I Could Never Sell

See if you can tell me the name of the author who has had the most NY Times bestsellers, according to Guinness World Records?

If not, notice why not.  Whether or not you care for bestsellers, the NY Times, or Guinness World Records.

Surely the NY Times could come up with that number without asking Guinness World Records.  I sense mixed feelings, at best, about their own bestseller list.

Guinness publishes less often than the NY Times, and falls behind.  Guinness gave the number of bestsellers by this author as 45 last fall.  Six months later the number has climbed to 51.  Six more bestsellers in six months, from this one author.

One author?  Well, this author uses a team of co-authors.  Just one co-author per book, so far.  He also monopolizes the staff at his publisher.  At some point, he too will count as a publisher, not an author, the way this is going.

What’s our problem with that?  We look down our noses at team-written novels.  Where does that come from?

Not from movies.  Meet Joe Black lists half a dozen screenwriters. Not all at once. More like a relay race. Movies are made by teams, and we’re OK with that.  Who sits through all those names at the end?

Does the NY Times have only a half-hearted love for its own bestseller list?  Mixed with distaste?  At a time when the NY Times, long a home for writers, is fighting for its life?

You can hear the mixed feelings for yourself as the NY Times discusses this one best-selling author. He was an advertising man first, heading J Walter Thompson’s North American branch. He launched his breakout book with a TV ad he wrote and paid for himself. He up-ended all sorts of prevailing wisdom with that, including wisdom that prevails to this day among many of us who attended the recent book launch for Linchpin. Forget TV, a book isn’t weed-killer, for instance. Or: Build your following slowly, like a courtship.

You’re the NY Times. What to do?  Your party is dying.  Your favorite customers are leaving first.  The rest cluster around this single colossal bore.  They could easily meet elsewhere next time.  They came for him, not you.  Do you bustle late into the night to keep them coming?

Is this how it feels as the sea eats away the bluff under the home your family has lived in for generations?

This blog is sub-titled Adventures in Aversion.  This story in the NY Times is an adventure in aversion for them.

I suspect aversions shape our lives more than attractions do.  Investors have learned something similar.  The pain of losing is greater than the pleasure of winning.

If a life is woven of moments, then an aversion that shows up moment after moment can spread throughout a life, as the weave and weight of a curtain colors the air of a room.

Example.  For some silly reason I have an aversion to the word “key” except where it refers to a key.  I wonder how many jobs and careers I have left because in them I had to say “in terms of that, this is key” and “in terms of this, that is key.”  Dozens of times each hour, because that was the language of the people in the room.  In how many rooms and jobs and careers have I made myself unwelcome with that quirk, that glitch in my wiring?

I have no such glitch with “absolutely.”   I enjoy hearing people sing out all four syllables of “absolutely”  because “yes” and “sure” are three syllables too short for their song.  I don’t need to sing along.  They understand me well enough.  “Yes” booms like a tolling bell in a plaza thick with pigeons, and silences for a moment the gobble-gobble of “absolutely, absolutely.”

Linchpin?  Another word for key, isn’t it?

Try the swap here:  This could be the key for us.  He could be the key for us.  Once it sounded strange and new to say “This is key now”  (without “the”).  “Linchpin” will get there.  In months, I’m guessing, or maybe weeks, with Seth Godin and the Internet driving it.

I would have voted for the lizard instead, in the title and on the cover.

Meanwhile a quiz.  Which of the following is key to being a linchpin?

a)

b)

c)

d)

e)

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