Simplicity Unbound; Taylor Swift’s Errors Tour; Six-figure Ghostwriters: Newsletter 18 December 2024

Newsletter 73. A nuanced look at simplification, the Author’s Guild’s AI rights position; a mega-agency that might forget creativity, plus three people to follow, three books to read, two podcast interviews, and a partridge in a . . . no, enough of that already!

It’s complicated

We crave simplicity. Boiling things down to their essence saves time and creates clarity. Advertisers and marketers are tops at this. Products like the iPhone and eero home network made things that used to be complex, simple. We devour Real Simple magazine, protect our homes with SimpliSafe, and buy minimalist home products from Simple Human.

Old stuff is complicated. New stuff succeeds when it’s simpler. And yet . . .

Things are rarely as simple as they seem. Ask an expert.

For example, I am an expert on book publishing. I know what it takes to conceive, pitch, write, publish, and market nonfiction books. It’s damn complicated. It’s complicated to get your head around an idea, complicated to assemble chapters, complicated to navigate the Byzantine publishing industry, complicated to turn text into pages, and complicated to get books into retailers. Publishing is not simple.

Before this, I was an analyst of the television industry. That was complicated too: writers, producers, advertisers, television networks, media holding companies, cable companies, TV sets, picture formats, on-demand, streaming, and on ad nauseam. Anyone who’s tried their hand at producing, pitching, broadcasting, making new devices for, or even trying to watch television has encountered the complexity.

Of course, the stuff I don’t know about seems much simpler. And that’s the problem. Because there’s a fundamental fallacy that everyone shares: What I know is complex, while what I don’t know seems simple. Each of us looks at our own deepest experience and feels that we’ve mastered a complex topic: parenting, writing, carpentry, dancing. But when we look at something new, we see only the surface. This is why people think they could land a multi-engine plane, write a novel, or run a major corporation. From the outside, it looks simple. Since you can fly in a plane, read a novel, or buy products from a corporation — and observe the obvious mistakes other people made while you consume their work — you inevitably think, “How hard could it be?”

I’m reminded of the scene in “Moneyball” in which A’s manager Billy Beane and his well-traveled and experienced assistant Ron Washington pay a visit to Scott Hatteberg, a former catcher with elbow problems, to convince him to play first base for the A’s. Hatteberg seems dubious, since he’s never played first base. “It’s not that hard, Scott,” Beane tells Hatteberg. “Tell him Wash.” And Ron Washington, who knows a thing or two about baseball, responds “It’s incredibly hard.”

Looks simple. Not simple.

Politicians are the world’s best at making complex things seem simple. Things like science, getting government checks out to people, catching tax cheats, preventing crime, creating web sites to sign up for medical insurance, publishing government statistics, winning wars, stopping illegal immigration, and so on. We know, looking at these things from the outside, that they’re way more complicated than they ought to be. We really want to believe there could be simple solutions. If there’s a choice between two politicians, and one says “I have a detailed plan to tackle this complex problem” and the other, “It’s simple, we’ll just do x,” the one that promises the simple solution is probably going to get the votes.

It’s never so simple . . .

And yet, the urge to simplify is a force for good. We like getting the weather forecast or calling a car to take us from here to there by tapping on an app. We like publishing our thoughts on blogs with no middleman. We like frozen dinners and microwave ovens and macaroni-and-cheese in a box. Hurrah for the simplifiers!

Simple sells. But simple is never simple. Sometimes the experts who know the complicated nature of things are obstacles in making things simpler. But they know things about how their world works that simplifiers (dare I call them disruptors) haven’t considered.

So if you have the urge to simplify, engage with an expert to learn why the complicated things are the way they are, and understand who will get upset (and resist) when you simplify things.

And if you encounter a marketer, politician, or pundit who is ready to tell you how simple things could be, be very skeptical. It always looks simple from the outside . . . until, of course, the amateur tries to land the plane with you in it.

News for writers and others who think

The Author’s Guild has taken the position that authors retain AI training rights to their content by default, and when those rights are granted to publishers, they should give authors 75-85% of the revenue. I agree in principle. In practice, it will likely take a publisher share of at least 40% to make it worth it for publishers to pursue mass licensing, which is the only practical way to make money from AI training.

Taylor Swift’s self-published Eras Tour book sold an astounding 814,000 copies in two days. Kudos to Swift for recognizing that she doesn’t need a publisher with which to split a huge payday. But next time she really should get a better copy editor to catch the typos before publishing.

In the Wall Street Journal, Jacqui Shine writes about the windfall of cash available for ghostwriters (gift link). “Ghostwriters are making six-figure salaries and negotiating more complex deals as demand increases for their services,” she writes. Trust me, it’s not as simple as it sounds to become an elite and well-compensated ghost.

Here’s the lede of Susan Vranica’s piece in the Journal about the planned merger of already huge ad agency holding companies Omnicom and Interpublic: “During an hour-long call this past week to sell investors on the virtues of a $30 billion merger of two advertising giants, data and technology came up a dozen times each. AI, eight times. ‘Creativity’ was uttered once.” Expect lots of layoffs and better targeting of even worse advertising (gift link).

Three people to follow

Alberto Cairo, talented author, designer, and thinker on data visualization.

Madison Johnson, head of manuscript submissions for Greenleaf Book Group, the o.g. hybrid publisher.

Arvind Narayanan , Princeton professor and coauthor of AI Snake Oil.

Three books to read

What If? 10th Anniversary Edition: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe (Dey Street, 2024). Maximum silliness for nerds: physics meets weirdness.

Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers by Yves Pigneur and Alexander Osterwalder (Wiley, 2010). Still the beautifully designed go-to resource for thinking about ways companies make money.

Improving Your Storytelling: Beyond the Basics for All Who Tell Stories in Work or Play by Doug Lipman (August House, 2005). Whether you’re writing a case study or giving a speech, this book is full of the world’s best advice on telling compelling stories.

Podcast interviews of note

Two places to hear me interviewed, with some fascinating questions and answers:

Bob Buday’s Thought Leadership Podcast — the intersection of books and thought leadership.

LeanPub cofounder Len Epp’s FrontMatter Podcast — some reflections on changes in publishing and new ways for authors to reach audiences.

Programming Note

I will not publish this newsletter next week. I’ll resume publishing on January 1.