MONEY & MEDIA:Malcolm Gladwell - author of bestsellers The Tipping Pointand Blink- has redefined success for writers and may be the adrenaline shot the ailing publishing industry needs
THE GLADWELL Constituency make their way from the train station to the theatre, some grasping copies of Outliers, while others, the old hands, flash first-edition covers of The Tipping Point. They've come to see their hero perform in the flesh, and the early evening warmth brings with it a mood that suggests the end of term at an American Ivy League university: relaxed and sophisticated, with an undercurrent of intellectual jealousy.
Malcolm Gladwell Live is a rock concert for the chattering classes and but one element of a successful and influential marketing strategy which offers pointers to the future of the book business.
Tonight, the English-born, Canadian-reared writer is in Brighton to plug Outliers. He walks on stage dressed in untucked shirt and jeans, his trademark shock of Afro hair trimmed, almost neat. Tickets for the event are £20, in return for which the punters receive an hour of Gladwell's time. The stage is bare but for a lectern. No pyrotechnics, no gimmicks. Just stories.
His subject tonight is the financial crisis, a product, as he sees it, of "expert failure". To illustrate, he uses tales from a key battle in the American Civil War, suggesting that over-confidence leads to poor decision-making. There is, he says, a "miscalibration" between how smart we are and how smart we think we are. Unlike incompetence, he says, which stems from not knowing enough, the financial crisis, the invasion of Iraq and the battle of Gallipoli - to name but a few - resulted from the arrogance of people who had perfect information but didn't use it. "Incompetence annoys me," he says. "Over-confidence scares me."
He bangs home the point that we are all in danger from professionals who suffer from the "delusion of control", where clever people think expertise in one domain can be extrapolated into others. This makes us lazy about checking facts, and that's when mistakes happen.
He quotes one of the most notorious moments in the financial crisis - when Jimmy Cayne, chief executive of Bear Sterns, took himself off to a bridge competition the weekend his bank went down. The rules of the competition were "no phones, no BlackBerries", so when big decisions were needed, he couldn't be contacted.
Throughout the hour, stories continue to flow. It is this use of narrative that has made his name and that is, he says, a legacy of his career in journalism, with its need to keep the audience hooked; he worked for the Washington Post before moving to the New Yorker, where he remains the magazine's star turn.
At a time when the publishing business is facing unprecedented commercial challenges, Gladwell's book sales are a phenomenon. Since its publication in 2000, The Tipping Point,his first book, has sold over two million copies in the US alone. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, also sold well over a million copies there. Along the way, he was made one of world's Top 100 Most Influential People in a Time magazine list and collected the American Sociological Association's first Award for Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues.
As a result of this attention, he is rumoured to have received a $4 million advance for Outliers, the paperback launch of which he is now promoting and which looks set to match previous success.
His success poses questions as to the future of the book publishing business, which faces similar internet-driven challenges to those encountered by the music industry. It's tempting to see Malcolm Gladwell Live as part of a bigger trend that creates multiple revenue streams for author and publisher, as top-end speakers can command €50,000 a speech. The author himself sees nothing new in what he's doing, describing his talks as "very 19th-century", likening them to how Charles Dickens and Mark Twain promoted their ideas, and his technique has been honed by practice in front of other writers and intellectuals, in a storytelling grouping called The Moth which meets several times a month at different venues in New York.
But the rise of book tours such as this, along with the proliferation of literary festivals, means writing need not be the solitary profession it once was. Al Gore's Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth was another example of the appetite for ideas that seems to pervade many media. Ironically, in the same theatre that saw Gladwell perform, Britpop star Jarvis Cocker did a lecture on songwriting - to rave reviews. Authors might see the books themselves as a loss leader, while they make their returns from other related areas.
Gladwell's success is due also to the nature of his subject matter, a fusion of business, innovation and social science, subjects that lend themselves to forward pointing analysis.
But with success comes criticism. According to Austen Allen, editor in chief of Abbeyville, an independent art book publisher based in SoHo, New York: "he [Gladwell] is a skilled and entertaining writer, exemplifying the modern New Yorker 'house style' for journalism, with its combination of solid research, amused detachment and quirky anecdotes in the Ken Burns mould.
"Tragically, Gladwell is also often very wrong. His work, famous for its forays into sociology, social psychology, market research and other trendy disciplines, is a testament both to the exciting possibilities and the intellectual limitations of those fields. His penchant for what might be called pop statistical analysis sometimes leads to elegant, well-supported, and counterintuitive conclusions, but just as often recalls the man who couldn't possibly have drowned in that river because its average depth was five feet."
Such criticism is unlikely to undermine the Gladwell phenomenon, the scale of which can be gauged by the rise of a new literary sub strata. Writer Noah Hall has produced a whole book dedicated to satirising the author's second book, Blink. The dust jacket of Hall's book captured the essence of the marketing machine: "Stop! Don't think! You already know what this book is about. That is the power of Blank: the power of not actually thinking at all. Using what scientific researchers call 'extra-lean deli slicing' (or would, if they actually bothered to research it), your brain has already decided whether you're going to like Blank, whether its cover goes with your shirt, and whether it will make you look smart if somebody sees you reading it on the train."
Such a book would sell few buyers at Malcolm Gladwell Live. At the end of the show, the author sits in the bar area outside the auditorium, signing books. The line of 100 or more people is a picture of middle-class British diffidence. "This isn't the sort of thing I would normally do," says one linen-clad fortysomething, before persuading the author into a quick photo op - the man's wife at the ready with her mobile phone. As the crowd subsides, the evening is still light, and another date on the Gladwell roadshow is over and the author-as-rock-star moves on to the next gig on his whistlestop tour.
