Black Friday, Great Authors

By Bob Hughes - Nov 22 , 2010

The time for holiday sales is upon us, and with it the desperation borne by retailers to make a profit on something, anything, before the end of the year. This includes publishers, who release – like Hollywood studios with blockbuster movies – their big books for the Christmas season. As with movies, what does this say for the rest of the year, and what does it mean for people who publish after the holidays?

It really shouldn’t be the kind of question we have to ask ourselves, but publishers, like movie studios again, feel that the gift-giving season is the one chance to recoup, the big chance to get back what they spent the rest of the year on underperforming books that failed to find an audience.

It says something that the surprise hit of the holiday season is the first volume of Mark Twain‘s autobiography. The University of California Press, which published the autobiography – a century after the great author’s death, as per his wishes – didn’t realize (in all its ivory-tower naïveté) that Twain’s trenchant musings on his life, his work, his era, were just the thing to appeal to readers today, and to gift-givers at the end of the year. Why? We want what’s real. And Twain was nothing if not real.

So far, the publisher has had to go back to press a few times, and there are now something like 600,000 copies in print. What does this say about today’s readers? It says that Twain is indeed timeless – that he appeals to the contemporaries today as much as he did people of yesteryear – but it also says that good writing speaks to generations whatever the time of year.

Twain engaged with his readers. He was a man of his time and ahead of it – he published one of the first presidential memoirs (U.S. Grant’s), and started his own publishing company, and did what he could to engage his audience. He wasn’t always successful – who is? – but he was memorable

You can be too – if you listen to your audience, if you dare to make a stand, if you speak, like Twain always did – the truth.

More than the greatness of his writing, it’s the transparency of his thinking that makes Twain a man for our age. And a man for the gift-giving season. I doubt that the University of California Press thought it had such a big hit on its hands – it was probably wishful thinking that it published the book toward the end of the year and hoped for a few thousand copies to be sold. But Twain probably knew better a century ago: he wanted to be heard, but more than anything he wanted to be connected, and be honest. He probably felt it would be better to wait a hundred years, before people were ready for his brand of truth.

You don’t have to wait that long. You can connect with your audience, too. If you speak the truth. At any time of the year.