Wheeling & Dealing: What Can Authors Learn from Watching "In the Shark Tank"?
The past two weeks I've been glued to the TV set on Sunday night watching a new show called "In the Shark Tank." One of the reasons I'm compelled by the show (at least for now), which is a remake of a show from overseas called "Dragon's Den," is that I love watching inventors pitch their businesses and products hoping to attract money. It rmeinds me of pitching books with book proposals.
Like watching Donald Trump's show "The Apprentice" in its first couple of seasons, I feel like I'm picking up just a couple of key principles that underlie the mindset of the private investor. The five investors--aka Sharks--are putting in their own capital, not the show's producers, which gives the program a looser result framework than a show where their is one ultimate winner. They come from different industries and so they think also from within their own expertise, interests, and capabilities. So although it is stylized and the inventors are coached for TV and cleaned up in some manner, there is a seed of reality in it that reminds me of my own business.
When authors prepare book proposals often they don't grasp the underlying reason for their existence. They don't see how money is actually earned from sales of units of books, and they don't know the amount of gut level instinct is involved in an acquisitions editor saying yes or no to them, and guessing how successful the project might be. When you've been around as long as I have you see that some editors have remarkable instincts and some . . . not so much. Within yourself you learn how to assess when you're in an area that you don't have a knack for picking winners and when you're in an area where everything you believe manifests, like magic. Being able to rapidly assess possibilities comes from experience and talent. A big tool of the process is valuation-if 10 percent is $100 then 100 percent is $1000. Numbers don't lie.
While publishing is perhaps the least shark-y of industries, it has its moments. One of my favorite quotes from a Shark this week was "Money has no soul." Want to cry? Boohoo. I'll run over with a tissue. It's true though. Money is amoral. Not immoral--A-moral, meaning it is neither good nor bad, neither compassionate nor mean. It depends on who uses it. It's just paper my friends. (Or digits in a computer.) A publishers decisions can be soulful or not, but they also have to be made with clarity of purpose. Money doesn't have a mind. Therefore books aren't charity projects. Publishers count money and assess risk or their business collapses.
As authors we have to be prepared to help publishers reasonably assess the risk and reward of working with us. And we have to understand it too. There is almost nothing more disappointing than wasting effort and time.
Let me know if I can help you get clear:
My book proposal course "7 Quick & Easy Steps to Write and Sell Your First Book Proposal" costs $297. Click Here to Find Out More
Like watching Donald Trump's show "The Apprentice" in its first couple of seasons, I feel like I'm picking up just a couple of key principles that underlie the mindset of the private investor. The five investors--aka Sharks--are putting in their own capital, not the show's producers, which gives the program a looser result framework than a show where their is one ultimate winner. They come from different industries and so they think also from within their own expertise, interests, and capabilities. So although it is stylized and the inventors are coached for TV and cleaned up in some manner, there is a seed of reality in it that reminds me of my own business.
When authors prepare book proposals often they don't grasp the underlying reason for their existence. They don't see how money is actually earned from sales of units of books, and they don't know the amount of gut level instinct is involved in an acquisitions editor saying yes or no to them, and guessing how successful the project might be. When you've been around as long as I have you see that some editors have remarkable instincts and some . . . not so much. Within yourself you learn how to assess when you're in an area that you don't have a knack for picking winners and when you're in an area where everything you believe manifests, like magic. Being able to rapidly assess possibilities comes from experience and talent. A big tool of the process is valuation-if 10 percent is $100 then 100 percent is $1000. Numbers don't lie.
While publishing is perhaps the least shark-y of industries, it has its moments. One of my favorite quotes from a Shark this week was "Money has no soul." Want to cry? Boohoo. I'll run over with a tissue. It's true though. Money is amoral. Not immoral--A-moral, meaning it is neither good nor bad, neither compassionate nor mean. It depends on who uses it. It's just paper my friends. (Or digits in a computer.) A publishers decisions can be soulful or not, but they also have to be made with clarity of purpose. Money doesn't have a mind. Therefore books aren't charity projects. Publishers count money and assess risk or their business collapses.
As authors we have to be prepared to help publishers reasonably assess the risk and reward of working with us. And we have to understand it too. There is almost nothing more disappointing than wasting effort and time.
Let me know if I can help you get clear:
My book proposal course "7 Quick & Easy Steps to Write and Sell Your First Book Proposal" costs $297. Click Here to Find Out More
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