An Entrepreneur’s Tough Take on Publishing

Sam Conniff Allende, a startup entrepreneur and new author with Penguin Random House in the UK, is being invited to share his skeptical viewpoint of the book business—with his publisher

One of the most controversial speakers at FutureBook Live in London last month was Sam Conniff Allende, a serial entrepreneur whose 10 startups include a content-led advertising agency, an interactive British television series, and a youth-marketing agency. Penguin Random House UK CEO Tom Weldon asked for Conniff Allende’s observations as an entrepreneur becoming an author with PRH, and he responded with some serious assessments that suggest publishers are less savvy than they may think in terms of where digital storytelling and consumer options are headed.

Conniff Allende—who has consulted with Red Bull, PlayStation, Google, BBC, Unilever, Facebook, and other companies—is the author of Be More Pirate: Or How to Take on the World and Win, published by Penguin Portfolio in the UK. (It publishes later this month from Simon & Schuster’s Touchstone in the States.)

“Publishing is unique,” he tells us in an interview, “in that it seems to think it has the right—never mind the ability—to ignore the change that’s going on all around it” in entertainment. “And it’s not naïveté that’s behind this as much as resistance.” Because books didn’t undergo as deep a digital disruption as the music industry did, Conniff Allende says, “It’s as if they battened down the hatches and now they’re coming up for air and they’ve missed out. Like someone who’s been in prison and comes out and everyone has an iPhone. Publishing really needs to catch up.”

He referred to a form of publishing arrogance in his FutureBook remarks, and he refines that concept with us, saying, “I’m actually for arrogance in the right place. Arrogance can be a real asset. It may well be needed to protect a form—the book—for the future. Strong and proud of it. But I don’t know if even that’s defensible, either, because you see such saturation of the book market with the same product again and again. While at the senior level I hear ‘We need to do fewer books well,’ that’s not what I hear at the commissioning level. There’s a knocking out of so many similar titles. More cookery books! And that’s a kind of arrogance misplaced.

“And then they tell you that publishing welcomes author involvement. I can’t tell you what a euphemism that ‘author involvement’ is,” he says with a laugh, referring to the increased burden of marketing responsibility so many authors find being transferred to them today. “It’s less involvement than delegation.”

In his work with clients, Conniff Allende talks about aligning with adjacent industries. One example of this in publishing may be the partnership announced this week in which Chronicle Books will have authors write titles based on LEGO, a licensing arrangement that leverages the young fans of the iconic building blocks and minifigures with books, puzzles, postcards, and journals. “In comparable industries,” Conniff Allende says, “it’s normal to think of where your next generation of audience is. Young adult fiction isn’t all an innovation of the publishing industry.”

And yet, at the highest levels, Conniff Allende says he feels that publishing isn’t finding its way into as many of the channels of social and commercial content as are necessary to give authors and readers the chances they need to find each other.

Bottom line: These are comments viewed by many in publishing as contrarian, to be sure—one attendee referred to Conniff Allende as “graceless”—and Conniff Allende functions as a provocateur even in the wider business context of his usual role. But one of the first things you normally hear from publishing colleagues in response to someone like this is, “Oh, you just don’t understand publishing.” So it’s encouraging to hear that PRH’s Weldon is impressed enough with Conniff Allende that he’s asked him to do a session with the PRH leadership about his take on his debut book-biz experience.