Who Are the Outliers of Modern Publishing?

Having just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, I was struck with the immediate question: who will be the next outliers of the now-turbulent publishing industry? Who will do for the publishing world what Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Bill Joy did for the computer world?

To put this question in context, I refer to Gladwell’s theory. He claims the most successful people in the world don’t just get there by magic fate or raw talent, but rather by an inexplicable blend of opportunity, luck, hard work and timing. (By the way, Outliers is an excellent read.)

While I can’t predict a specific answer to this, I can predict the likely characteristics and scenarios of these outliers, such as:

Age: in the range of mid-30s to early-40s (born ~1967-77). Old enough to respect the print world, but young enough to embrace the web as the next viable publishing platform. Not a 60-something laid-off news editor, and not a 20-something blogger hotshot, but somewhere in between.

Experience: an editor, journalist or writer by trade with work experience in the dot com industry. They’ve worked with web teams long enough to understand the role of other web disciplines like design, development, programming, optimization, analytics, SEO, affiliate marketing, etc.

Knowledge and Skills: writing, editing, content strategy, marketing, social networking, blogging.

Hard Work: 10,000 hours of practice, although The Dip author Seth Godin says maybe 5,000 will do. Need I say more? 🙂

Timing: at this moment, the outliers are working on securing a foothold in commercial web publishing. Right now. Not sooner or later, but now.

Opportunity: hard to be specific on this. Understand that the internet has essentially leveled the playing field of opportunity. The cost to publish and market is next to zero, so anyone with enterprise and innovation gets a fair shot to the top. An outliers’ success is no longer contingent on the old boys network, but rather on their—as Gary Vaynerchuk proclaims—passion, patience and hustle. And luck.

Place: the internet, of course. The outliers are active in if not outright leading discussions and rallying followers around their publishing vision. They’re making connections with the right people and cultivating those relationships for future support.

So, who’s it going to be?

Disclosure: the books referenced here contain Amazon affiliate links.

Photo by sektordua.