View From the Publishing Trenches

I’ve been pondering writing this review for six weeks or more but only just decided what I really wanted to say. The book — Collapse of Distinction: Stand out and move up by Scott McKain — is a good book. Make no mistake about that. You may learn something new from it…or, at least, gain a new perspective for your marketing endeavors.

A good book, but not a great book in my opinion.

However, I think it could have been a great book if it had been shorter and better focused. And if the author (or publisher) had not added so much fluff to stretch it out, particularly the “Executive Summary” at the end of every chapter. Those summaries serve little real purpose other than to add pages. The main text of each chapter is already well-organized with plenty of subheadings and pull quotes and, thus, is easy to scan to find what you want. The “Action Steps, Questions, and Ideas” add-on at the end of each chapter is a little better and more useful but doesn’t really add much value (again, it mostly adds pages).

I absolutely agreee with McKain that our society in general, and marketing of businesses in particular, has degenerated into an overall sameness with very little to differentiate one from another. The exceptions serve to prove the truth of the observations. In the first third of the book, McKain does an excellent job of answering the question “how did we get into this mess?” He addresses the various self-destructive decisions that business all-too-often make in an attempt to meet the competition rather than provide something unique and valuable to the customer.

McKain then sets out to offer concrete steps you can take to differentiate your business and its products or services from the overwhelming sameness in your marketplace. At that point, his advice seems to sound too much like the advice your can find in dozens (maybe hundreds) of other business books. The terminology may be different but the basics are the same. His “Four Cornerstones of Distinction” — clarity, creativity, communication, and customer-experience focus — are neither unique nor insightful, in my opinion. Some of the discussion of these four concepts is very good, but much reads like the text was padded for extra length.

And I did grow weary of the continual references to how wonderful the Obama presidential campaign was. McKain professes to believe that substance matters, but these kinds of examples seem to contradict that stand. A campaign, no matter now successful, that was almost all style with very little meaningful substance does not seem like a great example. Besides, if he wanted political examples, there have been some excellent conservative campaigns from which to draw. A little balance would have been nice. As it is, by about the third Obama campaign example, I began to skim the book. But maybe that’s just me.

I agree with McKain’s basic thesis: “Over the past several years, we have seen the homogenization of practically everything.” And his analysis of how it came about is fantastic. I found myself nodding in agreement as I read. His recipe for successfully differentiating your business from your competition is good and, if you haven’t read many other similar business books, you will find it useful.

This good 250-page book would have been a great 150-page book with more variety in its examples of successful differentiation. And the result probably would have been a harder hitting, more tightly focused, more valuable book as a result.

One other note of interest about this book: Collapse of Distinction is a NelsonFree title, meaning that any reader with the book in hand can go to a Thomas Nelson (the publisher) website and download the book in several other formats — including PRC (compatible with the Amazon Kindle and Mobipocket), PDF, and EPUB (compatible with Sony Reader) as well as MP3 audio files (the book is split into 12 files). I downloaded all of them. Here’s my take on them:

• PRC (Kindle/Mobipocket) — looks great on my Kindle and the desktop Mobipocket Reader
• PDF — looks just like the print edition (imagine that), complete with the blank pages…but the ToC had no hyperlinks to the chapters (why not?)
• EPUB — I don’t have a Sony Reader, so I first tried using the Adobe Digital Editions reader, but the file would not open (just a generic error message). Then I tried using the desktop version of Stanza, and that worked fine.
• MP3 — these worked fine, but I have two issues with them: (1) no indication of who is reading it (McKain or somebody else?) and (2) the files are huge with 26.5 Mb for the short Introduction (it’s just voice, guys, and could have been compressed a lot without losing significant audio quality)

One thing does puzzle me. Since the publisher obviously has a Kindle edition of the book (see the previous paragraph), why aren’t they offering it for sale on the Amazon Kindle Store right now? They also already have an audiobook version, but that is not available on Amazon, either. And the EPUB version is not available on the Sony Ebookstore site. This smacks of archaic thinking (which seems to contradict Thomas Nelson’s innovative approach with the NelsonFree concept) — first the hardcover, then the paperback, then the Kindle, then the audiobook?

I’d recommend this book if you could get a Kindle or paperback edition for, say, $9.95 (although I think Kindle books should be several dollars less than that). I think $24.95 for the hardcover is too much for what you get. The current Amazon discounted price of $16.49 is a good price when you couple it with the free alternate editions.