They moved the sports books in my local Barnes and Noble the other day, so I wanted to find out why. Stores just don’t do things without a reason. Maybe a dumb reason, but there’s always some reason. So I asked the manager. “We needed to cut back the space of books by five percent,” she explained.

Okay.

“We needed more space for kids’ toys.”

Wait a minute! Isn’t Barnes and Noble…a bookstore?

To a large degree, yes. But it took the movement—and actually the diminishment—of the space devoted to sports books, which is where I start my browsing, to cause me to look around the entire store and see what’s for sale. It ain’t just books. Or kids’ toys, for that matter.

At my Barnes and Noble, you can buy their electronic reader, the Nook. A stand with several Nooks (tightly) attached greets you as you enter the store. Periodically, in the manner of the K-mart blue light special, a Barnes and Noble clerk comes on the PA in the bookstore, interrupting people’s trains of thought as they are perusing books (or children’s toys), and makes a pitch for the wondrousness of the Nook. So you can buy a Nook.

You can also buy chocolates.

And $5.00 birthday cards.

And racks and racks of magazines, of course.

And journals and datebooks.

And used books. Used books are different from new books in that they are on their second visit to Barnes and Noble. The first time around, nobody wanted them. So they were returned to their publishers, who sold them by the ton—that’s right, by the ton—to companies that offer the books to booksellers as “remainders.” Remainders aren’t always evidence of publishing foolhardiness. Sometimes a book might sell half a million copies of the, say, 520,000 that the publisher had printed. Such was the case with Rush Limbaugh’s unbelievably super-bestselling books two decades ago. But by and large, the remainder table is where examples of bad publishing choices, and bad publishing marketing, go to die.

So you can buy a remaindered book, for about half the price of a new one. These books are so lucrative that they enjoy a huge amount of rack space very close to the front door. I’m going to guess that Barnes and Noble makes more money from remaindered books than it does from everything else except the latest bestsellers.

You can buy adult games—not “adult” games but board games adults and sharp kids play. Those are up front, too.

In the winter, I think you can buy umbrellas.

And then so many of the books that Barnes and Noble sells are what publishers used to call “non-book books.” A “non-book book” is a little bit of celebrity disguised as a book. The celebrity might belong to a TV cooking star or an exercise guru or even the victim of a particularly heinous crime who has chosen to seek closure for his or her ordeal on the bestseller list.

So you can buy non-book books, too.

And then, of course, come the toys. Some are book-related. Others, like mini-American Girl dolls, are not. The toy section is growing and growing, and it’s safe to say that the margins on toys are a lot higher than the margins on books. Also, the average good toy has a much broader market than the average good book. There are probably only five million people in the United States who buy more than, say, four books a year for themselves to read, not counting students and other captive audiences. But every kid wants a new toy.

The point of all this inventory-taking is to demonstrate that even in those cases of physical, brick and mortar bookstores that are still selling books, books aren’t selling all that well. If they were, books would be eating into the retail space increasingly occupied by toys, games, electronic devices, $5.00 birthday cards, notebooks, American Girl dolls, and chocolate. But if you’re trying to figure out what’s really going on in the world, the trend is your friend.

Unless you love books. In which case, the trend is a disaster.

What’s the answer? It would certainly help if the publishers published better books. Not more attractive books. Books these days are beautiful. About thirty years ago, the publishing industry hit on the brilliant idea of hiring freelance artists from the music industry, who went from designing album covers to artwork for CD jewel boxes, to design book covers. That launched the modern age of the beautiful book.

But so many of today’s books are like supermodels in print. Gorgeous to look at, attractive to hold, but shallow and vacuous once you get them home. That matters less with an actual supermodel, I would imagine, never having brought one home. But I think you know what I mean here. Bookstores are left with the unenviable task of selling mediocre books to a declining, diminishing audience of book buyers.

That’s a tough marketing row to hoe.

I hate to say it, but if I were running my local Barnes and Noble, I’d be upping my orders for American Girl dolls, Godiva, and Vogue, and Nooks.

But not books.

Steve Jobs transformed more industries than perhaps any human being since Leonardo Da Vinci. Desktop computers. Laptops. Phones. Music. Photography. Not to mention the fields he invented, like the iPod and the iPad.

Amazingly, the only area Jobs couldn’t transform was book publishing. Specifically, the pricing and selling of e-books.

Recently, the justice department announced an anti-trust suit against some of the top New York publishers and Apple, alleging a conspiracy to fix prices for e-books. Apple and a few of the publishers knuckled under and immediately lowered the price of e-books. A few publishers, for whatever reason, decided to fight the suit, but they’ll settle at some point soon, too. How did Steve Jobs let this one get away?

E-books are at once the salvation and destruction of the New York publishing industry. The salvation because publishers don’t have to risk a lot of money printing books, putting them on trucks, displaying them in what few bookstores remain in the United States, and then risking their return from those bookstores if and when they don’t sell.

Instead, of course, the book is delivered wirelessly (an adverb that would’ve had your seventh-grade English teacher in knots), for a few pennies. And of course, publishers get to charge whatever the market will bear—typically about $12.00.

E-books are also the destruction of the publishing industry because when you buy a physical book, even if you never read it or you don’t like it, you can put it on your shelf in your home or office and look imposing, intellectual, and very smart to anyone who enters. Behold my library. I am wise. And you, by comparison, are not.

You can’t do that with an e-book. If you don’t think an e-book is good, you don’t have a book that makes you look smart. You’ve got a computer file for which you paid $12.00, which makes you feel dumb.

One of the constant themes in these messages is that the publishing industry has debased the very concept of the book by publishing mostly mediocre, repetitive, derivative works of fiction and nonfiction. Why do these books get deals when the better books go begging? Because their authors have huge followings on social media, or because they speak frequently in front of large audiences, or because they have huge email lists. In today’s publishing environment, a solid marketing plan with mediocre content gets a book deal, while great content and a slender marketing plan does not.

E-books essentially allow publishers to get lazy, because somehow you have to take more responsibility for physical product that people will actually hold in their hands than for a computer file full of information of dubious quality packaged and sold as an e-book.

So now we come back to Steve Jobs. He got together with the major publishers, according to his own words in Walter Isaacson’s definitive biography, and basically said, “Look, guys. We all want to make more money. So let’s all charge the same amount for e-books. That way, you publishers won’t be competing against each other, thereby lowering the price to the consumer, but squeezing your own profit margins. Let’s all hold hands, sing Kumbaya, and maintain a price for e-books that guarantees all of us high levels of profit.”

The only problem with competitors having a conversation like that is that it’s against the law. It’s against anti-trust law. It’s against article two of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. So the government, acting on behalf of we, the people, filed suit. And Jobs’s e-book publishing cartel was vanquished.

And you think the federal government is doing nothing for you.

Immediately, the price of many publishers’ e-books slid by $2.00 or $3.00 on Amazon, and the rest are likely to follow suit as well. What tipped the regulators off as much as the price fixing, according to published reports, was the fact that Jobs and the publishers made these consumer-unfriendly pacts not in smoke-filled rooms but in the backrooms of high-end Manhattan restaurants. Sounds like the anti-trust attorneys at Justice, stuck on McDonalds-sized government meal stipends, couldn’t bear the thought of Jobs and the publishers enjoying fine dining while screwing the public.

What’s going to happen now? The remaining publishers are likely to settle. It’s just too expensive to go to court over something like this, and at the end of the day, the publishers have to know that the federal government is right (for once). This means that we’ll see greater and greater price competition on e-books. And as the quality of published books continues to decline, this means that we’ll see the price of e-books slipping closer and closer to their true value, which, by and large, is a heck of a lot less than $9.99.

Steve Jobs transformed pretty much every industry under the sun. But when we look at Jobs’s astonishing legacy, book publishing will forever be the one industry that got away.

It’s never been easy for a new novelist to find a home with a major publisher, but things have gotten incredibly worse over the last few years. One of the latest developments in New York-style publishing is that first-time novelists get book deals, but they don’t get physical books. They are “published” only on e-book format. If they sell enough copies online, then they can hope one day to be published in physical form.

This new trend is unsettling, because book buyers tend to be older, and they like physical books. I know that your grandparents have a Kindle, and I’m happy for them, but how many novels by first-time novelists are they likely to download? Publishers certainly aren’t lifting a finger to publicize these e-book first novels, any more than they did to publicize first novels published as physical books in years gone by.

It’s a deeply troubling development on a number of levels. First, the death of browsing in bookstores as book sales have shifted online means that it is less and less likely that a book buyer will stumble upon a first novel, give it a read, and develop a lifelong reading relationships with that author. It also means that first-time authors are going to find it harder and harder to create a buzz for themselves. Yes, of course you can do that on social media, and indeed, you must. But first-time novelists today no longer have the astonishing experience of walking into a bookstore and seeing their books on the shelves, or even in the front window.

That’s how things were way back in 1986, when I published my first novel, The Socratic Method, with Simon and Schuster. The book could be found in pretty much any bookstore wherever you went. I took a long drive from Boston to New York City, down the back roads, stopping in every town where I could find a local bookstore. Back then, there were plenty. In each, I stopped in and explained that I was a new author and that I wanted to sign my book. They were delighted to see me. Those bookstores, alas, are all gone, and so is the opportunity for first-time authors to develop relationships with book sellers. That’s all history.

Shortly after my first novel was published, I got a call from a bookstore owner in Manhattan who told me that although they specialized in murder mysteries, they liked my book so much that they were recommending it to all of their customers. How’s that for a 28-year-old writer? Sadly, that bookstore is gone, too.

The major publishers are paying microscopic advances, if they’re offering any advances at all, to the authors of first-time novels. I didn’t get much for my book—Simon and Schuster offered me $7,500.00, and when I sought to raise the amount, my then-editor, Bob Asahaina, just laughed at me over the phone and said, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” Today, a first-time novelist would be extraordinarily lucky to get an advance of $7,500.00 for the rights to publish his or her book as an e-book. The game has changed.

If a publisher is not willing to invest in the physical manufacture of a new novel, and unwilling to pay the freight to have it shipped to whatever bookstores around the country are still standing, how much of a commitment is that publisher really making? Especially when they are backing up a miniscule or non-existent advance with miniscule or non-existent marketing dollars. This begs the question of why it’s even beneficial to publish by a major publisher in the first place. Back in the day, the major publishers bought enough ads in book review sections of newspapers that their books were guaranteed a reading by the book review editors. Those editors would not review every single book that came in from a major publisher, nor would they give every book a favorable review. But a book from a major publisher would be read.

In my own experience, the New York Times, both daily and Sunday, published phenomenal reviews of my first novel. Christopher Lehman-Haupt, then the taste setter not just for New York Times readers but for book reviewers and regular readers across the country, published a review of The Socratic Method on Thanksgiving Day, 1986. That was another thrill, followed a few months later when Scott Turow, author of Presumed Innocentand many novels since, gave the book another glowing review in the Sunday New York Times Book Review.

More accolades came in the New Yorker, People magazine, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and other newspapers and magazines across the country. It was an experience that I suppose can only be compared to crack-cocaine, not that I’ve tried it. But in terms of a sense of head rush and addictive euphoria—it was an unmatchable thing. I am incredibly fortunate to have come of age as a writer when such events took place.

Today, Craigslist has killed the newspaper, by removing all classified ad revenue which once made newspapers profitable. As a result, book reviews and book review sections have all but disappeared from most newspapers, or have slimmed down to the point of unrecognizability. The major publishers no longer spend a lot of money on ad dollars, because they have come to the conclusion that ads don’t work. Of course, they sold books with ads for a long time, but the world has changed. As a result, a first-time novelist is bereft of many of the joys of publishing that older authors were fortunate enough to experience. Seeing your book on a bookshelf. Getting reviews in major newspapers and magazines. Book signings. (It’s tough to sign an e-book.) And the pure, outrageous joy of holding your own book.

Today, many new novelists recognize that the only way to gain traction as an author is to self-publish their novel, on Smashwords or Lulu or some other Internet site, perhaps selling it for as little as $1.99. In so doing, they can build a large enough following to attract the attention of a New York publisher, who will then want to pay a reasonable advance for the right to continue publishing them. But of course, a New York publisher is going to do no more marketing for a third-time novelist, no matter how successful, than for a first-time novelist. On top of that, you keep most of the money if you self–publish on a site like Smashwords or Lulu. If you publish with New York, you will run into their battery of sharp-penciled accountants who will make sure that you don’t see another dime after the advance.

So you’re probably asking the same question those novelists are: What do I need New York for? The sad answer is that novelists no longer need New York, because New York publishers have given up on them. It was never easy to sell fiction. But it’s immeasurably harder to sell something that is never published. Disseminating an e-book? Fantastic. It’s the wave of the future. In fact, it’s the wave of the present. But don’t tell me it’s the same thing as holding your own book, seeing it reviewed, visiting bookstores, doing signings, and all the other trappings of authordom.

Suddenly the past seems like a very long time ago.

But Isn’t It A Vanity Book?

Is a self-published book a vanity book?

Many times, people come to BusinessGhost so that we can help them to make their book a reality. They sometimes wonder whether a book we do would be a vanity book is extremely valid. I want to share with you what our clients discovered about this question.

First, we don’t do vanity books. Vanity is all about ego. It’s all about “Look at me! I wrote a book!” It’s all about showing off and looking to one-up everyone else. Instead of a new sports car, a book becomes a form of ego gratification. And as for the contents of a vanity book…it’s all about how wonderful the author is. How brilliant. How fantastic. It’s a book that accomplishes nothing for the world. It simply stokes the ego of the author, who can go around talking about how wonderful he is.

The books we do, by contrast, are not ego-driven. We seldom get approached to do such books. The clients we attract, instead, find that their books are acts of service. They are contributing to the well-being of others by sharing their ideas in the broadest possible manner. Their credentials and experience must of course be a part of the book, but simply to give credence to the ideas they will share. The book is not all about the author. It is all about the reader.

A physician, a financial advisor, an attorney, a business owner, or any professional only has so many hours in a day, so many individuals he or she can influence. The purpose of a service-driven book is to extend the reach of that expert to a considerably broader audience. There is nothing vanity-based about going to the office; it’s what you do in order to serve people. Likewise, our clients have found that there is nothing vanity-based about taking the same ideas they would share with one client or one patient at a time, and bringing those ideas to the world.

Ego-driven books are vanity books. Books that help people are acts of service. This is the kind of book we are contemplating.

The next question our clients ask is whether a book is less meaningful without the imprimatur of a publisher. Let’s examine exactly where the publishing world is today, and whether that imprimatur still has value.

The simple truth is that New York publishers today are no longer primarily interested in the quality of the content of the books they publish. At first, this sounds like a harsh accusation. The reality becomes apparent when my clients have stopped and considered the quality of books in their fields that they see when they browse in a bookstore (if they can still find a bookstore). Publishing has changed. Publishers are willing to publish books with mediocre content…as long as the marketing plan for the book is solid gold.

In other words, it doesn’t matter how much you know about your topic, how new your ideas are, how helpful your book will be, or even whether your book “deserves” to be published. The publishers stopped seeing themselves as guardians of the reading public decades ago, before they started to merge together and then became purchased by international conglomerates like Bertelsmann, News Corp, Viacom, and Hachette. All they really care about is how many people follow the author on Twitter, how many Facebook “friends” he or she may have, how many people they speak in front of each year, whether they already appear on national TV, and so on. The content is a secondary issue. The marketing plan is paramount.

This means that authors with great ideas but lacking a national media platform seldom get book deals in today’s dollar-driven publishing environment. The publishers all but skip the content part of a book proposal only to focus on the marketing plan. The major publishers are not interested in helping people build their brands. Their attitude is, come back and see us when you have built a national brand. Until then, then forget about it.

This means that the major publishers have actually devalued their own imprimaturs, by publishing second-rate books and ignoring potential first-rate books. If you don’t believe me, spend an hour at Barnes & Noble and see if you can find really first-rate books in your field, or in any area you know about. By and large, the stuff that’s published today is second-rate.

Also, a book deal with a major publisher means your book will have a shelf life in a bookstore of only a matter of weeks before unsold copies are returned to the publisher for a full-refund. So what exactly are we getting along with that imprimatur? The books I produce for my clients are just as attractively produced as those by the major houses. The books I produce are available on Amazon (and on order at any Barnes & Noble), the same as those done by the major houses. My clients’ books come out within eight weeks of completion — not more than a year or two.

Some publishers still pay advances, but the numbers are miniscule–often as little at $5,000 or $10,000–and sometimes they offer no advances at all. So there is seldom any real money to be made from getting a deal with a major publisher–unless that person already has a Dr. Oz-like national media footprint. I always tell my clients that making money from the sale of individual copies of books is seldom the goal for authors. The real money comes in terms of new clients or patients for them, speaking engagements (where they sell copies back of the room in addition to their speaking fees), consulting, and other ways.

Some of my clients also felt that they would not be taken as seriously as authors if their books did not have a major publisher’s name on the spine. What they found is that practically no one takes into consideration the publisher of a book when making the decision whether to buy a book. The criteria by which people judge books are these:

1. The qualifications of the author to write the book;

2. Whether the title, subtitle, and table of contents indicate that the author has the capacity to solve the specific problem the reader needs to solve; and

3. Endorsements (“blurbs”) on the back of the book from individuals who are either well-known or at least highly credible, due to their professional standing and credentials accompanying their blurbs.

Very, very few people have ever said, “This book meets all three of these criteria and it will solve my problem, but I won’t buy it because I’ve never heard of the publisher.” In reality, most people have never heard of the imprints, or mini-brands, of the major publishers or the names of smaller yet successful and credible publishing houses. They just buy a book if they think it will solve their problem.

This holds true with individuals at every level of the socioeconomic spectrum, from CEO’s to young people just starting their careers.

So when you put all of these points together — the publishers’ willful cheapening of their own brand; the very brief shelf-life of a book; the fact that publishers are paying less and less, and often practically nothing in order to buy the right to publish a book; that the real money from having a book doesn’t come from book sales but from building one’s own practice or consultancy or business; and that most readers don’t care who published a book, as long as it appears that it will guide them to a needed solution — the imprimatur of a major publisher means very little, indeed.

Our clients who were concerned about whether they and their books would be taken seriously in the marketplace have been gratified to discover that the world viewed them as authors and not as anything less. Their books have been acts of service to the world (and at the same time, in truth, a little bit ego-gratifying, too, and there’s nothing wrong with that — as long as it’s not the primary purpose of the book). You’ll find that the book will dramatically extend your reach, allowing you to bring your wisdom to a large — and grateful — readership, people who need the solutions you can provide.

Vanity? Hardly. An act of service that propels you to a position of preeminence in your marketplace? Absolutely.

One of my favorite writer stories is the one about the guy who dropped everything to write full time. He exclaimed, “I made three sales my first year! I sold my house, I sold my car, and I sold my furniture!”

We all know it’s never been easy to make a living as a writer. The landmark Author’s Guild survey of the 1970s indicated that the average writer makes a little bit more per hour than a person flipping burgers at McDonalds.

To which I respond, “Who wants to read a book by an average writer?”

This is why we all have so much respect for the concept of the bestselling author. It took me more than twenty years before a book I wrote made the bestseller list. In my case, it was Dropping the Ball, which I co-wrote with Dave Winfield. Seven more bestsellers quickly followed, including my (so far) only book on the New York Times Bestseller List, Making Jack Falcone, which I co-wrote with FBI undercover agent Joaquin Garcia.

Having taken this long to crack the bestseller list, I can tell you that it means a lot to me to have done so. And then, somehow, once you get in the club, it gets easier and easier to repeat. In 2012, I have three books with major publishers, and there is every reason to expect that each of them will be a national bestseller as well.

But how important is it today for authors to be bestselling authors?

Unless you do what I do for a living—ghostwrite and co-write—does it even matter at all?

When I ask my clients about goals for their books, they often say the same thing: They want to be a bestselling author.

That makes sense. Sales have always been the yardstick by which we measure a book’s success. And if you’re competitive by nature, why wouldn’t you want to be a bestseller? Why wouldn’t you be in it to win it?

But it’s necessary to define what “winning” really means.

A bestselling book is a payday for the publisher, and not necessarily one for the author. A New York publishing house typically takes 85 to 90 percent of the income a book generates, leaving the author with just 10 to 15 percent. If a book is sold in a foreign market, including Canada, the publisher might even take 95 percent. If the book is sold through the Book of the Month Club, the author may just get 3 or 4 percent of the cover price. So your book can do very well for the publisher’s bottom line and give you the glory of being a bestselling author. But that doesn’t necessarily translate into what I call CPR—Cash in your Pocket Right now.

Today, it actually means less to be a bestselling author than in years past. That’s because you can game the system on Amazon all too easily and create for yourself national bestselling status in the blink of an eye. Here’s how:

Do a mailing to everyone on your list. Tell them you have a new book coming out, and ask them to buy the book between, say, ten and eleven pm on a given day.

Amazon recalculates its bestseller list once an hour. If a book makes the top 100 on Amazon’s overall list of books, even for an hour, it can legitimately be considered a nationally bestselling book. Amazon also has sub-lists on every topic you can think of, so as to make it as easy as possible for book browsers to find the book they need. These sub-lists are also updated hourly. It’s not a huge stretch of the truth to claim that a book that appeared in the top 100 for one hour on any of Amazon’s sub-lists is also a national bestseller.

But even if you want to be in the top 100, you can do it if your friends buy 750 copies of your book within a sixty-minute time period. Sometimes, it can take as few as 400 copies sold to get your book into the top 100 category. And then your book is a national bestseller for all time, and so, by extension, are you.

If you sell 750 books on Amazon in one hour, you (or more likely, your publisher) will be enriched to the tune of about $1,500. Maybe more. While $1,500 is not an amount of money to be sneezed at, it’s certainly not enough to fund your retirement or even a family vacation, in many cases. That’s why I tell my clients that being a bestselling author isn’t as meaningful as it seems.

The only people who really need to be nationally bestselling authors are those who make a living, or intend to make a living, from public speaking. It’s all but impossible to get meaningful, paid speaking engagements unless you are an author, and it’s even harder to be taken seriously if your book is not a national bestseller. So if the speaking platform is in your business model, go gather your 750 closest friends and become a bestseller as quickly as possible. But if not, then you need to focus on something else: becoming a “best earning author.”

The books I write with celebrities are enormous fun to do.  On the other hand, books I write for my business clients are incredibly lucrative for them, even though they may never sell a single copy. The bread and butter of BusinessGhost, if you will, are books that our clients use as marketing tools for their businesses or practices. That’s because there’s nothing like a book to confer authority on an individual, to create a sense of uniqueness and preeminence, and to tell one’s story in great detail.

This last point is incredibly important. In today’s world, pretty much everybody’s website in any given industry looks the same. In fact, they all look great! Some video, some attractive photos, some well-written copy, some endorsements from past clients. A decent website demonstrates credibility. But it doesn’t demonstrate what makes you special. It doesn’t get your unique story across.

That’s because there just isn’t time.

When people read a website, they typically aren’t even reading—they’re glancing, they’re noticing, they’re watching some video, but they aren’t deeply engaged in a transfer of information, let alone deep knowledge, about a topic. And they’re certainly not getting clarity about the most important topic of all: why they should hire you and not a competitor.

That’s where books come in.  They create a sense of certainty that you truly are the world’s leading expert on a given topic.

What would it be worth to your business if every prospect with whom you came in contact knew that you understood the problems they faced, that you were the unquestioned authority on solving those problems, and that you had a clear path to providing solutions that they could read and discover for themselves?

We have financial planners for whom we have written BusinessGhost books, and they make $40,000 to $50,000 or more in fees every time they add a new client. We have companies that add million-dollar clients to their rosters on an ongoing basis, because their book tells their story.

We advocate giving away books for free. Our clients will print up hundreds of copies and give them to their prospects, so as to get this incredibly important body of knowledge into those prospects’ hands. We also make our books available to our clients as downloadable PDFs, which our clients offer for free on their websites, in exchange for contact information.

What’s the good of making $2 or $3 a sale on a book when you could make $50,000 a client instead? Or in other words, are you going into the book business with your book, or are you using your book to build your business?

This is the way we want our clients to think about the books we are creating for them.

Look, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be a bestselling author. It’s exciting and fun. But the real game is to be a best earning author. And as you can see, it can be a lot more lucrative to be a best earning author instead of a bestseller.

If your heart is still set on bestseller-dom, not to worry. I have a colleague whose business takes books and launches them to the top of the bestseller list (for a fee, of course). He took one client of mine and boosted her novel to the #2 spot on the overall Barnes and Noble list. He swears he would’ve made her #1, had President Obama’s book not been lodged firmly in first place that day. He took a nonfiction book a client of mine wrote and pushed it to #10 on the overall Barnes and Noble list. (If you want to get in contact with him, let me know.)

The point is that whether you get 750 of your best friends to buy your book, hire my buddy, or simply do the hard work of having a book reach the bestseller list of its own accord (and thus enrich your publisher), I hope you’ll agree with me that being a bestselling author is terrific. But becoming a best earner? That’s really the way to go.

Black Friday has come and gone, and neither on that day nor today, Cyber-Monday, have I seen a single bookstore opening at midnight or 6 a.m. and offering steep discounts on books.

In fact, Black Friday was the day on which Barnes & Noble announced the closure, at year’s end, of its 28,000 square foot flagship location in the Westside Pavilion in West Los Angeles, making Southern California one giant step closer to being free of books for sale.

Sigh.

The accumulation of ideas is much subtler, and obviously much less important, than the accumulation of stuff.

John Bogle, creator of Vanguard Funds and an author of highly respected books on investing, tells the story of Joseph Heller, author of the classic novel Catch-22, standing at a party in the vast summer home of a hedge fund billionaire in Sag Harbor.

“Did you know,” someone asks Heller, as Bogle tells the story, “that the guy who owns this house earns more every week than you’ve earned in 50 years from Catch-22?”

“Yes, but I have one thing he’ll never have,” Heller says. “Enough.”

We’re living through one of the worst financial periods in modern times, a debt crisis of historical proportions. And yet somehow the solution involves consumers going to stores, buying more stuff, and accumulating more debt. Am I missing something?

Thanksgiving, in theory, is the most spiritual of secular holidays, a chance to acknowledge our gratitude for what we have. Thanksgiving is also, as Johnny Carson once said, is “the one time in the year when families get together and thank God they only have to get together one day in the year.”

And yet the holiday is increasingly diminished by the urge to splurge. Not even tryptophan keeps people from busting the doors of Target and Walmart.

Why?

We’re all just like the hedge fund owner in Sag Harbor, except that we don’t have hedge funds to subsidize our shopping sprees.

We have no idea what enough is.

Our drug of choice is more.

More devices. More screens. More stuff.

And yet the things most of us are looking for can’t be found in stores, and, as the expression goes, they aren’t even things.

What do we really lack?

Answers.

Connection.

Meaning.

Freedom.

Love.

The buzzword that defines our era is “sustainability.” We desire a sustainable environment, a sustainable economy, a sustainable future.

Of course, all that sustainability stuff goes out the window when everybody burns fossil fuel in their midnight rides to the stores to buy more stuff and fill the earth with packaging now and the newly purchased items…eventually.

I’ll tell you what kind of sustainability is really threatened when bookstores close and Walmart stays open all night, when things matter more than thoughts — the ability of people to sustain reasoned argument or a series of ideas beyond that which fits into a text message.

For all these reasons, I’d like to propose a subversive act as the gift-giving season unfolds.

Give people books.

Not a gift card on Amazon, which can be applied to DVDs, widescreens, or anything else under the sun. That’s why they called it Amazon — a raging river of stuff.

Give people actual books. And not even ebooks but physical books. Paperbacks and hardcovers.

I’m old school enough to believe that you can derive more pleasure from a library card than a credit card.

That the most sustainable fuel of all is ideas.

That books — good books — can provide the non-thing things that we’re spending fortunes trying to buy in stores.

That a book can change a mind, an attitude, a society, a life.

Give your loved ones and friends some of those books.

And then maybe some Chelsea Handler to round things out.

Now we move from Black Friday to Cyber Monday to Christmas and Chanukah. As Tom Lehrer sang, “Angels we have heard on high…tell us to go out and buy!”

Buy someone a book.

Because a book…of all things…might just be enough.

Millions of people wish they were bestselling novelists, but what do bestselling novelists wish for?

To be rock stars, of course. Turns out that Dave Barry and Stephen King, both possessed of the same desire, shared the same book marketing person, Kathi Goldmark.  When she heard the same dream put forth by both men, she thought, in the best Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland tradition, why not put on a show? The show became the Rock Bottom Remainders, a band featuring the likes of King, Barry, Barbara Kingsolver, Amy Tan, Roy Blount, Jr., Scott Turow, and for one unforgettable night, me.

I was on the council of the Authors Guild during the 1990s, and I had gotten to know a lot of the nation’s top authors as a result⎯Erica Jong, Judy Bloom, Scott Turow, Roger Angell, and many others. One thing led to another, and it’s been too many years to remember what those things were, but I was invited to join the group on May 22, 1993 for two shows in a small, sweaty club called Nightstage in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I met the Remainders the night before, in a bar/restaurant in Northampton, Massachusetts, where they were performing on their way to Cambridge. That night, I had one of the most hysterical dinners of my life with Dave Barry and Roy Blount, Jr., two of America’s greatest humorists. Barry told a long and memorable story about how, in the 1960s, he and a friend were driven inside a U-Haul trailer, down the New Jersey Turnpike, strung out on marijuana. They spent the entire drive trying to figure out why the world looked upside-down through the peephole in the trailer, a question that can indeed consume hours if the marijuana is strong enough, which it was.

That night I got to play 8-ball with Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club, and Roy Blount, Jr. taught me the words to the songs we would sing. In every city, the Remainders would pick up a couple of local authors to join the chorus, and in Cambridge I had the privilege of doing just that.

On the way back from Northampton to Boston, where I lived at the time, I was working on the words to 60s hits including “Louie, Louie”⎯who knew the song even had real words?  I was so consumed with getting the lyrics right that it’s amazing I never drove off the Mass Pike.

And then, the next day, came my fifteen minutes of fame. The shows were well-attended, and Roy Blount, Jr. really sold me to a local crowd by explaining that I was one of their own, a local author joining the band for the day. I’m not a big ego guy, but I sure liked that round of applause when I was up on stage. We did our songs, the audience danced and went crazy seeing Ridley Pearson on electric guitar, and Amy Tan delivering an astonishingly sexy version of “These Boots Were Made For Walking” as Roy Blount, Jr. and I did the chorus.  “Louie, Louie” brought the house down.

In between shows, I got to sit in the tour bus with Stephen King, who could not have been kinder to a young and unknown writer like myself.

“I write the way I do because I have the heart of an eight-year-old boy,” King told me. “I keep it in a jar on my desk.”

I asked him the question I always ask major authors, so I can go back and tell my writing classes. At the time, I was teaching three times a year at U.C.L.A. and at private classes in the Boston area. The key question: how do you organize your work?

King gave a thoughtful reply.

“I honestly don’t do any outlining,” he said. “I’ll just write two drafts and I’ll polish, and along the way I’ll write myself notes like, ‘Remember to explain how Billy got the money for the airplane.’”

First, I was astonished by the fact that someone could write a 1,200 page manuscripts that flowed perfectly without creating even the slightest sense of an outline. That astonished me. And second, I remember sitting in the bus and thinking to myself, how Billy got the money for the airplane? Billy must be a kid, and kids don’t get money for airplanes. That’s so Stephen King.

Someone was kind enough to take a picture of King and me, and I look, to use the phrase of my fellow Authors Guild member, the great baseball writer Roger Angell, “unforgivably young.” I had just joined a self-help group of which King was also a member, and we had discussed that fact. As the photo was snapped, King, who graciously put his arm around me, whispered in my ear, “It gets better.”

The other memory of my one evening as a Rock Bottom Remainder was this⎯two very attractive, blonde German girls had taken a fancy to me as I performed, and invited me to join them in their hotel room. True story. I followed them, away from the theater in Cambridge, only to lose them in those pre-cell phone days in the swirling Cambridge traffic.

Perhaps it’s just as well. Otherwise, they might have proven Stephen King wrong. It probably would never have gotten better than that.

Last Thursday I spent ninety minutes with Debbie Reynolds, who, at 5’1″ seems smaller than she appeared on the big screen in Singing in the Rain and who, at age 79, is still larger than life. Ms. Reynolds is among the last of a dying breed, a true, old Hollywood star. She came up when the studio system ruled and elevated small-town girls like herself to international acclaim, and she carries herself with the same combination of insouciance and Hollywood royalty that made her famous so many years ago.

I first met her because I needed to interview her for a book project I’m working on, the memoirs of an even older Hollywood star: watch this space for information about that book a few months from now. Ms. Reynolds is and has been among the closest friends of that Hollywood icon for more than sixty years.

She lives in a family compound in the canyons north of Beverly Hills, in a smallish house surrounded by memorabilia and memories, Harold Lloyd’s player piano, autographed portraits of all the stars she knew and loved, gowns from Hollywood films of the 1930s, and sharp memories of an era that exists no longer. She even had her Girl Scout merit badge sash, which had more merit badges than anything I’d ever seen.

“Whenever I do anything,” she explained, “I do it to the absolute best of my ability. Also, back then, if you sold Girl Scout cookies, you kept two cents for every box, and if you sold enough boxes, you went to summer camp. That’s how I got to go to camp.”

“I’m a retired star,” she said, evoking in my mind thoughts of a kinder, gentler Norma Desmond.

“There’s no such thing as a retired star,” I said.

She turned quickly.

“You’re right,” she said. “The industry retired.”

Ms. Reynolds has little use for today’s films, or for that matter, today’s culture of promiscuity, young women with tattoos, and expletives taking the place of well-written film dialogue. She’s a small-town Texas girl at heart, raised in the Church of the Nazarene, a branch of Christianity that forbade its members even to see movies. Her own father never saw Singing in the Rain, because their church didn’t allow it.

How did she become a movie star? Debbie entered the Miss Burbank of 1948 contest and won it, wearing a skimpy bathing suit, which she showed me, and lip-synching and acting in a silly way to a popular song of the day. An MGM talent scout, yes, the studios had real, live talent scouts back then, witnessed her victorious performance and invited her to Hollywood.

Debbie Reynolds was 17 when she made Singing in the Rain. She slept in her studio dressing room, which she described as only slightly larger than the couch she was sitting on as we spoke, because her family was too poor for her to afford a car, and she would have had to leave Burbank at 3:00 in the morning to take a series of busses to get her to Warner’s lot in time for the morning call.

“I felt safe,” she said. “The guards knew I was sleeping up there, on the floor of my little dressing room. I had nowhere else to go.”

In many ways, she says, she was surprised as much as anyone by her own stardom. She was smaller and lacking in sex appeal compared with the Lana Turners and the Lauren Bacalls, the icons of the era who became her close friends. She had never danced before Singing in the Rain, and she had never kissed, either.

“I was taking ballet and acting,” she recalled. “I had no interest in boys, and I certainly didn’t want to be taking a class in kissing.”

Her dates, such as they were, ended with her father standing in silhouette behind the door of the small house in Burbank to which they’d moved when she was seven, patiently or not so patiently waiting for her date to say goodnight. Her father, all of 5’7″, stood there behind the door with a baseball bat, an unspoken invitation for the boy to get the heck off their porch, which he invariably would, and quickly. In fact, when it came time for the last scene of Singing in the Rain, where Gene Kelly kisses her in front of the billboard announcing their successful movie, she had never kissed anyone, family members notwithstanding.

She had to be shown how to kiss and be kissed, she recalls, and I won’t tell that entire story, because I don’t want to steal the thunder of the Hollywood legend whose memoir I am currently writing. Instead, that legend gave her a lesson, she said it took just a few minutes, and he claims that it went on for hours in how to kiss. Thus she was ready, or so she thought, for the moment when Gene Kelly would embrace her. To her shock and horror, Kelly not only kissed her once the cameras rolled, but jammed his tongue down her throat, which she had never expected or heard of. Disgusted, and outraged, she backed off, gagged, shrieked, and ran crying all the way to her dressing room.

Production halted until someone could coax her back to the set. She says that if you take a look at the last scene of the film, you’ll see a mightily annoyed Gene Kelly giving her the tiniest of unromantic, closed-mouth smooches at what should have been the happy triumph of a couple over all manner of Hollywood adversity.

Debbie Reynolds is 79, the survivor of three marriages, and four business managers who stole from her, by her account, $100 million. She recently sold a large amount of memorabilia for $12 million and is preparing a second sale, which saddens her, because she doesn’t like to surrender her memories, and certainly not for cash. Ms. Reynolds and the family grew up poor, and while other actresses were wearing beautiful dresses, she shopped at the Salvation Army and wore a sweatshirt that had her real name, Frannie, stenciled across the front. Maybe that’s why she still gives the sense of not taking herself, nor the whole enterprise that has been her career, overly seriously. Make that seriously, but not too seriously.

She could not have been a more gracious host, even singing a few bars from “Good Morning” when I told her how much my 11-year-old daughter loved the film. “Children love the songs from Singing in the Rain because they’re so easy to sing,” she explained, as she briefly launched into the song. The voice is still there, the eyes are still there, the memories are still there. And for ninety minutes, I had the incredible privilege of being there as well.

The following Sunday, she appeared at the Cerritos Center For The Arts, where she applauded her audience, which included my mother, my wife, my 11-year-old daughter, and myself, for “coming to see Debbie while she’s still alive.”  I urge you to do likewise!

Alan Arkin is one of America’s most celebrated comic actors. He came up with the original Second City crew–the legendary Chicago improvisational troupe that has graced the stage and cinema with so many great comedians. Arkin’s memoirs, An Improvised Life, is that rare thing these days–a newly-published book worth reading cover to cover.

The key to improvisational comedy, Arkin writes, falls down to three simple words: accept every suggestion. For example, if you’re up on stage, and your partner says, “We’re on a rocket ship to the moon, and I get airsick,” you can’t say, “No, we’re not. We’re at your kitchen table, paying the bills.”

In other words, Arkin is saying, every statement, every gesture, on the part of one person performing improvisational comedy is a suggestion to the other or others about where they are and what should happen next.  According to Arkin, if your partner tells you you’re on a rocket to the moon, then agree, and build on that, instead of trying to dominate and control and take the scene in some other direction.

Accepting every suggestion, Arkin suggests, builds trust onstage and creates the possibility of great comedy. Rejecting suggestions leads to confusion, on the part of both performers and audience, as to where things are going. The success of the genre of improvisational comedy hinges on the performers’ willingness to accept every suggestion.

This got me thinking. How different improvisational comedy is from real life, where we tend to reject every suggestion, whether it comes from a spouse, the boss, our kids, or total strangers on a freeway. Chris Jennings, who teaches Sandler Sales Training in Irvine, California, has a great line about this. He says conversations, especially those in sales, are like a seesaw, where one person’s pushing on yes, causing the other person to push on no. The trick in sales, Jennings teaches, is for the sales person to push on no, causing the potential buyer to push on yes.

Accepting every suggestion, the golden rule of improvisational comedy, therefore runs counter to the basic human instinct to disagree with anything and everything other people tell us, and to reject all suggestions out of hand, whether they are for a new way to do things at work or over decisions to which movie to see that night, or indeed to stay home and not see any movie. Opposites attract in real life as in improv, but somehow things work better when people train themselves to accept, instead of reject and deny, the suggestions of others. So if accepting every suggestion leads to improvisational comedy, then rejecting every suggestion must lead to the opposite–what you could call improvisational tragedy. And all too often, that’s what life is–improvisational tragedy.

There are no scripts in life. Pretty much everything that other people say to us is a suggestion, whether it’s couched in the terms of a direct order or a polite request. Arkin’s book got me to thinking about how much sweeter life would be if we applied that basic rule of accepting every suggestion to the unscripted mayhem and conflict that is real life. Would it really kill me if I went to see the movie my wife wants us to see? Would it really ruin my day if I let the driver trying to enter my lane actually get in? Would my professional career be stunted if I did something that worked someone else’s way?

In a broad sense, the publishing of a memoir indicates the author’s belief in two ideas: first, that his or her life story would be interesting to other people, and second, that perhaps some lessons could be drawn from that life that might improve the lives of others. These two beliefs point to the main reasons of why people write books, and why people read them–they provide entertainment and education in varying degrees. The best books usually provide both.

I enjoyed Arkin’s book because it was great fun to trace the history of American comedy, onstage and in the movies, over the many decades of Arkin’s own life. That’s entertainment. But the book also got me thinking about this question of improvisational comedy, which we pay to see, and improvisational tragedy, which we tend to create for free. The great playwright Stephen Sondheim said that his idea of a perfect evening in the theatre is where you laugh for three hours straight and then you got home and you couldn’t sleep. I won’t lie–I slept just fine after reading Arkin’s An Improvised Life, which is all you can really ask of a book.

So the next time you’re offered a suggestion, at home, at work, anywhere–remember Arkin’s suggestion. Accept it. As long as life is an improvisation, let’s improvise comedy instead of tragedy. It might just make the world—or at least your world—a better place.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the privilege of speaking to about three hundred people at a four-day event put on by T. Harv Eker, author of the massively successful Secrets of a Millionaire Mind. The event took place at Olympic Park, a forty minute sojourn from downtown Sydney at the locus of activity for the 2000 summer Olympic games.

When I got to the hotel, which must have been built as athlete housing for those games, I asked if there was a gym on the premises. There wasn’t.

“There’s a pool across the street,” the concierge said. “I’ll give you a pass.”

The “pool across the street” turned out to be the Olympic swimming facility, which is a pretty awesome sight at any time of day, but especially at six in the morning when you’re shaking off the jet lag from the ten-hour flight and seventeen-hour time difference.

Nice pool.

I spent just forty-eight hours in Sydney, almost all of them wide-awake, due to the aforementioned jet lag, and got to tour the Sydney opera house and climb the Sydney Harbor bridge, and that’s your correspondent, third from the left in the above photo.

In between all these hijinks, I gave a talk on how to create a book even if you are not a subject matter expert in a given field, how to use that book to create passive income, and how to create back end products that would continue to make money for you. As an example, I described a project I’m currently working on right now, a book about how to sell into the massive, 300,000,000 strong middle class on mainland China. I don’t know anything about that, but I know someone who does, and he, another individual, and I are working on creating a book along the lines that I’m describing. The audience learned all about how to create a concept for a book, how to find a problem that a large, credit card-bearing niche audience will pay money to have solved, how to locate and interview appropriate subject matter experts for the book, how to get blurbs quickly and strategically, how to get one’s work copyrighted, how to publish a book online, and so on. The audience’s response was gratifying–they seemed to get a lot out of the talk.

Exhausted and elated, I went to bed about ten-thirty that night, with my eyes opening and remaining wide open from one-thirty the following morning until about ten o’clock the next night, on my return flight to the States. I’m not entirely sure, but I think that since you crossed the international date line, one-thirty a.m. on Wednesday in Australia is roughly equivalent to six-thirty in the morning the previous Saturday back in Orange County.

I could be wrong about that, though. Don’t hold me to it.

At the conclusion of my talk, I offered the audience a package that consisted of consulting plus a long list of knowledge products–audio recordings, interviews with experts on everything in publishing from marketing one’s book using social networking to getting into bookstores to how not to get ripped off or used by print-on-demand publishers to the nitty gritty of getting great blurbs from thought leaders in one’s field, and on and on. The package, along with the consulting, sold for approximately $4,000.00. As a courtesy to my readers, I’ll offer you access to all of the knowledge products for one tenth of that amount, or $397.00. Granted, that does not include the ninety-minute initial consultation on your book with me, or my detailed reading of the manuscript you create when you’ve completed the process of writing the draft. If you are interested in that full Monty, you’re most welcome to it for $4,000.00. But if you just want to get all the information about how to do it yourself–and yes, you really can do it yourself, if you just paint by numbers and follow the process–it’s all yours for $397.00.

If you’re interested in purchasing either package, please click here and drop a short note to my assistant, Sara Stratton, and she will get it taken care of for you.

Until I hear from you, I’ll be right here in Irvine, trying to catch up on my sleep.