Books are the new T-shirts

Question: How did you get your publisher to give you a contract for a book of stuff that you had already written and published?

Answer: Books are the new t-shirts. We used to buy t-shirts as a way of covering our hard abs. Now, though, the purpose of the t-shirt is to be a souvenir, to give us a concrete way to remember something that mattered to us—and to give us an easy way to spread that idea to others.

Every non-fiction book published today has its core ideas available for free, online. Freakonomics was in the NY Times, The Tipping Point was in the New Yorker and on Malcolm’s site, plenty of stuff is on Changethis. The Long Tail was endlessly dissected years earlier. All are bestsellers because a book adds a different sort of value.

So, yes, the words have been in various places before, but not in a handy, nearly waterproof, easily shared and referred to format. My hope is that people will identify the nine most clueless people they know and buy one for each.

Seth Godin, in online interview by Guy Kawasaki about Godin's book, Small Is the New Big, which is a collection of blog posts