I have been putting the final touches on my new book, Good Boss, Bad Boss: How To Be The Best …. and Learn From The Worst. It is already available for pre-order on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but as it isn't out until September 7th, it seems a little early to talk about it too much and in any event, the pictures and text there need to be repaired. You will be hearing more about the content book here in the coming months, but in the meantime, I thought I would raise a little marketing theory that I have, and ask people what they think.
When I did my first book The Knowing-Doing Gap, now a decade ago, with Jeff Pfeffer, we were told by our publisher that we needed blurbs, those endorsements by well-known people, to help sell the book. I commented that I didn't think they were necessary, my publisher agreed, but said to go ahead and get some anyway. And so we spent weeks and weeks — getting turned by quite a few people — but ultimately got some pretty good people, notably John Chambers from Cisco (who did not read the book), and Bob Waterman (who did read it), and also Richard Kovacevich of Wells Fargo (who also read it). For my next two books, I got blurbs as instructed and got a lot of well-known people, and we turned down by many more. These three books sold pretty well, but none was a blockbuster.
Then along came The No Asshole Rule, with my then new editor Rick Wolff at Business Plus. His philosophy was, if you could get someone really famous who was exactly right for the book, blurbs were good, but otherwise, they have little impact because after all they are not reviews, they are praise (and in fact, are edited by authors and publishers). So I tried for Richard Branson of Virgin fame as he seemed perfect. That didn't work, so we went forward with no blurbs, just a statement on the back that says "Are you part of the problem or part of the solution?" So, my first book with no blurbs also became my first New York Times and BusinessWeek bestseller. I believe that, any qualities of the book aside, the the most effective thing we did was to send out a bunch of advanced copies to bloggers (especially people who I had some past relationship with through Work Matters or for other reasons), and that got the buzz going. There are other reasons, but I think that is the most important.
So, here I am with my new book, Good Boss, Bad Boss. The story is the same. I tried one very famous boss that i admire more than the rest. He has never endorsed a book before, but I figured I would try. That failed, he told me he liked the book but decided to continue his policy so he would not be deluged with requests. As a result, we decided to ask no one else, are putting a bit of text about the book on the back, and are again going to rely on bloggers for advanced buzz and of course all the usual press outlets. Now, I still do blurbs for other people and I do hope they help. And it is always fun to read a book in the early stages. But as you can tell, my perspective at this point is that blurbs don't help much — but having a lot of bloggers and other websites buzzing about a book does.
I wonder what other people think. Am I overgeneralizing from my very small sample? What do you think when you read a blurb on a book? Is it a hollow ritual or something that actually affects your opinion?
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