Definitely, says James Altucher, a writer and entrepreneur. In a riveting and informative blog post on TechCrunch he describes how self-publishing has worked for him, and why it should work for any entrepreneur.

Altucher makes many of the points we here at Beneath the Cover do when discussing why having a book is so important for an entrepreneur:

1. Entrepreneurs can exploit their knowledge and content
2. They can strengthen their role as expert by having published a book (and this includes self-publishing)
3. A book is a great way for an entrepreneur to stand out and, as Altucher writes,

“At the very least, when you hand someone a book you wrote, it’s more impressive than handing a business card. It shows that you have enough expertise to write the book. It also shows you value the relationship with the potential customer enough that you are willing to give him something of value. Something you created.”

For anyone, entrepreneurs especially, who want to become known, a book is perhaps still one of the best ways toward that. It becomes a part of your platform to help you spread your ideas and build your business.

Equally interesting is Altucher’s argument about why self-publishing is viable in an age when traditional publishing, though still powerful, is less of an option for the vast majority of writers. Writers who might make money but who are often overlooked in favor of the handful of big-name authors whose sales support the publishing business’s operating models.

Altucher is the most recent, but not the only, writer to extol self-publishing. Self-publishing may not work for everyone (it helps first to have a platform to reach people), but it might be something that more and more writers – good writers who are rejected by literary agents and publishers (not that good writing is an indicator of potential success – will consider going forward. More and more consumers are choosing to spend their time reading self-published books. So more and more authors will undoubtedly self-publish.

He boldly declared that content is no longer king. Indeed, he said, we already have enough information and the game is now more about:

1. Developing a deeper relationship with the individual.
2. Positioning the product appropriately by presenting existing information properly.

Although I agree with those two points are important—they are ancillary. The relationship and the presentation play a big role, but I completely disagree about the status of content. Content will always be king!

Some five or ten years ago, we went through a phase called the Democratization of Media. We quit relying solely on news anchors and big media agencies for information and content. Instead, we moved toward getting it directly from the source—or the closest individual to the source, including: bloggers, eye witnesses, and individuals that are actually in the trenches reporting real, raw, relevant data. These people aren’t massaging the message, or trying to build a relationship with me, instead they are simply delivering the information.

In fact, sometimes in life there are individuals that I don’t even like (both their personality and their style) but if I recognize that they speak authoritatively and truthfully…then I listen carefully to the content–regardless of how it’s presented. I usually value people who don’t spin the message, more than those who end up positioning it for me.

This reality trend is not going to stop. In fact, this isn’t a trend. It’s a revolution and it’s going to become deeper and closer still.

People desire valid, honest information and that is precisely one power of the Internet.

Of course, I agree there’s all sorts of useless fluff and incorrect blather online. Luckily our built-in BS meters are becoming quite adept at quickly sifting through this stuff. Additionally, anyone who writes or presents content that isn’t valid is quickly dismissed and disengaged from the conversation at an ever-increasing rate. At the end of the day, the information we value is truth, honesty, and hybrid thinking.

One can ask, “Do we have all the information we seek in life?” The answer is clearly, no.

To drive this point home, simply ask anyone suffering from a disease, a challenge, or personal issue if he or she has all the information that they need to triumph over their ordeal. Or consider if someone found a cure for AIDS or cancer. How important would this new content be? Would the positioning really matter? Would a relationship be necessary? The answer is no.

I punctuate this post where I started it…content will always be king.

I hope not.

An interesting article about Barnes & Noble’s efforts to compete against Amazon showed how even the largest and once-feared retailer can become a victim of changing buying habits and the new realities of the digital marketplace.

But more people are probably going to gravitate toward online book-buying rather than the leisurely pursuit of reading options at a bookstore. Barnes & Noble is aware of that, and its CEO William J. Lynch Jr. emphasizes that the company is a technology business, and he’s looking for ways to make the retailer viable, and competitive, as a purveyor of electronic media.

For the author, this might be a sort of sidebar to writing and marketing a book. But no one can take for granted any step of the book-publishing process. Sure, you may opt to self-publish either through print-on-demand or through a digital download of your book. You may think that bookstores are not in your future anyway, as a forward-thinking author. But bookstores are important for everyone. We need spots where we can actually unplug once in a while, even if the bookstore becomes plugged-in. What consumers should have, and authors as well, is choice.

Sure, the music industry underwent enormous changes, and musicians now rely more on performing than on the sale of their records to earn their living. But authors are less performers than musicians are. Authors need to build a platform to ensure that their ideas begin to reach an audience and broaden that audience. And then use that platform to strengthen their business. For authors, a book is a tool toward something else (we’re speaking here mainly of nonfiction authors). It helps build a business.

Even if you eschew traditional publishing and traditional methods of book distribution in favor of digital publishing and distribution, you should be aware that bookstores continue to do one thing well: promote the very idea of books. That’s strong. That’s important. That can help any author, regardless of how that author’s book is distributed.

Close to a million books are published each year, which means that books remain an essential part of our culture.  We nevertheless need to be reminded stop and think and experience words at less-than breakneck speed. Your message is important, and you’ll be building it in increments, adding followers, readers, consumers in a gradual and strengthening way. You want them to last, and stay with you as your platform grows and evolves.

And, after all, you can download a book in seconds. But it takes a bit longer to actually read one.

That’s a nice headline-grabbing remark – but the thing is, new books have long sprung up like Tribbles in that famous old Star Trek episode about multiplying creatures that threaten to overrun the Enterprise. This book-upon-book-upon-book phenomenon has been happening for the past couple of decades, and the rate at which new books appear will probably increase further as more people release e-versions of their works.

But while we’re awash with words most go unread. This was the case in 1950 and before, and this is the case now. It doesn’t matter how many books are published. What matters is how many authors are noticed. And how you are noticed.

It Takes a Platform

That takes having a platform from which to spread your message. It means finding, building and engaging with an audience.

It doesn’t matter what your specialty is: you’re going to face stiff competition. According to Bowker, the book-industry organization that handles ISBNs (those international standard book numbers) and conducts research, the number of books in just about every category it tracks increased substantially between 2002 and 2010. From agriculture to travel, the arts to technology. Even books of poetry and drama increased almost 100%. All told, the number of books published in the more than 25 categories that Bowker includes in its listings increased by 1148%. What’s an author to do?

Well, you can be heard. It takes focus, a continuing engagement with an audience, and the willingness to wait as you build that audience. It’s rare that authors find overnight, unexpected success in publishing. And even those who seem to have made it big quickly have often spent a long time laying the groundwork for their success.

So, yes, more books were probably published even in one day this today than in some past year. But that doesn’t mean you need to be confined to the sand piles of unread authors. You just have to learn how to raise your voice to be heard against the waves of books that are constantly crashing onto the shores around you.

The same may be said about authors: On the Internet nobody knows you’re not Stephen King. Or James Patterson. Or any other big-name author. Online, the playing field is leveled, because people search for content, and in a lot of cases that trumps name recognition, even from first-rate writers like King.

The rise of e-books, and the rise of self-published e-books, is rocking the world of writers, publishers and readers. A friend of mine, a well-respected crime novelist with more than a dozen books to her name, has been publishing her old short stories as 99-cent downloads, and doing quite well by this (in some cases she makes more this way than she was originally paid for having written the story).

Why wait for yet another anthology of stories when you can have something by a favorite author – or try something new by an unknown author – for less than the cost of a cup of coffee at Starbuck’s? (You can even download it while you wait for that pricey cappuccino thanks to the free wi-fi you find at Starbuck’s and at many other coffee chains.) She’s just one of many mystery writers (many of whom are seriously underpaid by their legacy publishers) who have found additional income thanks to the power of the e-reader and the prowess of Amazon and BN.com.

At Beneath the Cover, we’re not anti-publisher. In fact, we look for ways to help authors work better with publishers, and we try to teach authors how to market themselves better known to potential publishers and readers thanks to the power of a platform. But we ourselves are soon going to be publishing e-books for writers who want to know about publishing. It’s the best, fastest way to get vital content to today’s reader, other than by blogging or tweeting.

But I made that reference to the power of the lesser-known author thanks to a blog post by the writer J.A. Kornath, whom I wrote about recently in reference to his success in self-publishing a techno-thriller that had been rejected by the major publishers and that has become a tremendous online, self-published, bestseller among e-books.

I get the feeling he continues to be in awe of what’s been happening to him, and also at the tremendous power that comes not only from success but from utilizing a new tool that gives you more than you expected. In a blog yesterday, Kornath wrote that among the top 10 bestsellers among occult fiction on Amazon’s Kindle list, “Every one of them is self-pubbed. In fact, there are only three legacy authors in the Top 30. I count only ten legacy pubbed in the Top 100, and most are brand names… I’m outselling King, Harris, and Preston & Child. That’s odd, since they kill me in paper sales. But it doesn’t matter, because bestselling authors sell at any price, which publishers are aware of.”

This author won’t be the only one to find that. My friend the mystery writer is starting to experience a degree of success thanks to easily downloadable e-stories. Soon, nonfiction writers, especially those entrepreneurs who already have a strong audience, will realize that they can reach their audience without a lumbering middleman like a traditional publisher can sometimes be.

Nonfiction writers may still need to learn how to create a book, find and find an audience, and develop their platforms, of course. But they may realize that they can control more than they used to about how their work reaches readers. That’s because, in a way, the e-book phenomenon, as it’s practiced through the Amazon Kindle and BN.com Nook stores, is another example of transparency in today’s civic cycle. No fluff: just content.

With the success of the Edwardian-era PBS soap Downton Abbey, whose premier drew some 4.2 million viewers, an enormous number for public television, the publishing world sees a skirt to hang onto. This bonbon of a series looks at life at a grand manor house in England, the interactions of servants and masters, and the fading power of well-born Britons in the face of the harsh realities of the first world war.

So, naturally, publishers want a piece of that.

While January isn’t a bad month for bookstore sales – people often use their gift cards then, though perhaps many more received cards for Amazon or BN.com or iTunes for their electronic purchases – it can still be a bit of a drag after the holiday season. So, according to a New York Times article on this doubtless short-lived phenomenon, publishers are repackaging many existing titles that somehow touch on World War I or the decline of the British aristocracy in the first decades of the 20th century, to appeal to a Downton Abbey-besotted viewing audience that also reads books.

Nothing is new here, of course. Tie-ins have always been with us. And the series itself is a mishmash of Upstairs, Downstairs, the Forstye Saga some of the concerns of Henry James novels and others books and television shows and movies (including creator Julian Fellowes’ own screenplay for the Robert Altman film Gosford Park). It plays to a nostalgia for grand houses, the continuing allure of family intrigue and, of course, beautiful costumes.

But the tie-ins here seem somehow quaint, too, like the series itself. The hope for a sale, any sale, and the plaintive Twitter feeds (along the lines of “if you like this, then you must read our novel about a family during the same era!”) are reminders of the fragile book industry. And they are, one hopes, probably going to have some positive effect on sales.

At least the hoopla isn’t about another young-adult novel concerning vampires or featuring a post-apocalyptic showdown.

Most writers don’t have the benefit of a distantly related television show to spur sales (or even publisher interest). Most have to rely on their own platform to engage with an audience. It’s a lot of work.

But it’s also worth it, and, one hopes, longer-lasting than the carry-over effect of hitching one’s publishing wagon to a shooting star.

Build your own.

If you’re considering following what’s been popular, don’t. That’s what publishers, television stations and movie studios do. So put away your first chapter of George Washington, Zombie Killer, and The Blood-Scarlet Letter: Hester Prynne, Vampire Vixen, and think of something new.

It’s a new year, it’s a clean slate.

Copycat books, series and movies are never as good as the original (even if the original was only popular rather than good), and the follow-the-herd mentality leads to nothing as much as burnout.

You’re better than that.

You’ve probably had an idea kicking around for a while. You’ve probably discussed it with friends. You probably wonder how you can move forward with it.

You start by building a community of people with whom you engage and on whom you test your message. You build a platform.

You start writing. Writing what you actually think and believe and feel rather than what others have thought, believed and felt. If you want to comment on those things – what others have done – then you go to their websites and you do it there. Or you do it in your blog, which exists to engage. You don’t do it as your own original work. You’re not writing a sequel. You’re writing what you believe in – you’re being transparent.

Although many of us like the familiar, which is why we gravitate toward certain genres, such as thrillers, or how-to business books that promise to turn our entrepreneurial world around, nobody likes to read something he or she suspects having read before. (Although, frankly, the same business books seem to  appear at least 52 times a year.)

When you begin to create your work, through blogging or through interactions on social media, your growing audience will offer you not only encouragement but guidance. You’ll know when you’ve strayed from your message. You’ll get a sense when you’re lacking originality.

But first, do this: set pen to paper or get your fingers clicking on a keyboard.

Writing doesn’t just happen: you need to begin shaping your ideas. When they’re on the page, they’re that much more powerful, and you’ve begun to turn your thoughts into something beyond a private rumination. You’re about to engage. You’re about to become a thought leader.

Now start creating.

Didn’t think so.

It’s usually only the winners of the awards, and perhaps their publishers and maybe their agents when it comes time to sell the next book by a winner, who remember these things.

You probably don’t even remember who won the Oscar this year for best actor or actress or which film won (kind of makes all of the tedious hoopla about the Oscar race even less interesting, doesn’t it?). We’d all love to win something like an Academy Award or a Pulitzer Prize or be named a Nobel laureate, of course, but it’s funny how our memories turn from such achievements and focus on other things that are more pressing to our own lives.

This is why end-of-year lists are helpful in their way for reminding of us what we’d already inevitably forgotten. But even these lists are stored away soon after we’ve done reading in little-used mental filing cabinets. We remember events that are joked about – the Kardashian wedding, maybe, or the ridiculous hats worn by women at the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton – but somehow jokes are recalled more than achievements. Though a marriage is not really an achievement as much as an agreement between two parties. The real achievement might be longevity in marriage, if marriage is important to a couple. But that’s another topic.

A Pattern of Forgetfulness

In any event, this forgetfulness isn’t new. We’re not any less given to remember events or prone to erase memories of events now with all of the information with which we’re bombarded than before, when all we had to think about was, well, what people had to think about before the waves of smart phones and digital cable and downloadable movies and e-books and even platform-building that authors use in an effort to get people to remember who they are and what their message is.

What we remember are things or ideas that help us to live, or that may give us some insight into our fellows. The specifics are often gone, but the thought that by taking a small unrecognized action we might make a difference in the life of another, is likely to remain with us longer than who won what. Longer, even, than our own awareness of our random act of kindness.

Certainly the publishing world has been aflutter over the state of reading, of electronic and digital rights and formats, of bookstore closings and consumer indecisiveness, of becoming heard in a world of unrelenting noise. This state of unrest regarding books and publishing isn’t likely to abate over the next 12 months. But things like your message – whatever it is – is likely to stay with people if you’ve managed to speak to your audience in a transparent and honest way. And that’s what counts – being known for being open.

Let me quote here the famous closing passage from George Eliot’s masterpiece, Middlemarch:

“…for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

By the way, the winner of the Pulitzer for fiction was A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan and, for nonfiction, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. The King’s Speech won the Oscar for best picture, Colin Firth for best actor and Natalie Portman for best actress. But I had to look them all up. Naturally, I didn’t remember the specifics.

So, like many years, 2011 was one of terrible tragedies and some triumph. People won awards, others were passed over, famous people died as did many more unknown, hidden ones — the ones who actually count. But you can read about those important events and notable personages elsewhere in actual year-end recaps. Let’s simply hope that 2012 will have more good than bad news, and that what’s memorable is what’s lasting for the common good.

Happy New Year!

A case involving Richard Prince, who often appropriates art, is roiling the world of galleries and auction houses.  When is something “fair use”? That is, when can it be used in another work, and when is it theft?

Artists have always appropriated. Dante took from Vergil. Shakespeare took from many sources. Picasso used other people’s images. All of these artists transformed what they took into something wholly their own.

What the Richard Prince trial highlights is the work of an artist who’s more, as the article says, “art director” than artist – he makes money from work other people have done. Mr. Prince’s use of photographs from a book about Rastafarians for a collage series of his that sold extremely well (one fetched $2.5 million) was, in March, ruled by a Manhattan judge to theft. Mr. Prince is appealing the ruling.

For today’s generation, according to Stephen Frailey, an artist quoted in the article, “everything is raw material” on the Internet, which is regarded as a “collaborative community.”

Well, there’s collaboration and there’s just taking.

What about when a writer appropriates something, something often called plagiarism? Is it fair use, or is it simply stealing? Assassin of Secrets, published by Little, Brown & Co., was pulled from stores earlier this year after pseudonymous author QR Markham (real name: Quentin Rowan) was found to have lifted entire passages from several books, including Robert Ludlum works and a James Bond novel by John Gardner. The author admitted to having taken the passages because he was under such a strict deadline, and because he was addicted to plagiarism. But looking at his novel another way, it was something new made up of old parts, wasn’t it? Isn’t that what appropriation is?

I’m not advocating for plagiarism at all. But when is plagiarism just that and when is it something else? Writers have often used an earlier work as inspiration, as the bestselling crime novelist P.D. James does in her highly regarded new work Death Comes to Pemberley, which follows the beloved characters from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice several years after the close of that classic, as they confront a murder. A clever idea (and better executed than many novels that employ famous authors as sleuths), this is real appropriation. It’s a matter of transparency. Plagiarism is trying to hide what you’ve taken and pretend it’s yours. Appropriation is nodding to another work and creating something of your own.

And if you’re starting out on your own writing project, and using your platform to build your audience and spread your ideas you should rely on the power of your audience to tell you where you’re going. Not that you’ll resort to lifting other people’s works. But your readers will offer you guidance by telling you where you’re hitting home and where you’re going astray, and they’ll even provide ideas for you to work on, on your own. Their comments aid your work – and that’s a real collaborative community, too.

And trust me, we won’t have a global apocalypse. Can we put aside for good that Mayan Calendar gobbledygook and associated end-of-the-world fantasies? Thank you.

At the same time, 2012 does represent a new start for a lot of people (not a big end), and continuing ways of being heard and communicating.

We’ve been in a civic cycle for about a decade. This is a time when more people think outwardly rather than about themselves. But we’re about to enter a phase of this pendulum shift in our society when people begin to consider that their own collective mindset has more currency than that of another tribe. It’s an “I’m okay, you’re screwed up” way of thinking that places one set of beliefs over others.

During another civic cycle, in the Victorian era, Matthew Arnold published his greatest poem, Dover Beach, which closes with a plea for compromise, to feel a kinship despite one’s differences. It has a special relevance in our toxic political landscape when people place party over country and are loath to work together.

Here is the final stanza:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night

This says much about the continuing, and losing, battle that we fight by defining ourselves solely by ideologies.

The thing is, we are blessed in this country, and although the world and culture and technology change rapidly, we should be grateful for our opportunities. We’re not in sub-Saharan Africa, plagued by drought and internecine warfare. We have not been ravaged by earthquakes. We have potable water. Certainly many of us don’t have the same levels of comfort we had only a few short years ago, but we still have so much more than most.

Last year, I spent the Christmas holidays – indeed, much of the year – stranded in Canada, unable to travel to the States to see my daughter because of immigration issues. Being stuck there, even among people I care about, gave me new perspective on what’s important.

Although I live in a free society, I did not have the freedom to travel as I had wanted. I couldn’t welcome the holidays with my daughter because that would have meant that I couldn’t return to Canada, where I’d begun a new life and a new business. I realized that what was important, truly important, was what I couldn’t have at that moment: the opportunity to share time with my child. I had taken for granted even the small freedoms.

If anything, my situation led me to confront my own beliefs. Forced to consider the perspective of my country from that of another, I learned (or tried to learn) how important it is to understand people with different perspectives and beliefs, and how essential it is that we all share gratitude for what we have – and for what we share with each other.

We live and work in a symbiotic ecosystem that depends on everyone working together. The changes that the near future holds will be profound, they may be scary, and we may not be comfortable with what’s happening, but it’s essential that we have a dialogue about what we see and how we feel. And that we be grateful for what we have.

We can’t have understanding without gratitude, and we can’t be grateful without humility. We are not alone in the world.

Let us be true to one another.

I’d love to hear from you. What fills your heart with gratitude? Have you had an experience that forced you to look at what’s important to you?

Best wishes for your Holiday Season,

Michael Drew