Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, has a new book, “Free,” coming out in July. It’s not free, it costs money. Malcolm Gladwell, who has written many books that have contributed to one-word business-speak, wrote a review of Anderson’s book in the latest issue of The New Yorker. He didn’t like it. Now, Seth Godin, another author of many books, says Malcolm’s wrong.
It’s a guru slap-down!
With all due respect, they are all wrong to one degree or another. Each also is partially correct. Casting this discussion as an either/or is misleading, the trivialization of the real issue by people who no longer have to worry about making the first step into publishing. For a writer, though, giving away books is not the solution to jump-starting a career as a published author (there is a big difference between being a writer, which anyone can do, and being an author, which anyone can also do), it’s the beginning of building a living, a small business that, in all likelihood, will never be a big business.
The future of business will not be built on a price point, but the value delivered and the cost of delivering it. This isn’t a binary challenge that will be answered by giving away news and entertainment. Gladwell accurately deflates Anderson’s sweeping statements, which were laid out in a Wired feature last year, “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business.” In his review of the upcoming book from Anderson, Gladwell writes:
His advice is pithy, his tone uncompromising, and his subject matter perfectly timed for a moment when old-line content providers are desperate for answers. That said, it is not entirely clear what distinction is being marked between “paying people to get otherpeople to write” and paying people to write.
The first sentence is clever and could equally be applied to Gladwell’s definitive answers to questions about decision-making in “Blink” and “The Tipping Point.” A simple statement, such as this from Anderson’s Wired article can be very attractive to desperate publishing executives seeking to compete with the rapidly declining cost of publishing, which kicks aside barriers to competition from virtually anyone on the planet:
The new model is based not on cross-subsidies — the shifting of costs from one product to another — but on the fact that the cost of products themselves is falling fast. It’s as if the price of steel had dropped so close to zero that King Gillette could give away both razor and blade, and make his money on something else entirely.
Gillette adds blades to its cheap razor refills to justify high prices, not because it is cheaper to add blades to the Mach III. Low costs are exploited to raise perceived value (now, with 50 blades!) and profit margins. It would be nice to think industry works solely in response to economic formulae out of the goodness of executives’ hearts, but life doesn’t work that way, even when everyone is “pursuing their passion.”
Gladwell’s last sentence, which is in bold above, cuts to the explicit assumption in Anderson’s article, that the cost of products is falling so fast that prices become irrelevant. This is true for media markets only if you believe that people will no longer earn a living from their work, which they apparently will have to give away to get attention. Gladwell is correct that at some point, people need to get paid to produce work on a consistent basis. Doing journalism, for example, is expensive. The people doing it for free will eventually realize the value of their contribution and ask for compensation or simply quit and go back to the work that makes them a living (they may, of course, continue if the effort yields political or social prominence, but they will never trade a living for influence with no path to a good living, and we get crooked press and politicians out of that market configuration).
Yes, as Seth Godin argues, “In a world of free, everyone can play.” We can all play writer, but when does becoming a writer actually become a living? If we’re going to assume that all writing will be made and delivered at no cost to the reader, how will the writers put a roof over their heads, food on the tables and kids through college? Writing has never been a great living, but it was a living if one worked hard at it. “Free” only