From AFR Boss in 2002. And i still haven’t got around to writing one yet.
So you want to write a business best-seller. Even if you do, you are still unlikely to get rich quick, reports Ed Charles
MANAGEMENT BOOKS are big business for Australia’s publishers, however
many copies they sell. But they aren’t necessarily a money-spinner for
authors. Locally, respectable sales for any book would be 20,000
copies; for a management title, selling 5,000 is very good. Dymocks has
about a 20 per cent share of the sales of business and management
books. Meredith Drake, the chain’s business books manager, says: “There
are only eight or nine books that would sell more than 2,000 copies a
year (at Dymocks).”
With authors taking about a 10 per cent cut of sales, most wouldn’t earn $5,000 a book, even those 100,000 to 200,000 words long. Yet Australian management authors still try, even against the daunting competition of the global gurus. Sandy Grant, president of the Australian Publishers Association and chairman of Hardie Grant Books, says management books follow international trends. “The US is still the dominant force,” he says.
What’s defined as a management book is a grey area encompassing motivational, academic, biographical, psychological and economic texts. AC Nielsen’s BookTrack top 10 management books includes personal finance titles. The one exception is Paul Barry’s Rich Kids: How the Murdochs and Packers lost $950 million (Bantam, 2002). The other nine, mainly written by Australian authors, have get-rich-quick and property investment themes. As with any product, sales are cyclical, reflecting trends and events. As Rich Kids shows, anything to do with large collapses and governance is in demand. Wendy Morell, group marketing manager, finance and business, at John Wiley & Sons, says Enron is still hot. A new title on the subject is due from the US next month.
Morell says Australian books are occasionally published overseas. Robert Critchley’s Rewired, Rehired or Retired? (Jossey Bass, 2002), one of Wiley’s business best-sellers for the past three months, is one of them.
Colin Carter, senior adviser to the Boston Consulting Group, has a book on corporate governance coming out next year, called Back to the Drawing Board. Written with American academic Jay Lorsch and published by Harvard Business School Press, he had the subject matter long before the Enron bubble burst. “It was a subject that was viewed as very boring,” Carter says. His motivation was not money. He had always wanted to write a book. “I enjoy doing it and it is a bit of a challenge.” He would like to have an influence on the way boards operate, although he doesn’t expect it to be a promotional tool for his practice. “As far as the practice is concerned, I’m half- retired and I’d prefer to play golf,” he says.
Bob McLeod, marketing manager of business books at McGraw-Hill, says many Australian management authors are writing for the prestige and opportunity to subtly promote their companies, rather than for the money. “For a lot of them it will enhance their reputation and their consulting business,” he says.
Although joint publishing is common practice in the US, McLeod says McGraw-Hill’s joint deal with the Australian Institute of Management is a first for the company in Australia. Its series of books on innovation and leadership is expected to sell around 3,000 copies.
Sometimes the deal is that the publisher is helped financially or by the author’s company buying copies. Internet consultant Martin Lindstrom’s book Brand Building on the Internet, written with Tim Frank Andersen, was published by Hardie Grant Books in 1999. Lindstrom’s employer, Clemenger, bought 500 copies. Lindstrom didn’t take a fee. Sandy Grant says Brand Building sold better in Europe and the US than in Australia. This is the problem for local authors – the limited domestic market. Sales of Australian management books are in proportion to the relative importance of Australian business to the US and Europe.
Published in April 1999, the US title Who Moved My Cheese?, by Spencer Johnson (Vintage/Ebury), sold almost 9,000 copies in the past year – at least 10 times more than any locally written, strictly management title. This makes it the Dymocks management best-seller. The next strictly business title on the list, Jack Welch’s autobiography Jack, sold only a third of that figure. Between Johnson and Welch came the popular self-help books Rich Dad, Poor Dad (1998) and Retire Young, Retire Rich (2002), both by Robert Kiyosaki.
Jenny Rehfeldt of AIMBooks in Sydney says Who Moved my Cheese? sells well because it is topical. “Occupational change is what is on people’s minds,” she says. It is also a thin paperback that takes about 25 minutes to read.
And one more recommendation: With all the thousands of management books to choose from, Dymocks recently gave Who Moved My Cheese? to its staff.