By Michelle LaPointe

Author’s Note:

It’s common for ambitious projects to require some foundational knowledge. Before getting started, you need to take a class, do Internet research, consult an expert, or read some books. This project requires foundational knowledge, too, but it’s in the form of three stories.  You already know the ending of one of them, but that can’t be helped. It was too good not to use as a name for this project.

I wrote all of the commentary, but I did not write the illustrative stories themselves. In the grand tradition of oral storytelling, they were told to me in social settings. In two cases, they were told at parties so good that I do not remember very much about them.

I remember the origins of this Spherical Cow story, however. A friend of mine, a particle physicist who then worked at Fermilab “counting neutrinos,” as he put it, told it to explain why he was annoyed with an astrophysicist of his acquaintance.  (Astrophysicists are welcome to weigh in with a rebuttal in the comments.)

I have remembered and retold these stories because they are very effective parables. I use them all the time to explain why marketing so often goes sideways. They help us to be aware of the origins of our assumptions, and to see past them toward fresh ideas and better solutions.

Also they’re entertaining.

The Spherical Cow Story

Some years ago, a brilliant astrophysicist retired to a small Wisconsin dairy town. He was pleasant but not sociable, mostly taking long walks and keeping to himself. All anybody really knew about him was that he was very smart. 

He’d been living in the town for a while when the local cows suddenly stopped giving milk. 

All the experts in the area put their time, talents, and expertise toward solving the problem. Farmers, veterinarians, extension agents, and dairy managers all weighed in. When they failed, they reached out to bovine scientists, cow nutrition experts, farm advisors, agrologists, and even hoof trimmers from all over the country. Everyone tried their best, but no one came close to an answer. 

Finally, one of the farmers suggested that they ask the astrophysicist to take a crack at the problem. He was, after all, very smart, and it couldn’t hurt. 

The astrophysicist agreed to give it a go. He went around to all the affected farms. He interviewed farmers, veterinarians, and extension agents. He spent weeks gathering data, and then spent weeks more holed up in his house, working on the problem. Residents of the town often saw lights burning in his windows long into the night. 

After a lot of thought, the astrophysicist announced that he had a solution. He hadn’t actually tested it on the cows, being somewhat icked-out by the milking process, but all of his careful calculations and accumulated research made him confident that it would work. And after all, when he made a prediction about planetary behavior, he was usually right, and planetary science had to be much more difficult than understanding ordinary cows. He told the mayor, who called a town meeting. When the residents showed up at the Town Hall, they saw the astrophysicist standing at the front of the room, with two tables piled high with documents, and a blackboard filled with calculations. 

Everyone settled into silence. The astrophysicist cleared his throat, took up the microphone, and began. 

“Assume a spherical cow of uniform density…”

How does a story about cows apply to the challenge of marketing books?

We all come at the challenge of book marketing with the knowledge and experience of our own expertise, even if it’s not in marketing, or, as in our case, it’s marketing expertise, but not in marketing books. Sometimes that’s good— a fresh perspective always helps, and a different knowledge base is sometimes the catalyst for a great insight or an out-of-the-box solution. Some of the greatest scientific breakthroughs in history have come from experts in different disciplines having casual conversations in hallways or while socializing. 

(I once had the opportunity to attend the Ig Nobel Awards, an annual production of the Annals of Improbable Research. At a symposium the day after the main ceremony, the scientists described the genesis of their award-winning experiments.  Most of their stories included the phrase, “I was having a beer with…” If you have not yet discovered the comedic genius that is the Ig Nobel awards, here’s a link. If you don’t know any scientists, go and meet some now.)

But the phenomenon is familiar to any of us who work in collaborative environments, whether we share information with other departments at the office, or get together in a neighborhood to solve problems like improving traffic safety for children. 

On the other hand, relying too much on our personal knowledge or experience means that sometimes we make assumptions that aren’t particularly helpful.

These assumptions may be based on information that’s outdated, inaccurate, or irrelevant to the problem at hand. In this case, it’s especially important to be open to fresh new solutions, so that we can come up with ideas that are more effective than what’s been done before. At the very least, we hope to discover or develop techniques that will augment or improve upon traditional solutions, or at least make them easier to implement.

The necessity of a fresh eye applies to those of us who have a professional marketing background, too. Anyone who spends much time in BookThreads soon notices that there are quite a few authors with marketing backgrounds. It makes sense, when you think about it. We’re already used to writing pretty much every day of our lives. Is it significantly more difficult to write a 100k novel than four or five hundred ads? Some of us are foolish enough to think it’s not more difficult, and by the time we figure out that we’re very, very wrong, we’re so far into our books that we just keep going.

But even for the pros, book marketing for a solo author has different challenges than marketing for a business. Hence the need for collaboration, a disciplined approach, and fresh ideas.

Image credits: Michelle LaPointe and Envato Elements