Guide, published in collaboration with O’Reilly Media.