1) We have a fresh slate at HarperStudio. What’s your advice?

The huge opportunity for book publishers is to get unstuck. You’re not in the printing business. The life and death of trees is not your concern. You’re in the business of leveraging the big ideas authors have. There are a hundred ways to do that, yet book publishers obsess about just one or two of them. Here’s the news flash: that’s not what authors care about. Authors don’t care about units sold. They care about ideas spread. If you can help them do that, we’re delighted to share our profits with you. But one (broken) sales channel–bookstores–and one broken model (guaranteed sale of slow-to-market books) is not the way to get there. If you free yourself up enough to throw that out, you’ll figure out dozens of ways to leverage and spread and profit from ideas worth spreading.

2) If everything is free, how is anyone going to make any money?

First, the market and the internet don’t care if you make money. That’s important to say. You have no right to make money from every development in media, and the humility that comes from approaching the market that way matters. It’s not “how can the market make me money” it’s “how can I do things for this market.” Because generally, when you do something for an audience, they repay you. The Grateful Dead made plenty of money. Tom Peters makes many millions of dollars a year giving speeches, while books are a tiny fraction of that. Barack Obama used ideas to get elected, book royalties are just a nice side effect. There are doctors and consultants who profit from spreading ideas. Novelists and musicians can make money with bespoke work and appearances and interactions. And you know what? It’s entirely likely that many people in the chain WON’T make any money. That’s okay. That’s the way change works.

3) How do you think publishers and authors could work more productively together?

Publishing is far too focused on the pub day. The event of the publication. This is a tiny drip, perhaps the least important moment in a long timeline. As soon as publishers see themselves as marketers and agents and managers and developers of content, things change.

4) What’s the most important lesson the book publishing industry can learn from the music industry?

The market doesn’t care a whit about maintaining your industry. The lesson from Napster and iTunes is that there’s even MORE music than there was before. What got hurt was Tower and the guys in the suits and the unlimited budgets for groupies and drugs. The music will keep coming. Same thing is true with books. So you can decide to hassle your readers (oh, I mean your customers) and you can decide that a book on a Kindle SHOULD cost $15 because it replaces a $15 book, and if you do, we (the readers) will just walk away. Or, you could say, “if books on the Kindle were $1, perhaps we could create a vast audience of people who buy books like candy, all the time, and read more and don’t pirate stuff cause it’s convenient and cheap…” I’m a pessimist that the book industry will learn from music. How are you betting?

5) You talk about all of these inspiring people in TRIBES. Is there anyone you had to leave out that we should look into?

There are so many inspiring people out there, you see them at every turn. As someone considering the opportunity to lead, I don’t think you need more examples than the ones I’ve got in the book, I think you need to think hard about what’s holding you back. It’s not for lack of proof or from a paucity of examples, that’s for sure.