The Dip by Seth Godin

The Dip Tour

I'm trying something new this May.

Usually, when authors tour, they trudge from bookstore to bookstore. It's grinding and a little demeaning (here's a tip: if you see an author in a bookstore, don't go near him unless you're prepared to buy the book (or at least hide it somewhere in the store.)) The whole interaction isn't very pleasant for the reader either.

Well, I love to do speaking gigs, but rarely get the chance to do events that are open to the public and relatively inexpensive. So I figured I'd combine both.

Here's the deal. (Details are here). In each city I'm able to get to, if you buy 5 books (in advance), you get to come hear me give a speech for free. OR, if you prefer to think of it differently, if you pay $50 to hear me speak, you get five books for free.

Why five books? So you'll give four away. That's why I wrote the book. So you would buy copies and give them away. You register online, you pay in advance, you're guaranteed a seat and you're guaranteed your copies, available when you show up. We can't do refunds, because the books are a pain to move around, so please be sure you can come when you sign up.

Which cities? So far, just Philly. UPDATE: We just added Chicago.
More to follow soon, I hope. If you have a very large network or a very large organization in a city in the US (sorry, too much travel to go overseas), drop me a line if you'd like to discuss running an event in your town. The minimum is 500 people, though. [let me reclarify: you need to get the books through a special link, not from just any store... and, I will be posting new cities, very soon! Promise.] If it works, I'll tell you. If it doesn't, I'll tell you. Either way, it'll be interesting way to meet a lot of readers and get books into the hands of people motivated to give them away!

Just because they moved the dip...

...doesn't mean it's gone.

The music business used to be simple. You gigged and prayed and waited and hoped that Berry Gordy would give you a contract. Once you had a record label, you were in. The Dip was early and steep.

Now, of course, making a record is trivial. A laptop and some microphones and you're in. No permission needed.

And making a music video is a lot easier. And who needs MTV if you can get it on YouTube.

Hence the problem. Before, there were thousands of frustrated musicians with no record, no promotion and no Clive Davis. Now, there are thousands of frustrated musicians with a lot more at stake. They've got recordings and CDs and videos and MySpace pages but they're still not successful.

It doesn't feel fair. It's not. It's the Dip.

The Dip is what separates a hit from a non-hit. And the irony is that without the Dip, it would be useless to try to succeed in pop music. Without a chasm that separates the hits from everyone else, the hits aren't worth anything.

Embracing the Dip, not cursing it, is the only way to stay sane (and become successful).

What the General knew

Seymour Hersch quotes the late General John D. Lavelle on Vietnam,

"Hey, either fight it or quit, but let's not waste all the money and the lives the way we are doing it."

Stuck in another Dip.

Was Google right to be so sure of themselves?

Chris Anderson has very nice things to say about The Dip. In his post, he wonders about a quote I related from Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google. Sergey said,

"We knew that Google was going to get better every single day as we worked on it, and we knew that sooner or later, everyone was going to try it. So our feeling was that the later you tried it, the better it was for us because we'd made a better impression with better technology. So we were never in a big hurry to get you to use it today. Tomorrow would be better."

In return, Chris says,

The problem with extrapolating marketing lessons from once-in-a-lifetime success stories like Google and Apple is that most of us aren't Jobs, Brin or Page, nor can we count on the luck that played a role on all of their successes. Products that market themselves are ideal, of course, but there aren't many of them. And even those that are don't always reveal themselves as such at the start.

Here's the thing: When Sergey said this, Google wasn't legendary and he wasn't a billionaire. When he said it, Google was just a well-funded startup with a plan. And the plan was to confront the Dip. While other startups were playing it safe, being defensive and watching the cash, Google made a decision: do this to get through the Dip or don't do it at all.

Ironically, Chris made similar decisions with The Long Tail. It would have been easy to publish this book as a normal business book. And it would have hit the wall. Chris embraced the Dip that faces every book and acted instead like his book was surely going to be a record-breaking bestseller. His actions made it likely the book would either fail miserably or succeed magnificently.

As a result of Google's decision, they made counter-intuitive decisions. No ads, for example. No clutter. No popups, no tricky interpretations of privacy policies. Instead, every decision was, "If this is going to be the one and only choice, the best search engine in the world, what should we do?" The feeling was, if they built that, the money would take care of itself. And the investors who bought in were in on the game from the start.

Did they get lucky? You bet. Did it seem arrogant? Sure. But my point is that if they hadn't made those decisions, they would have certainly failed. They would have had no chance to get lucky in the first place if they hadn't embraced the Dip and organized to get through it. I think if you plan on a once-in-a-lifetime success story, it's a lot more likely to happen to you.

A few free galleys

Sometime in the next few weeks, Allison is going to be mailing out a number of galleys (pre-production paperback review copies) to bloggers. If you've got a blog, if you think your readers might want a review and you'd be willing to take a look at The Dip, drop Allison an email. Let her know what you write about and be sure to include your mailing address.

No promises, of course, but hopefully she'll be able to get a number of copies out in April. [Yikes, they're all gone. That was quick.]

Finding the Dip in the cell phone market

Tim Cook, Apple COO:

The traditional way that all of us were taught in business school to look at a market was you look at the products you are selling, you look at the price bands that are in the market, you think of the price band that you product is in and assume you can get a percentage of it, and that's how you get this addressable market. That kind of analysis doesn't make really great products. The iPod would not have been brought to market if we had looked it that way. How many $399 music players were being sold at that time? Today the cell phone industry, a lot of people pay $0 for the cell phone. Guess why? That's what its worth! If we offer something that has tremendous value that is sort of this thing that people didn't have in their consciousness, it was not imaginable... I think there are a bunch of people that will pay $499 or $599 and our target is clearly to hit 10 million and I would guess some of those people are paying $0 because its worth $0 and willing to pay a bit more because its worth more.

Short version: creating the best cell phone in the world required being willing to charge for it. And if you can make a cell phone worth charging for, people will pay it. Apple's Dip was working their way through a barrier (charging) that no one has felt willing to make such a huge bet on before.

"Delightful!" ...The Financial Times

The first review of The Dip in the mainstream media was from Richard Pachter in the Miami Herald. Given the short length of the book, his 'review' was more like half a sentence (Richard promises a complete review soon). But it was a very nice half sentence. Now we have a longer review from the ironic management columnist Lucy Kellaway. (Reg. required). Here's what she really said,

"This double attack from two friends laid me low for a bit, but I now have the ideal weapon with which to fight back. I’ve been sent a proof copy of a delightfully slim new book by Seth Godin called The Dip – A little book that teaches you when to quit (and when to stick). Godin’s theory is that quitting is a vital part of success. The worst thing any of us can do is to try to be well rounded people: he urges us to concentrate all efforts on the things we are going to win at, and quit everything else."

So maybe the only delightful part was the width of the book, but it's better than, say, "annoying..." or "plagiarized..."

The relentless rush to be mediocre

That's what my book is really about. Or, to be a lot more positive about it, it's about avoiding temptation and gravity and becoming the best in the world.

I'm amazed at how quickly people will stand up and defend not just the status quo but the inevitability of it. We've been taught since forever that the world needs joiners and followers, not just leaders. We've been taught that fitting in is far better than standing out, and that good enough is good enough.

Which might have been fine in a company town, but doesn't work so well in a winner-take-all world. Now, the benefits that accrue to someone who is the best in the world are orders of magnitude greater than the crumbs they save for the average. No matter how hard working the average may be.

I've never met anyone... anyone... who needed to settle for being average. Best is a slot that's available to everyone, somewhere.

Welcome to The Dip

I was doing email permission marketing long before Al Gore even had a chance to invent the Internet. In the late 1990s, email was an incredibly powerful tool. In fact, it wasn't unusual to get a 50% response rate to a well-created piece of mail delivered with permission to the right person at the right time.

Which is why I stopped. Without a large team, I just couldn't do justice to the responses an email would generate. If 100 or 1,000 people take the time to write to me, I figure I ought to be able to take the time to write back.

So, with some trepidation, I'm trying an experiment. This blog is equipped with a feature that allows you to be updated by email. Once a week until my book comes out in May, I'll be posting on this site. I'll be writing about:

• What's the book's about
• How to win a free autographed copy
• A new sort of speaking tour
• How I'm marketing the book
• How the book can work for your organization

Feel free to sign up for the email alerts or for the RSS feed. Or not.

I just hope you'll try to avoid the temptation to hit 'reply' to every post! Or at least forgive me if I don't get back to you right away. The last thing I want to do is waste your time or abuse your trust.

And thanks for reading.

(Amazon and BN both have the book listing up).