Lean Publishing

I’ve been thinking a lot about publishing lately.

I started thinking (and writing) about publishing based on my experiences self-publishing Flexible Rails before it became a Manning book. Also, I just finished writing Hello! Flex 4 for Manning: it’s in Fourth Pages now, which means that the typesetter needs to apply the last 16 edits we have made and that’s it. So, I’ve now done the self-published author thing (getting Flexible Rails into the top 100 all-time books by revenue on Lulu) and the traditionally-published author thing with both Flexible Rails and Hello! Flex 4.

So, I finally have a deep enough understanding of how publishing and self-publishing works from an author’s perspective to have meaningful opinions about it.

I’ve also been doing a lot of thinking about Eric Ries‘ concept of a Lean Startup (since that’s what my company Ruboss is) and Steve Blank’s concept of Customer Development.

From this, I’ve realized that, in many ways, writing and self-publishing a book resembles running a Lean Startup.

I’ve also realized that many of the lessons learned about Lean Startups by people such as Eric Ries and Steve Blank can be applied to the process of writing, marketing and publishing a book. This insight, combined with my previous thoughts on publishing, led me to the concept of Lean Publishing. I’m now convinced of the following:

Lean Publishing is the future of publishing.

Translated from marketing speak into something more specific, I will claim the following:

The vast majority of new non-fiction books should first be self-published using the principles of Lean Publishing. Once the first draft of a manuscript is completed using the Lean Publishing approach, the book may be suitable for publication by a traditional publisher. (Traditional publishers do add value, but the value they add is mostly at the end of the book writing process, not the beginning.)

This blog is going to explore the concept of Lean Publishing, based on the lessons I have learned from writing Flexible Rails and Hello! Flex 4 and also drawing on recent examples of books from around the internet that have used Lean Publishing principles.

I will start by attempting to list what I think are the principles of Lean Publishing. Since this is a blog post, there has to be a numbered list somewhere, so without further ado I give you…

The 10 Principles of Lean Publishing

1. A Book is a Lean Startup
2. Publish Early (Fail Fast)
3. Publish Often and Listen to Your Readers
4. Trust Your Readers (DRM is Evil)
5. Pick and Own a Niche
6. Give Something Meaningful Away with No Strings
7. Build a Community with Web 2.0 Tools and Automation
8. Only Sell High Margin PDF Books While Still Niche
9. Publishers Add Most Value At The End of a Book
10. Develop Your BATNA Before Negotiating with Publishers

I’m going to explain each of these principles in depth over the weeks and months ahead, using Flexible Rails as the primary case study and various other examples from around the internet.

Also, I’m going to put my money where my mouth is: my company Ruboss is building a product which will facilitate the Lean Publishing process. (We have been working on this for a while, and we’re close enough to launching it that I can start talking about Lean Publishing now.)  So if you think that I’m engaged in self-promotion here, all I have to say is (1) you’re right and (2) this is a blog: what did you expect?

If you want to be notified as soon as we launch our Lean Publishing product as well as getting the in-depth posts explaining the principles of Lean Publishing, please subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed.