Remnant Review (Sept. 18, 2010)
Here is my plan: monetize electrons. I can give away most of these electrons, but the few I will sell will sell long beyond my death.
I love the Internet!
I will monetize my calling. I define "calling" as "the most important thing you can do in which you would be most difficult to replace." My calling ever since age 18 has been to develop a systematic treatise on Christian economics.
To do this, I have written a lot of material. It exceeds 20,000 pages, if you could some of my books and newsletters as appendixes, which they are. I have not yet begun my final treatise. I hope to begin it in two years. It will be in multiple forms: a fat book, a medium-size book, and a short book. It will also involve lots of YouTube videos. That will cost me time more than money.
This brings me to the topic at hand: publishing. I have written a lot. I have published far more. Publishing involves marketing.
I will take you through what I have done in order to help you get ideas on what you may be able to do. This involves making judgments early of what to expect. It's like getting married. You don't know what to expect, but you think it's worth starting the project.
I had one set of judgments. These have changed radically because of the Internet. Today, the potential is far larger than anything I could have imagined when I began. A good marriage is like that, too.
The pace of technological development related to writing, publishing, videos, and all other forms of communication is advancing so rapidly that nobody can keep up. For someone who has spent his life pushing words across a page, pushing them across a screen was not a major breakthrough. But, as video and audio have become less and less expensive to deliver to users, writers are forced to go beyond the traditional technology of words on a page. Gutenberg accomplished a social revolution in the mid-1400s. That technology did not fundamentally change until the 1990s. That is a long time for any technology to remain dominant. But changes come, and all of us have to adjust to this.
Whether you are a teacher or student, you're going to have to adjust to the new technologies. They're coming so fast that the adjustment process is disrupting. This is especially true of anybody connected with publishing. It's not enough to get books into the mail anymore. There was always a problem of persuading people to buy books. That is not going to change. But now a publisher has got to find ways of bringing people to his website, or to Amazon, in order to make the sale. This has made it very difficult for traditional publishers to adjust.
I want to take you through the process of producing a book. In doing this, I want to compare it with what the process was 30 years ago. It is very different today. From the point of view of the author, it is much better. He can reach far more people, and he can reach them less expensively than ever before. But, from the point of view of the publisher, the new technologies pose an enormous learning curve.
I want you to understand what I have gone through over the years, so that you can see the advantage that you have today. You are in a position to get your message out to more people than you would ever have thought possible 10 years ago. Everything is changing on the web. I want to show you how I am dealing with the web, so that you can have some understanding of what you can do to expand your influence.
I often quote A. J. Liebling. A generation ago, he said: "Freedom of the press is a guaranteed only if you own one." Today, because of free blog sites and new digital technologies, anybody with access to a phone line owns a printing press: WordPress.com, Blogger.com, and others. If you can get to a public library, you own a printing press.
This makes it possible for little people to get their message out to a lot of other little people, and maybe even some big people. If you can sell enough e-books, you can probably persuade a publisher of conventional books to take your book and market it. Of course, from an economic point of view, you're probably better off marketing your own book. If you can bring people to a site where they can buy your book, you are 80% a publisher. All it takes is order form technology in an account with PayPal to become a publisher.
Project Launched: 1973
In the spring of 1973, my wife suggested that I begin writing an economic commentary on the Bible. I knew that I wanted to write a book on Christian economics, but I wanted the book to be based on careful exegesis of biblical texts. This had never been done before. So, she suggested that I do it one verse at a time, one month per verse or passage. I was able to get the articles published each month in R. J. Rushdoony's newsletter magazine, Chalcedon Report. I was on the Chalcedon payroll at the time, so this was an obvious way for me to earn my keep.
I wrote most of my commentary on Genesis using an IBM Selectric III. The early chapters I wrote on a Hermes 3000 manual portable typewriter. The advent of word processing transformed the way I write. Within one week in 1980, I doubled my output. No other piece of technology has ever enabled me to increase my output that rapidly. That was 30 years ago.
I continued to write one article a month until 1981. By that time, I was running a successful nonprofit organization, the Institute for Christian Economics. I was also running a successful newsletter publishing venture, Remnant Review. I was in a position to begin to publish my own material for my own audience. Also, I was getting ready to publish the first volume of the commentary, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis. I could not find a Christian publisher who wanted to publish it, so I decided to publish it myself. I had been publishing my own books since 1977.
At that time, book publishing was an expensive proposition. You had to pay for a typesetter, and this was a costly venture: maybe $3 a page ($8 in today's money). I had a good one, but it cost money. Then I had to order at least 5,000 copies of the book in order to get the price per copy down enough to make it a profitable venture. The books had to be paid for in advance, and they had to be warehoused somewhere.
One of the amazing facts is that today, 30 years later, it is considerably cheaper to publish a book than it was then. You don't have to have as many copies in a print run to get a very good price per copy. Printing technology has dropped in price, so there's a lot more competition in the field. Despite the fact that consumer prices are generally 2 1/2 times higher today than they were in 1980, I can print 2,500 copies of a book for about the same price per book as I paid in 1980. This is a tremendous advantage.
After 1981, I continued to publish the commentary every other month, and I continued to publish physical copies of the book. That continued until 1997. The last book in my economic commentary of the Bible to appear in paper form was my commentary on the Book of Numbers: Sanctions and Dominion. After that, it was obvious that it would be much cheaper for me to publish the books online. I could give away the books, and the person who downloaded it would pay for the toner and paper. If he really wanted to read the material, that was a cheap way for him to get the book. Admittedly, it was not in a conventional format. He probably had to use a three-hole punch and then stick the pages in a three-hole binder. But it was still cheaper for him to do that than it would have been to buy a book for $25 or more.
The eBook
Today, the arrival of the e-Book reader has changed publishing dramatically. Amazon has reported that it sells as many eBooks for Kindle readers as it does physical books. This has taken place in just a couple of years. People like the readers, because people don't have to put the books on a shelf. Fanatical book-lovers, of course, don't like the eBook technology, but it still offers tremendous advantages. This technology is going to revolutionize the way we take notes on the book. Is going to revolutionize the way people in graduate school prepare term papers and dissertations. From a scholar's point of view, an e-Book is a vastly superior technology than a paper book.
For someone involved in publishing ideas, the e-Book is a dream come true. In my case, I will not have to inventory books, nor will I have to come up with several thousand dollars in advance to print them. I am going to be able to sell them at a fraction of what I could sell them for in hardback. More people will be able to buy them. I have no doubt that there will be some demand in the future for paper books, but e-Books will generally replace paper books for anyone under 30 years old.
All of this has transformed the way that I must market the books. I don't know if I will ever go back to using paper publishing technology. I may, but it will not be the primary means of getting my books into the hands of readers.
The day is coming when you will be able to underline a digital book, or make a yellow highlight of an important passage, add some keywords, and file them in such a way that you can retrieve that information at any time in the future. As someone who has written a doctoral dissertation, I cannot begin to stress what a breakthrough this is. For a scholar, the e-Book reader with note-taking technology really is a revolution.
There are new technologies coming that will enable an author to link his e-Book to the web. He can actually do that now. This is not used much, but it is obviously going to be common in the near future. The book can be hyperlinked to any website in the world. It can be hyperlinked to audio files or video files. The user can follow the links to increase his information about whatever the author is writing. With the advent of Wikipedia, the research strategies of a decade ago have been superseded. This is better for authors. It is surely better for readers. They can verify what is being said. They can follow through on specific ideas. This is a tremendous breakthrough.
It is my goal to produce a CD-ROM on which all 30 volumes of my commentary are available. I would like the footnotes from one volume that refer to another volume to be hyperlinked. So, when a reader sees that I have referred to something I have written in another volume, he uses his cursor or maybe his finger to access whatever it is that I wrote in the other volume. He does not have to go to a bookshelf, pull a book off the shelf, and go to that section of the commentary that I have referred to. This is going to save the reader time. Also, it is going to make the CD-ROM quite valuable. Having a tool like that is a tremendous advantage.
I will probably sell that CD-ROM for something in the range of a hundred dollars. I have not decided on the pricing. If I sell the individual copies in digital form for about $5 apiece, the total cost of the series in PDF form would be $150. If I printed those books, the total cost would be $750. It is obviously better for most readers to have them in PDF form. It is best to have them hyperlinked on a CD-ROM.
If you want to read them on paper, you can print them out. But most people would probably prefer to read them on an e-Book reader. It is certainly much more convenient this way. Someday, people will be able to sit, as I'm sitting right now, and dictate notes into the e-Book reader. When the day comes when you can easily make verbal notes on whatever it is you are reading, and add keywords for future retrieval, research will become far easier. I don't see why anybody would want the books in a physical form unless it is just for show. If you're talking about mastering the material in the books, and overcoming the grim reality of your fading memory after age 45, you had better have the books in e-Book format.
So far, I have been talking about the delivery of information on a page. It may be a paper page, or it may be a digital page, but it is a page. It is a page in a book. But this is not enough.
The big problem for an independent author today is to find buyers of the book. If he cannot persuade a publisher to print a lot of copies in order to get those copies into the mail or into a bookstore, the publisher is not going to publish the book. But an author does not need to publish the book through the conventional outlets any longer. If he can bring readers to his website, he can sell his book easily. So, let's talk about my strategy for bringing readers to my website.
Google has now transformed the way people find new material. We know today that only about 2% of all website hits comes to the home page. Google is bringing them to individual pages. So, the best possible strategy that an author can have is have lots and lots of short pages that will be discovered by Google searchers. I have a friend who became a multimillionaire by using this strategy. He told me that it works, and I hate to argue with anybody who becomes a multimillionaire in a period of three or four years. If he tells me something works, I listen.
Here is what I decided to do. He confirmed the plan. The total number of pages in my commentary is probably around 15,000 pages. That's a lot of pages. I will hire someone to break the entire series into a series of very brief pages. I may wind up with 15,000 separate web pages. Each one must have to have a title. Somebody will have to read the books, extract digital pages, and post them on Gary North.com. These will not be visible to members. There's no reason for members to worry about all this clutter. They can access the full chapters in PDF for free. The articles will be readable to Google.
At the end of each brief extract there will be a hyperlink that will take the reader to a page on my site that deals with the particular Bible book (e.g., Genesis) in which the verse that he has just read about appears. He clicks the link, and he comes to a designated page on my website for that particular chapter of the Bible. If he has read a brief note on Genesis 1:1, he will now be on a page about Genesis 1:1-3. Here is what he is going to find on that page.
First, there will be a brief summary of my findings regarding that chapter. These will be in one sentence segments. They may be in bullet form; I have not made up my mind.
Second, there will be a link to a PDF of the typeset chapter. This will be free. So, if the individual really is interested in what I say the chapter means, he can click the link and read the chapter on screen, or, what is far more likely, he can print it out. At the end of each PDF chapter will be a link to a sales page where he can buy an e-Book of the entire commentary on that particular Bible book. There will be another link on the sales page where he can buy the CD-ROM of the whole set.
Third, on the chapter page will be a link to an audio file: MP3. This will be free. He can listen online, or he can download the file to his computer. The goal here is to persuade the individual to listen to what I have to say, probably during drive time. At the end of each audio there will be a reference to bring him back to the site. It reminds him that he can get more free materials on another verse in the Bible book (e.g., Genesis) free of charge at the site.
Fourth, below the MP3 link will be embedded videos. (1) There will be an embedded video of my conclusion. This will be posted on YouTube. It will be 3 minutes long. In the lower left-hand portion of the video will be a URL which will take the individual to my website. I have reserved a domain that can be used for this purpose. What I have done is to post the domain address as a redirect. So, when an individual types in that domain name and clicks the mouse, he will go in a fraction of a second to the domain-registration site. The registration site will then immediately transfer him to a page on Gary North.com. This will be a page describing the whole commentary series.
It should be obvious what I'm trying to do here. Not only do I have a video on my site that does not cost me anything (free bandwidth), but people who have searched Google for a particular Bible verse may find the video rather than my web page. Because Google owns YouTube, it seems that YouTube videos get pretty high ratings on Google searches. An individual watches the video for 3 minutes. If he likes my presentation, he can then go to the link that is visible at all times on the video. That pulls them to my website.
What if he does not want to go to my website? I have an option for him. I'm going to have another YouTube video, this one about 12 minutes long, that provides my exegesis of the passage. This will reinforce the 3-minute conclusion. He may not believe my conclusion initially, but he may be willing to click a link, meaning a live YouTube link, in order to see if I can prove my case. He devotes another 10 to 15 min. to the topic. At this point, he may really be interested. Once again, he will be directed to go to a specific domain, which is a short name, and that will redirect him to my site.
This still may not be enough. So, I give him another chance. There will be another live YouTube link to a third video. In the third video, I will discuss the implementation of whatever I had said the verse is about. In a lot of cases, there will be no direct implementation, because a lot of the laws are no longer in force. They went out of existence with the Fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. Still, the person may be willing to listen for another 10 to 15 minutes in my discussion of how it would have been implemented prior 70 A.D., and how certain aspects of it might be legitimate today, though not literally, by following the principle that I have expostulated in the second video. So, I have three shots at bringing him to my website.
Fifth, that's still not enough. Some people who come to my site will not want three videos. They will want to watch one video. So, I will have a link to another web video service, possibly Blip.TV. It will be one of the video hosting services that lets the individual post longer videos.
If this sounds like a lot of work to you, you are in agreement with me.
I had planned since 1977 to knock off writing my commentary when I turned 70. I did not know if I could finish the task. As it has turned out, I will almost exactly finish the task at age 70. Maybe this is an example of Parkinson's Law: work expands so as to fill the time allotted for its completion. In any case, I should have all of the commentary typeset and proofed. It may not be indexed, because I am not going to index it. That would take me another 1500 hours, which means three years (500 hours a year). It means I'm going to pay somebody else to do it. I have done enough indexing in my career, and I don't intend to do any more of it.
Let me review my marketing strategy. I have specific products to sell. There will be e-Books of individual commentaries, and there will be a CD-ROM of all of the commentaries. The CD-ROM will be internally hyperlinked. Readers will be able to go from one portion of the CD-ROM to another portion with the click of a mouse or perhaps the touch of a finger. So, over the long haul, that product should sell for a long time.
I'm going to give the rights of publishing to my family's trust. Any money that comes in from the sale of the books will go to the trust. My children own the lion's share of the trust. This will enable me to transfer wealth to my children without going through probate. I don't know how many books I will sell. I don't know how much money I will make. This depends on whether or not Christians want to buy 1500 page commentaries on the economics of the Old Testament. I have a sneaking suspicion that this will not be a whole lot of buyers.
Once I get them online, I don't have to do anything to sell them from that point on. Google will bring people to those individual 15,000 pages. Google will also bring them to the videos on YouTube. Once the material is online, marketing is pretty much over.
There is another advantage. Google ranks websites in terms of the number of pages of content that the sites have. If I follow this plan, I will be able to add another 15,000 pages to Gary North.com. That is a lot of pages. Google will undoubtedly raise the ranking of my site. It doesn't clutter up the site, because the pages are not there to be viewed individually by members of the site. I want members of the site to download the free PDFs of the chapters. If they like those, they can download an e-book or buy the CD-ROM.
All this extra work that I'm going to have to do to produce those videos is in part educational and in part marketing. I do want the information to get out. I also know that modern people don't like to read. I mentioned the fellow who had made all the money doing short videos. He said that he came up with the idea before YouTube even existed. He came to two conclusions. First, bandwidth is going to get cheaper. Second, people don't like to read. He put these two ideas together and created a company based on short training videos. He sold it to a much larger company.
The educational videos are also sales devices. This is a multi-step strategy of selling. I call it shotgun, rifle, scope. The shotgun is in two forms. The first form may be the printed individual pages on Gary North.com. The second form will be the videos posted on YouTube. They are free. They are forever. I don't know who will find them, but I know some people will find. It doesn't cost me anything to deliver that material to them, once I have gone to the trouble of posting the pages and posting the videos.
The rifle is the $5 eBook. The scope is the CD-ROM.
When I began this project in 1973, I was using technology that basically had not changed in almost 100 years. The manual typewriter that I used for the early years of the commentary I had been using ever since my senior year in college in 1962. It was still functional. I resisted moving to an electric typewriter until I went to work for Ron Paul in 1976. There, I had my own IBM Selectric III. I found that I could write quite easily with it, and I modified my writing skills. I never again went back to a manual typewriter. I actually did the typing for his weekly newsletters on that Selectric III.
In 1977, I bought one for myself and began writing Remnant Review on it.
You need to know how I used to do my writing. I would sit at my desk. I had my pen and a yellow legal pad. I wrote everything by hand. Next, using my world-famous two finger typing system, I typed the material on my Hermes 3000. I would revise as I wrote. What came out of the Hermes was usually about twice as much as what I had written by hand. Next, I took the Hermes copy and corrected it by hand. Then I carried that to a local typist, who I paid to convert my corrected manual typewriter copy into final copy for Remnant Review.
I discovered, much to my surprise, that when I converted to the IBM Selectric III, I was able to compose off the top of my head. From that point on, I rarely wrote anything down by hand. I might make an outline, but even that was rare. I found that I was able to fill eight pages of Ii>Rmnant Review every two weeks with very few revisions. I always seemed to end at the very bottom of page 8. I cannot explain how I made that transition, but that is how I began to write with a Selectric III.
In 1980, I converted to word processing. I used an early version of WordPerfect, called S.S.I. That transformed the way I wrote. I cranked out everything much faster. I could make the corrections easily. I lost the fear of putting down something on a piece of paper that I would have to revise painstakingly. With this fear gone, my writing improved.
I can argue with myself on screen. I can write something down, read it, and conclude: "This is nonsense." Then I delete it. In effect, I debate with myself. There is a saying, which I only found out about a few months ago, that says: I write in order to know what I think. With word processing, this became true in my life. It made my writing easier, and I think it made my writing better. It did not make it dramatically better.
I recently revised an article that I had written in 1965. I didn't have to revise very much of it. When I submitted it to a publisher, the editor immediately accepted it. He had no idea that he was reading 45-year-old copy. He did not notice any change in style. Quite frankly, I didn't either as I revised. Most of it was pretty much the way I would have written it today. But I sure would write it faster today.
The point I'm trying to make is this: I started with one technology (Hermes 3000), expanded to a second form of technology (IBM Selectric III), moved to a third form of technology (word processor), and am now using the fourth (voice-recognition software). I am composing this with Dragon Naturally Speaking. I don't use it for everything I write, but I use it for longer pieces. I think Remnant Review remains as readable as it was before. I can crank it out twice as fast in the original draft, although correcting it takes longer.
In terms of the technology of publication, I was stuck with mid-15th century technology as recently as 1997. The printed book was essentially the same as it had been in Gutenberg's time. The marketing of the books was not fundamentally different, either. So, there is a 500-year technology that got superseded in less than 10 years by a whole series of technological breakthroughs.
First, there was the World Wide Web. Second, there was the PDF. Third, there was Google. Fourth, there was YouTube. Fifth, there is the e-Book. Sixth, there was online purchasing by credit card. Seventh, there is the website. Eight, there is the blog site. Ninth, there is Facebook. For those who are really advanced, there are probably a number of other technologies I don't know anything about or else I don't know how to use. In any case, in a period of less than 15 years, the entire technology of publishing and sales has changed. Everyone has had to play catch-up.
When my wife first suggested the idea that I write the commentary, I thought that I was advanced: a newsletter. The newsletter is a relatively recent development. It was most prominently developed by Kiplinger immediately after World War I. It did not become widely used by ideological organizations until the 1950s. That opened up new markets for new ideas. But the newsletter has gone the way of the dodo bird, with few exceptions. Older people like them; younger people don't understand why. Younger people are going to read online. That assumes that they are going to read at all.
There has been more technological innovation in relation to the distribution of ideas in the last 15 years than there had been from 1445 to 1995. Anyone who trained to be a newspaperman knows that his days are numbered. Yet the newspaper had been a common means of communication ever since the early 18th century. We have lived through a transformation like no other in history. The gatekeepers have lost control, because they have lost the monopoly over the printing press.
Under these circumstances, I have had to adjust. The adjustments have been positive. I'm reaching far more people today than I ever dreamed of reaching in 1973. I am able to get my information into formats that are easily accessed and easily digested. I am very grateful for the change. But it has extended the time that I'm going to have to commit to bring my commentary project to anything like completion I had to learn new technologies. I will have to learn newer ones, I'm sure, over the next three or four years. But, once the material is online, it's forever, or close to it. I don't have to persuade a publisher to keep the books in print. The publisher doesn't have to generate money in order to keep the books in print. Books can be put online and kept available for just a few dollars a month. If I go to certain sites where material can be posted for free, the material can stay online just about forever.
My original goal of writing something that would still be read in 100 years has now been extended. It is conceivable that what I write will still be read in 1,000 years. It will not be read by the same kinds of people who I had originally targeted in my plans. It will be read by people searching for certain ideas. This is the closest we have ever come in history to what Albert J. Nock described as the operations of the remnant. The remnant can find me, and I don't have to find them. Google enables the remnant to find what they want, and by a few mouse clicks, the Internet enables them to transfer that information to others. Facebook is speeding up the process even more.
It is now possible for a particular idea, or an individual, to reach literally hundreds of millions of people in a very brief period of time. I talked about this when I discussed the girl who has the sex education videos on YouTube. Her videos have generated 225 million downloads in four years. Yet nobody in the mainstream media has ever heard of her. This is going on under our noses. If there is one person doing this, there are dozens of people doing it. There may be hundreds of people doing it.
Because of the new technology, I am able to get to readers by literally the hundreds of thousands. These people would not otherwise have heard of me. They would not have come to me it had it not been for the Internet. There are multiple streams of readers, and they find me for multiple reasons. They get different kinds of materials. But my website can enable me to provide information for lots of different people, who have lots of different agendas.
There are other ways of making this work. At some point, I can set up specialized websites. For example, I can set up a discussion forum on Gary North.com in a manner of minutes. But I can create another website for very little money, or for free if I want to spend time doing design, that I can use for promoting my Bible commentary. I can create a specialized site for discussion with lots of different forums if I want to.
I may choose not to do this. There are some good reasons not to do it. One of the reasons is that if they come to Gary North.com in search of biblical material, they may find other kinds of material that they find interesting. If they find other interesting information, they may subscribe to Gary North.com. But if I want to create a separate site, I can do this very easily, and then use GaryNorth.com to direct people to the new site. I have done this with my site DeliveranceFromDebt.com.
What I'm describing here is closely related to my calling in life. My calling is to develop a specifically Christian approach to economics. My goal is to produce something like Mises's Human Action or Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. To do this, I first had to do the exegetical work. I did not think it would take 30 volumes to do this, but the technology has enabled me to do it.
This is my point. I start with the calling. I decided what it was that was most important that I could do in which I would be most difficult to replace. I pursued this systematically, beginning in 1973. I upped the ante in 1977 when I went to 10 hours a week, 50 weeks a year. I needed all that time to finish the exegesis.
The new technology arrived on my doorstep, step by step, enabling me to complete the task. The technology has also enabled me to publish the material in forms that anybody can access free of charge.
I also can set up marketing programs that will enable me to generate some money, though I don't know how much, because I've been able to attract people to my site based on search engine technology. If I generate money, this can be transferred to my children.
So, a project that I began in 1973 as my calling may turn out to be a way to extend my financial legacy, or least a portion of it, to my children. They do not have to become experts in marketing, although it never hurts. The arrival of these new technologies, which are essentially passive-sales technologies, once I have the material posted online, has enabled me to create a system of inheritance that did not exist 10 years ago.
I did not come to a conclusion regarding this transfer of inheritance until about a month ago. It has taken me all this time to figure out what I was going to do in terms of the sale and formats of the books. Yet I work with web technology every day. I'm online every day. I'm thinking about marketing all of the time. Nevertheless, what I have described so far in terms of the final sale of the material was not intuitive. It took me literally years to come to the conclusion that this is what I ought to do. I was pushed into this conclusion by a series of dead ends that I had not expected.
What I found over the years is this: dead ends, while painful, are very often necessary. If you keep at your calling, day by day, and you develop your skills, day by day, you will find the doors open. One door closes, but another one opens. Steve Gillette wrote a nice song about just that phenomenon; it is quite accurate. You think you've hit a brick wall, and you find that there is a detour around it that you had not seen. This is the right pathway for you.
You have to have faith in the legitimacy of your calling in order to pursue it effectively. You have to come to a conclusion regarding the relevance of whatever it is you have selected to do. This is not easy to do, but when you find out, you had better not deviate. Once you put your hand to the plow, don't look back. If you are really disciplined about whatever it is that you decided is the most valuable thing that you can do and in which are the most difficult to replace, you will find that your work gets more efficient. The tools that you need will become available.
I have said that the printing press technology did not change very much, 1455-1995. But the format of the printed material changed. The newspaper changed societies. So did the paperback book. The newsletter was a major transformation for those of us who were in the conservative movement or the hard money movement. It made my career completely different. Technically, I was using an approach that Gutenberg would have recognized, but I was delivering the material in a unique form.
The newspaper has not fundamentally changed in 300 years, and it is about to go the way of the dodo bird. In this case, the marketing hit a brick wall. The market was dependent upon newspaper delivery, printing presses running large numbers of copies, and a sales force. All of this is being hammered by the web. Craigslist can make a $100 million profit a year with 30 employees. It is making this profit at the expense of the classified ad sections of American newspapers. There's no question that the world is not going to go back to the newspaper.
On the one hand, some of the technology remained fairly constant for five centuries. The marketing did not. The format of the output did not. The innovations came primarily in the realm of marketing, aesthetics, and delivery of the final products. The biggest technological change was electricity: huge print runs.
Then came the web. It has undermined much of what came before. You don't need to own or hire a printing press. You don't need pieces of paper. You don't need ink. You don't need a delivery man to get up at 4 AM and toss papers. The sales can be done without human intervention. Remember Bill Myers's rule: Sell electrons, not atoms. It costs mostly time to sell electrons.
All of this has opened up the entire news communication system to little people. There are lots and lots of little people. These people are creative in many different ways. There are enough of them who are extremely creative; they are transforming the world of communications.
I began my calling in good faith at the suggestion of my wife. It was a very good idea. It changed my life. It changed her life. If things go well, it will change lots of people's lives. But even if it doesn't, I was able to pursue it in a systematic way over a period of four decades. The money always came in. I was always able to meet the payroll. Then I no longer needed a payroll. There were some tough times, but I got through them. There were lots of brick walls, but I got around them. Step-by-step, I advanced my calling. New technologies just seemed to show up on my doorstep that enabled me to do my work even more effectively.
Do you have this kind of confidence in whatever it is that you regard as your calling? Do you have the same kind of determination that will enable you to stick with the task over a long period of time, taking advantage of any new technology or new marketing approaches that you discover? Are you confident that if you do your work in a faithful way, it will not be overturned?
I don't know how confident you are about your calling. I don't know how confident you are about the way in which you intend to pursue it. But I know this: if you stick with something long enough, you will get very good at it. If you get very good at it, you will find that people want access to your output. They may not want to pay you anything. They may not want to pay what you think it's worth. But they will want whatever it is that you have devoted your life to. They are the remnant.
If you pick a task of very limited value, you're going to have a limited market. But there are enough people out there in the world who need something that you have. If there is information in between your ears, there is somebody out there who wants to put that information to productive use. He may not have much money, but he may have the integrity that is required to extend your vision into the future.
This is the question of succession. At some point you're going to die. What happens to your legacy then? With the rise of digital communications, those of us who were in the business of developing ideas and persuading people to accept these ideas and even implement these ideas have this tremendous advantage over others. Digits are our friends. As digits keep getting cheaper, our ability to influence people keeps getting greater.
Remember what my friend said: bandwidth keeps getting cheaper. The only trouble is, I have lived most of my life with text. Also, the other observation of my friend is now working against me: people don't like to read. So, I am having to make adjustments in the form in which I use the digits. I must move increasingly to video and audio.
The audio portion of the work is not a problem . . . yet. I was a better speaker than I was a writer for nine years, 1958-1967. It took years for me to develop my writing skills to be as good as my speaking skills. So, I'm in a position to use MP3 technology to get my ideas out. I'm not so equipped to do the videos yet, but I'm getting training, and in any case, I can always hire somebody to do that side.
When I took the psychological test that I recommended that my subscribers take, I found out my classification. I looked up careers that would be good for somebody with my classification. One of them was public speaking. Well, that cheered me up. I have been doing the right thing. But one of the things that it specifically said in the list of things that I should not do is video editing. I can understand this, too.
I want to give you encouragement with respect to the development of your calling. There is no way in confidence that I can say, without any qualification, that if you pursue your calling diligently, you will find exactly the right technology at exactly the right time to fulfill your calling. Maybe you won't find it. I could have done what I did if I had owned only a manual typewriter. But I would have had to hire a lot of people who did not use manual typewriters. I could not have done it as profitably, and I could not have done it as effectively. Technology is on your side, assuming that you have selected the right calling.
There is no way that you can know what technology is going to arrive, or when it is going to arrive. I planned my strategy in terms of Gutenberg's technology. I'm now to the point of believing that I will not fulfill that calling by means of the old technology. I am not convinced that I'm going to put the books in print on pieces of paper.
I can do this, of course. I can go with print-on-demand. This is a tremendous breakthrough. A book buyer can go online, place an order for a book, and the book will be printed, bound, and delivered for someone to stick into a bag and mail it. The technology even prints out the address. Print technology is a lot better than it was 15 years ago. But, in all likelihood, while I may use this as an option, it will not be the primary means of delivering my ideas into the hands of readers. I assume that the e-Book reading device is going to be the means by which I communicate my ideas to that shrinking minority of people who still like to read.
On the other hand, there may be a vast increase in the number of people who want to read what I have written. Why is this? Because we have at last begun to break the barrier of the tower of Babel. What I write is going to be able to be translated into many languages with the click of a button. People who, five years ago, would not have read anything that I wrote will be able to find my pages, and the translating technology will enable them to read what I have to say. There will undoubtedly be mistakes in it. But, let's face it, we forget 98% of whatever we read within a couple of days. How many times have you been reading along in a passage, and you turn the page, and you keep reading, only to find out that when you thought you turned a page, you actually had turned two pages.
That, by the way, was one of the great advantages of book typesetting practice until about 1810. At the bottom of each page was the first word that would appear on the next page. This was done to make it easier for printers to make sure the pages were in order. But it helped the reader not to lose his way when he turned the page. There is no question that we are not going to go back to that system, but it worked. Your eye is ready for the first line of the next page. My point is, we forget so much of what we read, and we misinterpret so much of what we do read, that it all gets scrambled in our brains anyway. The marginal loss of meaning as a result of translation software is trivial in comparison to the enormous loss of meaning that takes place between our eyes and our brains.
You should have confidence in your calling. You should have confidence that it is a legitimate calling, and that because it is a legitimate calling, you will be able to see that legacy extended beyond your grave. In my case, YouTube will keep my videos online. I must make sure that my heirs understand that they had better not let my website go down. But, if there's money coming in from the sale of digital books, they will have a real incentive to make certain that my website does not go down. So, my legacy is likely to continue.
You may not be in this situation -- digital continuity. If you aren't, you are going to have to recruit people who will keep that legacy moving into the future. Again, there will be lots of misinterpretations over the decades. If you think there is a loss of communication between your eyes and your brain, just think of the loss of communications over three or four generations of people who think they are extending your legacy. Things get unrecognizable after a couple of generations. The noise seems to overwhelm the original message.
If you have a calling, you had better think about how the results of that calling will be extended beyond the grave. This is the question of legacy: inheritance. I call it point five of the biblical covenant model. I call it that because that is what Ray Sutton called it. He developed it. (That You May Prosper, 1987, chapter 5.)
I want to encourage you to work on developing your calling. Make sure it is legitimate, and give careful consideration to your personal talents. Be fairly sure that the talents you have, or will develop, are sufficient to the task chosen.
Then you have to consider the inheritance issue. Try to monetize it. It will last a lot longer if you can find a way to do this. There is nothing like a stream of income to retain your heirs' attention.
© 2022 GaryNorth.com, Inc., 2005-2021 All Rights Reserved. Reproduction without permission prohibited.