Seth Godin
Author
Small is the New Big

We ran Seth Godin as a
featured TypePad blog
on May 4, 2006.

 

In preparation for this interview, I checked out the Squidoo lens on "The Best of Seth Godin," which details not just your well-known marketing books, but seemingly every book you've produced over the years. (The Internet Road Map!) Talk about prolific. When you first saw blogs, you must have said "Finally! Now I can write something every single day!" What was your initial reaction to blogging?

Of course! The greatest thing about blogs (but also one of the things you need to watch out for) is that there is no filter. It's just you and your readers. No editors, no production cycle. This is a boon for me, because I'm able to take a nascent idea and get it out there without a lot of overhead and without investing a lot of time. The challenge, of course, is that sometimes you press SAVE before you should.

Blogs have become deeply ingrained in many people's media diets. Do you think blogs are fulfilling their potential?

I think blogs are TV in the era of the Lone Ranger or the early I Love Lucy shows. The conventions are still being settled and the greatest practitioners have yet to arrive. I think there's an enormous amount of room for improvement... even at the best blogs.

When did you start writing sethgodin.typepad.com/?

Joi Ito introduced me to his blog (and to TypePad) at a conference in Colorado in 2002. I started my blog that very day. I was in the room with a Justice of the Supreme Court (one of the good ones), Joi, Sergey from Google and Jacqueline Novogratz from the Acumen Fund. It was a good day!

Was that your first blog? Do you have others?

Prior to that, my "blog" was my periodic email blast, which had grown to more than 10,000 people. The problem was that the emails got too much response... I'd do a mailing and a few hundred people would write back, each needing a response... I ended up not mailing so much. So the blog was a great solution to that.

The new book, Small is the New Big, is a collection of short riffs, mostly from your blog, but also from magazine articles and e-books. What did you discover about those forms when collecting them all in one place?

Mostly I discovered that there's a lot of filler involved in day to day blogging. Stuff that seems important in the moment but didn't stand the test of time. I was thrilled to discover, though, that my intent -- which is to write pieces that are interesting today and important next year -- was occasionally achieved. That's what ended up in the book.

The book contains close to 200 short entries, each separately titled. These little chapters are ordered alphabetically. What was the thinking there? To ask the reader to get engaged?

The alphabetical order is a statement first about randomness. I believe that marketing is pervading everything that everyone does, and pigeonholing the riffs didn't make sense. The second reason is that in our molecularized, googlized world, being first in phone book isn't worth so much any more.

Mining a blog for book fodder is definitely coming into its own as a publishing strategy. What do you think that says about blogging? How about publishing?

Well, I could write a million words about this, but here's the short version: non-fiction book publishing is largely about finding an audience that is willing to listen and will benefit from what you have to say. We don't need any more cookbooks (there are a billion recipes online) but cookbooks sell (when they sell) to people who are open to what that chef or this author has to say about the topic.

Blogs are an amazing tool for authors because they allow you, day by day, drip by drip, for a few dollars, to assemble an audience of people who want to hear from you. That's the huge first step of publishing, and now, for the first time, anyone can do it without help from a media company.

You say "The real power of blogs comes from that they can be as specific as you like," which is something we definitely love seeing here at Six Apart -- that bloggers can be as specific or as broad as they choose -- or modulate between the two. What are some of your favorite examples of really specific blogs?

Here are two, chosen at semi-random, both about food:

The first is about a guy who takes a picture of every interesting place he eats and then writes it up.

The second is the famous blog in which Julie cooked every single item in the Art of French Cooking and then wrote about it.

I'm sure that if I looked harder, I could find a blog about tofu.

I'm going to ask you to riff on some of your riffs. Which sections of the book caused the biggest reaction when it was orginally published?

The title essay, "Small is the New Big" clearly has legs. And the column, "What did you do during the 2000s" has generated some really great mail... people who started companies or organizations as a direct result of reading it. Of course, it wasn't my column at all. All I did was remind people of something they already knew.

Which section really surprised you when you collected it for the book -- made you sit up and say "Wow, that was great stuff."?

The Fast Company columns aren't blog posts, and so they're longer and less timely. As a result, they're more bookish as well. I cried when I wrote the column about my mom, and I cried again when I re-read it for the book.

Was there a section that you wanted to include, but didn't make the cut?

There were a bunch of "inside baseball" really short pieces that made sense in context but didn't stand up to the need to have the book be coherent. Also, my favorite stuff is always my most recent stuff, and sooner or later you need to draw the line.

You love telling stories, it's pretty clear. Beyond your practice as a marketing guru, have you ever considered a career in fiction or playwriting or those kinds of storytelling arts?

My most favorite story you'll probably never get to hear. It involves a mad axeman, an insane Canadian war veteran named David Curhan. It's a meticulously researched ghost story, and it scares even the bravest teenager. But that's it for my fiction career.

What blogs do your read regularly?

It's a never ending, always changing parade. I'm more of a surfer than a subscriber.

What's your next big (or small) project?

Squidoo.com takes up most of my time. The goal is to build a page that makes your blog work better.