Pay Attention, it’s 2019.

All of this has been written before, and all of it will be written again, because that’s how the world works.

A little context. I was invited to speak on a panel at Futurebook Live 2018 (November 30th, 2018). Expertly chaired by Macmillan’s Sara Lloyd, the discussion ranged from ‘what we’ve seen that showed us what new forms of storytelling could do’, through the value (or not) of consumer research, and finished with a spirited examination of story as world, world as story, and the value, and process, of innovation. Hence this article, which is going to pin some of those things down as words on a screen.

The first thing I want to say is that innovation isn’t a bad word. I’ve read articles about publishing and its relationship to innovation that have made me wonder whether the word is verboten in the upper echelons of this industry. Innovation, as I see it, is not the expectation of failure, is not driven by data-analytics that won’t let you make a decision until it’s been sense and market-tested to oblivion, is not… (I could go on, but will stop there).

You want to know what innovation is? 

Innovation is passion. Trust, and joy, and permission, and faith. Courage, beauty, and invention. Innovation is a conversation that has the sense to not know where it’s going. Sara said that innovation is about people, not technology, and she’s right. But how we approach and understand that is the difficult bit. How we think about people, how to prevent ourselves from being distracted by shiny things, and how we allow ourselves to have passion, faith, permission and courage.

Passion, faith, permission and courage are things that publishing has in spades, has in every fibre of its being. A belief in the power of reading to change the world. However it is evident (to me, at least) that the curatorial expertise that goes into creating books and the ability to make innovative things that can complement books are not necessarily the same thing.

We still, despite some politicians’ claims to the contrary, live in a world where expertise is a good thing. So here are my suggestions for how innovation might find its way into publishing in 2019.

The first thing. Talk to people who aren’t you. Really. It seems to me that the reason publishing exists as an industry is that it’s actually incredibly difficult to edit, produce, market and distribute a book if you’re not an organisation that’s geared around doing just that, and publishing does do that rather well. And that’s the offer to an author; that a publisher knows what they’re doing. The people you need to talk to about innovation might be experience designers, or technical producers, creative designers, or coders. What matters is that they have something to tell you, but you have to ask first.

The second thing. Marketing is not just about driving sales to a book. Marketing is also about the halo around a book, or an organisation (an imprint, for example). It’s about demonstrating to a reading public, or an author, or anyone involved in the book trade, that you are creative, original, clever, ethical, responsible (again, I could go on)… Those things are just as important, and they will, indirectly, drive sales and attract attention, but those sales will be the result of courage, permission and faith, not metrics.

The third thing. Innovation will cost you money. It isn’t free, and it isn’t cheap. If you want free or cheap, then stop asking for innovation. That said and established, there are plenty of ways to have this not fall entirely on your shoulders. The most obvious one (because I’m also an academic) is to partner with a university. We have access to Industrial Strategy funding that you don’t, but we make a stronger case for some of that money if we have a commercial partner. There are also funding opportunities that need to be led by a commercial organisation, but that are more likely to be awarded if you have an academic institution in the mix too. Working between the university and commercial sectors is how I’ve been able to make a lot of the work I have, and it generally makes everything more interesting. You need to be prepared to commit something – usually time, money or a combination of the two – and you need to share, but the rewards are considerable.

Finally, the fourth thing. If innovation is passion, then talk to artists. Who know more about creating something because they believe in it than almost anyone else in the world (authors aside). They will be mad, most of the time, and they might scare you a little, but they make the things they do because they they’re a little bit driven, because they’re passionate about new ideas and new audiences.

And one more thing, linking back to a piece I wrote here over a year ago. Failure is not what you think it is. Failure is getting better at something because you believe in it, and are given (or have given yourself) permission to keep doing, and to keep trying. Failure goes away when you start thinking imaginatively, when you think about what you’re really trying to achieve in the long term, and stop being quite so focused on the immediate measures of success. Not everything is going to work, but if you’re committed, and stay true to a desire to see change, and to challenge yourself, then if you do stumble, you pick yourself up again and get on with it.

Maybe though, it’s simpler than all of the above. These are all factors to bear in mind, concerns to be considered and advice that is well meant. But maybe innovation is just saying ‘yes’.

All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

This is the phrase. Adopted as a pep-talk by silicon valley Imagineers and tech startups, by creative writing students and university lecturers. It doesn’t mean what you think it does. It isn’t a hopeful phrase, isn’t an entreaty to keep going, to try your best and move on from disaster.

It’s a mournful set of words. Melancholic, devoid of joy. A sequence spoken at the end of a life filled with failures. An introspective self-justification to remain sane as you lie on your deathbed. It is the language of disillusion and despair, despondency, and defeat.

We do it a disservice by misquoting it. We malign it as we forget its place amongst the last things Beckett put to paper. We employ it as a lie.

Worse: We have weaponised the concept of failure.

This weaponisation has a real effect. It is not an abstract, not a situation we can ignore. Billions are thrown at mis-advised startups and empty-headed schemes which are fated to collapse before they draw their first real breath. The hot air present in new technology entrepreneurism has been powering the whole world for years.

In its weaponisation, it occludes the value of learning. ‘Fail better’ has become a mantra for moving on and jumping aboard the next, newest, shiniest piece of technologically enabled disruption. It has become a watchword for novelty for the sake of itself. The innovation Ouroboros eating its tail, as Saturn squats in the next room, devouring his children. Each one, he imagines, will taste better than the last. Each time, he is disappointed.

Beckett wrote those words toward the end of his life. The whole novella (Worstward Ho. 1984, Grove Press) is a lament. The phrase, that phrase, specifically laments the desire to succeed at one thing. To strive toward perfection at the expense of all else. Beckett skewers, impaling on a stake, precisely the anodyne future that his words would engender. Fail better has become the phrase to justify a butterfly-like flitting from one disaster to the next. Your document management start-up just went bust? Don’t worry, there’s an umbrella-sharing scheme opening in Shanghai next week. Jump on board. Just remember to fail better next time.

Beckett pursued the word. His try again, fail again; a steady, unending process of whittling and carving. The novels, plays, novellas and poetry each, and together, bear testament to obsession.

Beckett, and the context that phrase, the phrase, arose from is why the weaponisation of failure is toxic. We have allowed failure to be acceptable because, in truth, it is. Failure is part of the creative process. Novels contain chapters replete with failure. Paintings the same. What is different about an artist’s failure, and a tech startup’s failure, is that the former fails in the name of improvement, in pursuit of learning. Failure is a step along a path and the footfall it leaves will be examined, pored over and deconstructed. Poked at and worried over. Realigned and turned inside out. The latter will be packaged as equity debt and sold on, reabsorbed into the guts of the machine. It will appear, in a new suit, in a year or so, whereupon the whole sorry circus will begin once more.

Beckett demanded perfection, insisted he live up to his internal expectation of his work. His lifetime was dedicated to embodying human experience in words; an impossible ambition, but one that Beckett’s diligence, his obsession, brought closer to fruition than, arguably, any other writer in history. Beckett accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature. Accepted, and declined to attend the ceremony in Stockholm. He was too busy working¹. Too busy failing better.

Beckett’s fail better is Frank Auerbach painting every single day for sixty years. Remarking of his work that “… I haven’t done enough pictures to justify my existence”. Carving an image out of his paint², willing the subject to manifest on the canvas.

Behind Camden Town Station, summer evening Frank Auerbach

You don’t achieve Beckett’s clarity, his precision, by walking away. You don’t get that good by failing better somewhere else, at some other thing that tantalises you with a swift return on investment. You get some way toward that by reflecting and trying again. Patience, here, is genuinely a virtue. In fetishising failure, celebrating it as a necessary entrepreneurial byproduct, we are forgetting how to actually learn, how to process diligence and commitment. We have valorised the mantra of TED talks. Bite-sized fragments of learning that are rarely examined in detail by their audience. This short essay is being published on The Writing Platform, who’s mission is “arming writers with digital knowledge”. This is the small piece of knowledge I’d like to impart, and have come to mind the next time you’re told that failing better is a virtue:

Failure is a choice, not a consequence of iteration. Failure happens when you walk away from an idea. When you give up. Everything else is narrowing your focus and getting better, becoming more precise.

Try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good. Go for good. Where neither for good. Good and all.

1. Something Bob Dylan’s critics would do well to remember. ︎
2. Here’s a secret. Stand 20 feet or so from an Auerbach painting and look again. His studio is 25 feet square. Stand in the artist’s shoes and see. ︎