Bestseller Interviews

Would you like to consult with companies like Microsoft, Oracle, or Hewlett-Packard? How about the hottest startups coming through venture-capital firms?

Well, a best-selling book can help you do it.

I asked Geoffrey Moore to answer a few questions about how to write a bestseller, and he ended up giving some of the best advice I’ve read on the relationship between an author and his or her consulting career.

Geoffrey is the author of five best-selling books, including Crossing the Chasm, Dealing with Darwin, and Inside the Tornado. He’s also the Managing Director of TCG Advisers, where he consults with some of the world’s hottest high-tech companies.

Thanks for doing this interview, Geoff!

1. Question: You’ve spoken often about the chasm that companies have to cross to reach the pockets of mainstream buyers. Is there a similar chasm for writers that separates anonymous and best-selling authors, and if so, how do you cross it? 

   Answer: I think there is an analogy here. Unknown authors need to establish credibility with some constituency such that publishers will value them as able to “deliver” a market. This creates a chicken-and-egg problem if the vehicle for establishing that credibility is the book you are trying to get published. In my case, my consulting practice and speaking engagements allowed me to gain a modest following for the “chasm” ideas before the book came out.

2. Question: As a beginning author, who were the early adopters (the first readers) for your books, and how did you reach them?Answer: Early adopters were high-tech marketing managers and executives. At the time there were not many books on the subject, and the best two—Regis McKenna’s The Regis Touch and Bill Davidow’s High-Tech Marketing had both been out for a while. That, plus the chasm problem resonating with folks, drove early sales. To target these folks I spoke at industry conferences and at business breakfasts with the sponsorship of KPMG high-tech practice. Many consultancies are looking for an excuse to bring together their customers, so business authors who are willing to speak for free can usually get a sponsor.
3. Question: When do you change your focus from promoting your current book and start working on the next one? In other words, when should authors stop chasing laggard readers?Answer: I don’t think about books, nor about readers. I think about consulting engagements and business executives. I focus on a new book when the mental models of the current book are no longer an adequate match for the problems we are seeing in the consulting practice. Up to a point, you can patch this over by adding models via PowerPoint, but eventually you need a whole new framework, hence a whole new book. For me, though, the book is a means, not an end.
4. Question: Once you built up a small fan club, how did you make the push to reach the majority of readers and become a best-selling author? What advice would you give to authors that are trying to make the same leap?Answer: Crossing the Chasm was a “meme,” a contagious idea that spread virally. I did a lot of workshops leveraging the material in the book, many with start-ups, many with entrepreneurial efforts inside major corporations, some sponsored by venture capitalists. It was always about the chasm, about where each effort was relative to the chasm, about how strategy had to change, etc. etc. It was never about me. It was always about the situation the people attending were in. That made every encounter an exploration of a new situation guided by the models in the book, lots of “being in the moment” required. In business markets I do not think people care about authors, or even books. They care about common problems that they have at the moment and that are typically not easily or not ever solved.
5. Question: How important is it to innovate with your book–to say something that’s never been said before?Answer: It is not so much “never said before” as “currently not properly understood.” People need to get a significant benefit from the ideas being promoted. They have to break the back of one or more problems that are currently intractable. People are always looking for a key to some lock.
6. Question: As a beginning author, what steps did you take to separate yourself from the crowd, and how would you recommend other authors differentiate themselves?Answer: I didn’t think about authors as my competitive set. The only place I ever encountered them was on bookshelves in bookstores, and that is a very tough place to try to compete. You need to get mindshare before the reader gets to that shelf. In that context, you are not competing against other authors, but rather against received wisdom, the status quo, and the background hum of white noise that a bazillion new books every year generates. You must call out to a well-defined target audience, you must capture their attention by dramatizing a problem that they have at the moment, and you must frame the solution to that problem in a provocative manner that is easily communicated by viral means.
7. Question: How many years of marketing and consulting experience went into each of your books, and how important do you think that experience is for writing a best-selling book?Answer: All of the research for all of my books happens in the natural course of my daily consulting practice and work at the venture capital firm where I am a partner. In that context I get a huge amount of briefing every year. The part that transforms that into usable experience is when my partners and I commit to solve some intractable problem and must wrestle it to the ground. Inevitably that generates a raft of new insights, and over time the existing models and books are simply swamped by the new additions—hence the need for the next book. The kind of books I write imply original insights, so they absolutely require experience.
8. Question: How do you find so many examples to support your points in each of your books, and do you think it’s important that other authors perform similar research?Answer: Examples are critical to communicating any abstract idea, and the more you have, the more nuanced the communication can be. By contrast, when you are stuck with a relatively small number of examples, you risk making claims that do not scale to the rest of the world. You want to make sure you have tested your idea in enough situations that it has legs. A lot of fad business books disappoint because they over-rely on a handful of performances that turn up later to be transitory at best.
9. Question: Do you think your connections to large companies like Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard help you sell books, and how did you develop those connections?Answer: The books help make the contacts, which leads to engagements or at least pretty interesting conversations, which leads to more viral interest in the books. Although I always do a book launch PR program, I do not think of myself as promoting the book so much as evangelizing the ideas in the book. The goal is to be in service to the class of readers that have the problem the book purports to address. If you are genuinely in service to people, they will generally support your efforts.
10. Question: If you could pass on one piece of wisdom to aspiring authors, what would it be?Answer: It’s not about you, not now, not ever. It’s not about being an author. It’s not even about selling books, although that will be a key metric of your success. It is always about your audience and your subject, and framing the latter in a way that creates unique and valuable insights for the former.

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